:: Bluestarblog ::

:: Sunday, December 21, 2003 ::

Some fun stuff before the holidays. While looking up the Red Wings-Predators hockey brawl from October (nine fights!), I came across an encyclopedia of hockey fighting. The site includes news, bios, fighting leaders and breakdowns of every NHL fight over the past several years.

More on hockey fighting - Colby Cosh links to this story from ESPN on the Battle of the Hockey Gladiators. First two contestants? Tony Twist and Kurt Walker.


From Volokh I found the amusing Mr Picassohead.


From DRT News this important update: Scientists create 'perfect' toast

Food scientists at the UK's University of Leeds have developed a formula for making the perfect piece of toast.

The equation - which details butter and toast temperature - took three months and cost £10,000 to develop.

"The amount of butter should be about one-seventeenth the thickness of the bread" - Professor Bronek Wedzicha

Tax dollars at work.


A few cool things from Retrocrush - Safety Charts from India, 20 Worst Movie Titles, and the Worst Halloween Costumes of All Time.


Computer programmer or serial killer? Take the quiz on how well you can pick by seeing only their faces - I got 7 (from Spot On).

:: Scot 3:18 AM [+] :: ::
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Mark Steyn:

Saddam looking like a wino round the back of Waterloo Station meekly submitting to a lice inspection by an American soldier is a much better photo than Saddam's bullet-riddled corpse at the end of a shoot-out. When was the last time a Middle Eastern thug wound up on the receiving end of an infidel tongue depressor? For fellow dictators like Boy Assad, the sight of the despot-turned-hobo may be a fearful premonition. For Islamist appeasers like the House of Saud, it's a reminder that the way you neutralise a troublemaker is not to throw money at him in the hopes he'll only blow other people up but to hunt him down and finish him off.

For the Palestinians, who never met a loser they weren't dumb enough to fall for (the Mufti, Nasser, Yasser), Saddam still has an honoured place in the Pantheon of Glorious Has-Beens. But for millions of Iraqis a monster has shrivelled away into a smelly bum too pathetic even to use his pistol to enjoy the martyrdom he urged on others.

Even Lego Saddam had more courage than the real one.

More from Steyn on the coalition of the unwilling:

The snubbed Euro-weasels were not as pithy as Mr Bush. But the new Canadian Prime Minister, Paul Martin, is worth quoting. "This shouldn't be just about who gets contracts," he said. "It ought to be about what is the best thing for the people of Iraq."

Good point. The best thing for the people of Iraq was to get rid of Saddam, and back in the spring Mr Martin didn't want to be a part of that. The best thing for the people of Iraq, according to Mr Martin and , and Herr Schroder and M de Villepin, was that Saddam should be allowed to go on killing and torturing them for another decade or three. Reasonable people are prone to reasonableness, and the reasonable thing to do is, invariably, nothing.

The assumption was that there would be no price to pay: after the war things would revert to normal - ie, the autopilot bromides at which Mr Martin and co excel.

But it was the weasels who scuppered any return to business-as-usual. Messrs Chirac and de Villepin barely paused for breath before moving on from their pre-war sabotage programme to a revised post-war sabotage programme.

When Kofi Annan calls the Pentagon's action "not helpful for restoring transatlantic relations", what he means by "restoring transatlantic relations" is that America should move closer to the European position. The French have raised being "not helpful" to an art form, and generally that's fine by Kofi.

Whatever merits it might have had for conducting relations between 19th-century European courts, "diplomatic language" is now so unmoored from reality that it's an obstacle to honest discussion of the global scene.

Though Saddam's capture dominated the headlines last week, the public spanking Washington gave the axis of weasels was of much greater interest to me. Like Noam Chomsky of last year, the coalition of the obstructionist - any combination of France, Germany, Belgium, Canada, or Russia - has been my favorite punching bag this year. Plagued by their own motionless statism, these nations fought hard to preserve a corrupt status quo and are now paying the price.

In the past couple of years many have written about the new geopolitical theatre being shaped in the wake of 9-11 and here is yet another scene. An economic display of power that emphasizes the new 'in' crowd - the U.S., U.K., Australia, Poland, Spain, Italy, and Japan - just as much as it does the 'out' crowd. Not only was the axis blackballed on the reconstruction contracts, before they could truly retaliate they were witness to worldwide images of their pet dictator being probed by a U.S. military doctor. It was almost as humiliating for them as it was for Saddam.

