Monday 29 March 2010

Nuclear Power yes....


Just now, 09:00 Hong Kong time, BBC Radio read out my letter  to them of the other day -- whoof!  All credit to them, though, for I'm sure my views would not be shared by the majority of staff on the Beebs...  To be fair to the BBC, they have read out a number of my letters over the years, so they do broadcast wide variety of opinions.

Still, it's not that often I hear my name on the radio that it's not slightly surprising each time it is.  So it was odd hearing it read out, my first thought being "that's strange, a guy in Hong Kong with the same name as mine...”  [website for the chart above: here] [Link rotted...]

Friday 26 March 2010

Moore Island is no more

Letter this morning to South China Morning Post:

New Moore Island is No More Island, owing, we are told, to “global warming”. (“Island that nearly sparked war is no more thanks to warming”, March 26).  Well, goodness me!  I live by the sea, but haven’t noticed that it’s risen two metres in the last decade.  For while your headline  clearly buys into Jadavapur University Mr Hazra’s view that New Moore Island near India has sunk due to “global warming”, in the next breath we are told that in the 1990’s it was two metres above sea level.  Something fishy here.  And it should have been picked up.  Two metres?? Due to “global warming”?  Clearly New Moore Island is No Moore due to the regular geological rises and falls of land throughout the world and if global warming did play a part it could only have been the minor one.
Yours, etc
Discovery Bay
Yours, etc
Discovery Bay

So you decide.  Is it sea rises of two metres in a decade?  "Drowning Island", or "Sinking Island"?  The latter, surely.


Article below.  I have to post it all, as it's subscription only.

Island that nearly sparked war is no more thanks to warming

Global warming appears to have finally resolved a dispute that gunboats never could: an island located midway between India and Bangladesh that became a flashpoint for military threats in the 1980s is now submerged under the rising seas.

The Bay of Bengal island, which India called New Moore Island and Bangladesh referred to as South Talpatti, has ceased to exist, the Jadavpur University's School of Oceanic Studies declared this week.

Sugata Hazra, director of the programme, said he started looking at satellite imagery recently after reading media claims that the island, which peaked at 2.1 kilometres long and 1.8 kilometres wide, was actually growing in size. Close examination failed to reveal anything. He then checked with local fishermen.

"They confirmed the island had gone sometime back," he said. "We raised the alarm that we'd better take stock of how much loss is occurring."

The tiny island was first noticed after a severe cyclone in the early 1970s. Both countries laid claim amid speculation there might be oil or natural gas beneath its sandy shores.
No permanent structures were ever built on it, but in 1981 India sent gunboats and coast guard members planted a flag. As soon as India would sail away, security experts said, Bangladeshis would take it down.

Now, Hazra joked, a submarine may seem more appropriate than a gunboat. "What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," said Hazra.

The island actually began shrinking in the 1990s, part of an 130-square-kilometre reduction in land mass witnessed in the Bay of Bengal's Sunderbans mudflats over the past 40 years, Hazra said.
During the 1990s, the island was only two metres above sea level, part of a low-lying delta extremely vulnerable to rising seas.

While it is ironic that the political hullaballoo between the neighbours over ownership now appears futile, the debate over the dividing line remains important given India's ongoing bid to define its borders, said Sreeradha Datta, a research fellow at New Delhi's Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. "All the fighting was over nothing," she said. "But we still want to use the middle line to deal with our maritime boundary, which is becoming a hot issue.”

Sanjoy Hazarika, a New Delhi-based analyst with the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, a think tank, said: "It was an amusing case of how a big country tries to bully a smaller country. This didn't go down as a great moment of Indian diplomacy.”

As for climate change and the future, a UN panel predicted that 17per cent of Bangladesh would disappear by 2050, displacing 20 million people, if water levels rise by one metre, as some predict.
"There's a lesson here that the world should learn while negotiating over territory," Hazra said. "It's not whether some country makes a gain. It's whether we all collectively win or lose given the impact we're seeing on the global environment.”

Another nearby island, Lohachara, was submerged in 1996, forcing its inhabitants to move to the mainland. At least 10 other islands in the area were at risk as well, Hazra said.