The week hasn't gone so well for the axis of neglected. By now, Saddam has not only coughed up his accessories (Russia, France), he's likely adorned his confession with the complete victimological narrative ('Yeah, I did backdoor business with nearly all these countries in the hopes of maintaining and increasing my power, but hey, it's a tough world when your despotism has been rendered a laughingstock'). That Russia and France are now prepared to 'ease' Iraq's burden of debt falls into James Taranto's 'You Don't Say' category of news.

From Victor Davis Hanson:

This war would be over far sooner if 350 million Europeans insisted on a modicum of behavior from Middle Eastern rogue regimes, rounded up and tried terrorists in their midst, deported islamofascists, cut off funding to killers on the West Bank, ignored Yasser Arafat - and warned the next SOB who blew up Europeans in Turkey, North Africa, or Iraq that there was a deadly reckoning to come from the continent that invented the Western military tradition. Indeed, European sophistication and experience, combined with real power, could be a great aid to the West in its effort to promote liberal and consensual governments outside its shores. But if they do not even believe in the unique legacy of their civilization, then why should we - much less their enemies?

So for now we should not lament that the Europeans are no longer real allies, but rather be thankful that they are still for a while longer neutrals rather than enemies - these strange and brilliant people who somehow lost their way, and no longer can distinguish between a noisy Knesset and Arafat's hangmen, much less between those racing to topple a tyrant in Baghdad and others lounging at Sebrenica.

Nice collection of readings here on philosophy in wartime, including more than few essays from Hanson and Bernard Lewis. A few samples from the pro-Jihadi left, as well as a 1998 interview with Osama bin Laden are included, just for perspective.

:: Scot 2:10 AM [+] :: ::
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Making a mixed Christmas CD? Don't forget these:


The Best Christmas Songs of all Time!

Stevie Wonder - One Little Christmas Tree
Run DMC - Christmas in Hollis
U2 - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)
Badly Drawn Boy - Donna and Blitzen
Ella Fitzgerald - Sleigh Ride
The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl - Fairytale of New York
Kate Bush - December Will Be Magic Again
Bon Jovi - Please Come Home for Christmas
Chris Cornell - Ave Maria
Smashing Pumpkins - Christmas Time
Trans-Siberian Orchestra - Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)
Trans-Siberian Orchestra - O Come All Ye Faithful/O Holy Night
Brenda Lee - Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree
Pretenders - 2000 Miles
John Lennon - Happy Xmas (War is Over)
Paul McCartney - Wonderful Christmas Time
Bing Crosby - Do You Hear What I Hear?
David Bowie/Bing Crosby - Little Drummer Boy
Band Aid - Do They Know It's Christmas?
Waitresses - Christmas Wrapping
Kinks - Father Christmas
Boris Karloff - You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch
Royal Guardsmen - Snoopy's Christmas
Bruce Springsteen - Santa Claus is Coming to Town


Did I forget any? Mention them in my commment box (caveat commentor: anyone who suggests Elmo and Patsy's "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" will have their ISP blocked and be permanently banned from my site).

* music samples courtesy of fye.com

:: Scot 12:03 PM [+] :: ::
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Revisiting Discover

Some days luck just seems to go out its way to find you. Last month, in the middle of what already had been a good day, I walked past a sidewalk trashcan and saw the October issue of Discover atop a relatively clean heap of other dry papers. I reached halfway down the can and grabbed it from the pile. Unusual I know - I'm not a big reader of paper magazines. Nonetheless, I figured I had some good bedtime reading material for the next few nights.

I used to buy Discover, along with other science, music, and literary mags, up to the late 90's before I went online. With access to thousands of science essays, articles, thinkers, and websites (many wonderfully above my scope), these magazines, at 6 bucks a pop, became expendable. Playing with more efficiently storable information than I could handle, I didn't really miss the dozen or so mags I used to buy.

I suppose I underestimated my appreciation for the art of the 'package.' The next few days I was glued to my treasure. I couldn't believe the timeliness, variety, and presentations of the essays and articles, all in one easily portable tote. I came across dozens of pieces that were of particular interest and others I would have been just as happy to surf to if I saw them online.

My terrific finds included:

(link) A piece on the evolution of the naked ape. Shedding excess body heat was the traditional explanation given for human denudement, but that theory may see a shift thanks to evolutionary biologists like Mark Pagel (n.b. his website is less interesting than sand). His theory is that bodyhair is an evolutionary disadvantage as it was more prone to carry pests and diseases. Sounds about right. I would add that a coat of fur also hinders our ability to manipulate our sheathing. Bare skin has a smoothness that allows for many more varieties of protection - and sensations.

(link) An article on something I had never heard of before - space tethers. These cable contraptions are some kind of wondertool that are starting to be implemented into NASA's programs. Here's a longer article from Space.com on this, including a few words from the president of Tethers Unlimited, the company leading this enterprise.

(link) An interview with anthropologist Scott Atran on suicide terrorism. He certainly sees the cult connection:

Q: How on earth does anyone sane work up the gumption to blow himself up, together with what is often hundreds of bystanders?

A: Exactly the same way that you get soldiers on the front line of an army to sacrifice themselves for their buddies. What these cells do is very similar to what our military, or any modern military, does. They form small groups of intimately involved "brothers" who literally sacrifice themselves for one another, the way a mother would do for her child. They do it by manipulating universal heartfelt human sentiments that I think are probably innate and part of biological evolution. In fact, I think most culture is a manipulation of innate desires. It's the same way that our fast-food industry manipulates our desires for sugars and fats, or the way the pornography industry manipulates people to get all hot about pixels on a screen or on wood pulp.

Q: Wood pulp?

A: Yeah, paper in a pornography journal. I mean, it has no adaptive value. In the case of something like Al Qaeda, you've got these people in groups of three to eight people, for 18 months, isolated from their family, getting this intense and deep ego-stroking propaganda. You do that to anyone, and you'll get him to do what you want. There are all these studies that psychologists have done of torturers on all sides of the political divide. A very famous one is on ordinary Greeks who became torturers during the military junta of 1967 to 1974. They found they were perfectly ordinary--in fact, above-average intelligence. They'd get them to be torturers by indoctrinating them, by showing them how necessary they were for their societies, and getting these people to believe it.

Q: You seem to be suggesting that natural selection may be playing a role in generating the feelings that enable people to become suicide terrorists, but blowing yourself up is hardly a good strategy for propelling your genes into the next generation.

A: Natural selection gives us all sorts of dispositions and desires that were adaptive in ancestral environments. Now, our cultural milieu picks certain of these adaptations or their by-products and is able to trigger them to produce behaviors that have nothing to do with what they originally evolved for. Kin altruism (the theory that individuals are willing to sacrifice their lives to save closely related kin) evolved through natural selection. If you listen to most political and religious discourse in societies, it's always done for a brotherhood--brothers and sisters. So you create a fictive family. How else are you going to get people to die for one another when they're non-kin-related? You've got to trick them into believing they are kin-related somehow.

Atran's essay, Genesis and Future of Suicide Terrorism, is a longer and more detailed read. He stresses the notion that these Islamist footsoldiers aren't the crazy lunatics they're made out to be. He's right about that. There is a level of education and sociality about suicide terrorists that suggest they aren't exactly 'nuts.' Atran errs however when he makes no mention of the ideological battle being waged between Jihadism and the West. The canon of hatred disseminated by preachers, educators, and governments of Islamic nations that would have their followers rally and fight for world-wide Sharia law receives nary a mention while Atran alludes to political grievances and dictator propping as the Islamists' main beef (even though it was the Arab Caliphate, not geopolitics, that fueled Osama bin Laden). Atran definitely has some good insights but I also believe his perception is skewed concerning the greater scope of Islamism, the state of Muslim culture, and the perfidies of Iraq:

As for winning the War of Ideas about democracy and personal freedoms, the Pew survey strongly suggests that Muslim opinion in favor of these values means that war was already won. This raises suspicion that the call to battle against haters of democracy and freedom – like the alarms about Iraq’s imminent use of weapons of mass destruction and its ties to Al-Qaeda - was cynically designed to rally the home front for a strategic push into South and Central Asia. The Pew survey intimates that much of the world – apart from America – thinks so.