Additional reporting by Associated Press 
[link to article here but remember it's subscription]

Nuclear Power: yes! And… go China!

BBC radio (world.business@bbc.co.uk) this morning was seeking comment on Nuclear Energy, asking "do we want to have a nuclear power station for every village in England?"  And I don't think they were being sarcastic...

My comment (which the Beebs read out next day...):

Yes, yes! Bring on clean, reliable, safe nuclear energy!  For too long this has been off the agenda by misguided or wilfully ignorant Greens.
 One old greenie who gets it right is Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog of 1968.  He says we should:
  1. Urbanise   [less Co2 per capita consumed in dense cities]
  2. Expand Nuclear Power
  3. Grow Genetically engineered plants
  4. Start Geo-engineering to keep us cool...
Please also start a debate about the last: geo-engineering.  BBC had a program a few weeks ago, but the main guest were firmly anti, and it needed someone sane and sensible on the support side: who better than Stewart Brand?

Link here  to see his video at a recent TED Conference. Well worth the 18 minutes!

Yours, etc,

China Postscript: when we were recently in far north China, on the way to Yabuli ski slopes of Heilongjiang, we drove there and back several hours each way from the capital Harbin and noticed that all the houses in all the villages had chimneys but no smoke from any of them.  

When I was there 30 years ago (yes, 30...) they had all been spewing thick and very dirty coal smoke clogging the valleys in dense smog.  The reason for the change?  A huge nuclear power station we passed by, emitting pure water vapour from its stacks.  I certainly know about the potential dangers of nuclear power.  But they are way overrated, especially when compared to the actual, right-here-right-now dangers of coal power, from the thousands of miners killed every year, to the noxious fumes they emit.  It's a choice of risks, not no-risk vs all-risk.  And the balance is clear: Nuclear risk is less and it's cleaner to boot.

Good on China! 

"We all came off a boat...." Well, no, really


The same old friend that took me to task for living in a place (Hong Kong) which was lacking in "soul" and had "no empathy for the have nots", which I countered here , sent me the above cartoon, part of a mail-round, which had the comment "Guess we all came off a boat some time ago”. 

To be frank I found the cartoon and the comment a bit perplexing, the more so the more I thought about it.  I presume that it's meant to be a call for tolerance, for tolerance of all the immigrants who would come to Australia for a new life.  We should remember that we "all came off a boat", we were all given the opportunity in the Lucky Country and we should open our hearts to those who would just do the same today.

But then... we didn't all come off a boat, did we?  I mean what about the Aboriginals in this cartoon?  The time is 1850 and Australian Aboriginals had been in Australia for about 30 or 40 thousand years before that, all presumably born en pays, and even their ancestors came across a land bridge, so they reckon now, though some may well have had some form of canoe.

But let's not quibble on that point.

What of the meaning of the cartoon?  Is is that the Aboriginals were tolerant of the British convicts, and that therefore we should be tolerant of immigrants too?  If it is indeed true that the Aboriginals were so tolerant -- "Oh, what the hell, there's only a handful of them" -- then it didn't turn out too well for them, did it?  After all, caucasian Australians auto-excoriate and are excoriated by Aboriginals, for having decimated the Aboriginal population and devastated their traditional way of life and culture.  That's why the Rudd government said "Sorry", after all.  So, it didn't turn out too well, did it, this tolerance for the immigrant?  The conclusion would seem to be, not tolerance but to fight.

And isn't that what the Aboriginals did anyway?  There were plenty of Aboriginals who didn't treat the "invaders", these Europeans, with the equanimity of those in the cartoon.  The Aboriginal resistance to European immigrants is now widely accepted and celebrated across the board, including by the same Left that finds in this cartoon a call for tolerance of any new immigrants.

Puzzling, no?  [or maybe I've just misread the cartoon and the drawer means us to draw exactly the conclusion that letting anyone into one's country can only have a lousy outcome?]

Myself, I have no qualms about immigrants to Australia, not for anyone from Asia, from Africa, from Europe, from anywhere really, as long as they do so according to Australian law.  

There's just one group that we should be restricting and that's Muslim immigration, for unlike any of the other waves of immigration we've had in Australia, Islamic immigration has no desire to integrate, but rather to bring Sharia to our country.  Sure there may be plenty of fine and "moderate" Muslims, but if they are pious, then they are bound to support the spread of Sharia and that's in evidence in every country with even small minorities of Muslim immigrants.

What to do about Sharia?

Those of us concerned about creeping Sharia in the west are sometimes asked “so even if we assume you are right, and it's not an exaggeration to say that there is a "global jihad, which works daily to impose the discriminatory and brutal strictures of Sharia upon free people” -- and we're not saying we agree, mind -- but even if we grant the danger, then what should be done?”

Wednesday 24 March 2010

Why worry about Islam?

The following pretty much sums up why I get fussed about the threat of Sharia by stealth, the slow and steady inroads of Islamic practices pressed onto countries with growing Muslim minorities.  It was written by Robert Spencer and I can't see much (indeed anything) wrong with standing against the global Jihad on this basis.  He's talking about a new forum he has set up, called the Freedom Defense Initiative, which, says Spencer
stands for the human rights of people of all creeds, colors, and sexual orientations against the global jihad, which works daily to impose the discriminatory and brutal strictures of Sharia upon free people. Sharia denies basic rights to women, non-Muslims, and gays, and exalts its brutal and inhumane system as divine law.
Too alarmist?  Exaggerated?  No, not if you look into it.  It's the real and present danger.

Article here .

Hong Kong charity giving: leader or laggard?

"Hong Kong charity giving: leader or laggard?”

In a word: leader.  Hong Kong is THE world leader in charity giving, whether by government or by individuals.

This came to mind when an old friend accused me of living in a
"glittery shiny plastic consumer driven fantasy world of muchos $$$$ and such waste and no heart or soul or empathy for the have nots". 
 I first did a quick bit of research.

I'd known or believed for some time that Hong Kong was a place where people, individuals and government, gave to charity in much greater proportion than most places in the world.  I'd "known" this for some time, but with nothing to back it, other than noting how much people opened their pockets to those less well off and to major world catastrophies.  In my case, the company I ran for some years, we held a major charity drive every year -- the Trailwalker Race for Oxfam -- and raised $500,000 every year, for the charity and I personally saw what it did for villages in Nepal.  That activity has carried on since I left the company.

But what of figures to prove that point?  I found some figures that showed Hong Kong was at the top of a table of government aid per capita, up with Norway [1].  On government aid, I found that we were also up there at the top of the table.  For example, four of the top Asian philanthropists were from Hong Kong (population seven million), four from Australia/New Zealand (population 25 million) [2].

I'd been meaning to post this for some time, then today an article in the South China Morning Post that gives even more detailed figures [3], and shows that Hong Kong is not only at the top of the world league in private and government giving, but that it's way up there well above the next most generous (Norway).

Some highlights:

  • Nearly nine out of 10 people gave to charities in the past year, an average of HK$ 2,986 (US$ 382).  This compares with just cents per person in the "world's wealthiest countries".
  • The number of charities rose from 3,819 in 2003 to 5,898 last year.
  • Donations from individuals and companies rose from HK$ 2.89 billion (US$ 370 million) in 2003 to HK$ 7.03 billion (US$ nearly 1 billion) in 2008.

That's not really a place with "no soul or empathy" is it?


References:
[1]  Global Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  Per Capita Foreign Aid Assistance by World's Wealthiest Countries.   Here.
[2]  Top Asian Philanthropists, Forbes Magazine.  Here.
[3]  South China Morning Post, 24 March.  Information on Charities in Hong Kong.  Here .  Pdf here .

Wednesday 17 March 2010

An Open Letter to Geert Wilders by David Solway

Below is a thoughtful open letter to Geert Wilders , who is facing trial in the Netherlands for so-called "hate speech" for criticising Islam.  Solway spends some time on the vexed issue of whether there are "moderate" Muslims and if there is a difference between "Islam" and "Islamism".  I well remember the first time I read the Koran a decade ago and thinking "if this is what we have to deal with, we're in trouble".   Solway quotes Roger Simon on this point:
“if Wilders is correct, and the line between Islam and Islamism is as blurred as the Dutchman posits, then we in the West are in very deep trouble indeed.”
And we are in deep trouble indeed.   Solway's full letter is below.  It's an important read.