Muslim opinion truly favors democracy, yet they are banished to live under dictators, ad-hoc monarchies, and religious crackpots. Considering the tyrannies in question, would you not conclude that the rulers of these nations are in fact haters of democracy and freedom? Atran also pushes the 'Iraq had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda' argument which is both false and irrelevant. And cynically designed? 'Iraq's connections to weapons programs, terrorism, and human slaughter' speaks for itself - no cynical design necessary. He's right about the strategic push into the Middle East, but I'm getting the impression he thinks it has more to do with oil than war.

* A finely complicated mathematical argument explaining why American currency could benefit from the 18 cent piece. Ivars Peterson in Science News has more. For Canadians, who regularly use six coins in their currency, the math works out to an 83 cent piece.

* Five optical illusions from the Autumn night sky, capping off a terrific summer of cosmic opera. Here's a cool pic and explanation of one of the illusions - the enlarged Harvest Moon.

* A cover story on gravity!

I remember a little piece that used to air on the Space channel about Walter Wright, this guy who theorized gravity wasn't in fact a 'pull' from the Earth's center but rather a 'push' from the sun. To back up his theory, he had constructed about a dozen or so magnetic contraptions that modeled the principals, as he saw them, of gravity and cosmic movement. A kind, affable fellow, he was excited to be pushing his high school level of physics to its limits. His room, full of books and models, had a charming, Isaac Newton vibe to it. I came across a book review of his 1979 work Gravity is a Push a few months ago and it had to be one of the funniest I've ever read.

* Mars and the politics of space exploration. I got sucked in after reading this thinking that a (human) trip to Mars was in fact the next major project NASA should be focusing on. After sending robots there, a footprint on the red planet seemed to be the next logical step. Sending a crew to Mars would not only be seen as Earth's greatest technological achievement, it would also revitalize our waning interest in space. Ex astra scienta - let's roll!

Grandiosity got the better of me however when I came across the next piece about a return trip to the moon. Not just another visit, but this time there to stay. Building science bases on the moon seems a much more practical route than blindly hurtling ourselves to our second nearest planet. If private enterprise is poised to exploit the moon, why not science?

Glenn Reynolds considers colonization as the impetus for any future space jaunts:

BACK TO THE MOON?

Why not? I was just a kid, over 30 years ago, when the last humans set foot on the moon. Now there’s some indication that President Bush may come out in support of going back.

In general, I’m very much in favor of moving human beings off the planet in large numbers. In fact, I agree with Stephen Hawking that the human species is unlikely to last 1,000 years if it stays earthbound. Between the risks of war, accident, and natural disaster, the prospects for civilization (and quite possibly the species) don’t look great if all the eggs are in one basket.

I’ve been more of a fan of Mars missions than of a lunar return, though unlike many in the area I’m not committed to either the Moon or Mars as a necessary next step. There are plausible pathways to human settlement of outer space that start with Mars, there are plausible pathways that start with the Moon, and there are plausible pathways that involve neither, though those are a bit more difficult.

What’s most important is that whatever we do be sustainable, not just another flags-and-footprints mission to say we’ve done it. Long-term, that means getting private enterprise involved, and making sure that people can make money. Taxpayers get tired of spending money. Businesspeople never get tired of making it.

Congress, reports Rand Simberg, is beginning to look at such questions, and it’s notable that this is happening even as there’s considerable progress in non-governmental space activities. Let’s hope that this succeeds, as the future of humanity may well depend upon it.

Rand Simberg's website, Transterrestrial Musings, offers a cornucopia of space news and policy (here's his latest FoxNews piece on the tired and aged NASA).

* The results of Central Park's Bio Blitz. In their own words:

At noon on Friday, June 27th, hundreds of volunteers joined teams of scientists in a 24 hour survey of the diversity of plant, animal and microbial life in New York's Central Park.

The group identified and catalogued nearly a thousand different species. The website gives a breakdown of their finds.

* Book reviews for more books I know I won't get a chance to read:

Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology by Paul Broks (Guardian review here)

Adams Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form by Michael Sims
(Architect Books review here)

Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection by Mark Pendergrast
(CNN review here)

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I read the magazine front to back, including the pile of reference links found at the back. It was a nice change to read pieces for their own enjoyment instead of simply gluttonizing information into my storage banks. Does this mean I will be buying more magazines in the future? Probably not.

:: Scot 6:24 PM [+] :: ::
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