An open letter to Geert Wilders:
Though we have not met, I feel as if I know you well. I have followed your trials—and trial—closely and, like many who are engaged in the same fight against Islamic supremacism and the various forms of jihad that confront us, I endorse your campaign on behalf of the West and its traditional liberties in every way that I can.
Indeed, I wonder if you are aware of the extent of your de facto “support network,” a majority in America who, according to a Pew Research Center survey, are “very concerned” about the rise of Islamic extremism, and certainly a significant minority of the increasingly vocal. The same may now be the case in your own country and in a number of other European nations as well—Switzerland and its minaret affair come immediately to mind—as ordinary people gradually come to realize the threat they are facing.
Of course, we can write off the political and intellectual elites who, through laziness, timidity, adherence to the craven doctrine of political correctness, and no doubt the profiteering impulse, are in bed with the succubus who would guzzle their blood. And this is no blood libel. In addition, you probably strike these presumably more decorous sensibilities as too blunt, aggressive or politically ambitious, which is clearly what prompts their efforts at character assassination against you. But your passionate resistance to the creeping Islamization of Europe prompts me in turn to ask: Does this in Wilders seem ambitious? In any event, pay no attention to these tergiversators. As Andrew Bostom writes, “The transparent agenda in characterizations of Wilders is to demonize Western Europe’s most informed and courageous politician resisting the actual jihadism…But the Swiss minaret referendum, and even more emphatically, burgeoning Dutch support for Wilders and his PVV, indicate that ordinary Europeans reject the capitulation to Islamic supremacism their cultural relativist media and political elites deliberately abet.”
In your fine speech to the British House of Lords on March 5, 2010, you established the principle, as you have many times before, that you and your Freedom Party do not “have a problem with Muslims as such.” You distinguish between law-abiding Muslims and the ideology of Islam based on the Koran. “There are many moderate Muslims,” you declare, “but there is no such thing as a moderate Islam.” The first part of your proposition is a socially appropriate sentiment, but the second part begets a conceptual problem which is decidedly unpleasant to address.
Forgive me for suggesting that you probably had no choice but to make this subtle discrimination between the faithful and the faith, which implies a certain disconnect between the wish and the reality, as you must surely realize. You tread on very delicate ground here, as you are doubtlessly constrained to do in order to avoid alienating both “moderate Muslims” and non-Muslims who regard themselves as unprejudiced.
When you rightly assert that “Islam is not merely a religion [but] a totalitarian ideology,” note that the Koran “commands Muslims to establish shariah law,” claim that “Islam is not compatible with our Western way of life,” and go on to compare the Koran with Mein Kampf, quoting Winston Churchill to reinforce your thesis, the distinction you adduce between individual Muslims and the collective institution of Islam tends to collapse. For what you are really saying is that moderate Muslims cannot be devout Muslims or, in truth, cannot be Muslims at all. What sort of Muslim remains after you have factored out shariah law, effectively compared Muhammed to Hitler, and contended that the Koran should be outlawed, or at least designated as a species of hate literature, as you proposed in your letter to the newspaper De Volkskrant on August 8, 2007?
You now find yourself uncomfortably situated, so to speak, between the devil and the deep Red Sea. Not being a Muslim yourself, you don’t have the option of polemical emphasis that derives from rejecting the faith, becoming an apostate-on-principle or converting to another faith, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan and Nonie Darwish, among others—all of whom took the second part of your logic to its inevitable terminus. They understood that one cannot honestly profess Islam without abiding by the decrees of the religion and its holy book, including the oft-repeated summons to kill or enslave the infidel, the structure of gender apartheid, the imposition of shariah, and a host of other draconian laws.
In other words, a “moderate Muslim” would have to live in a state of contradiction, and perhaps many do—as does, for example, freedom loving Tarek Fatah, Canadian author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, who calls himself a “hardened secular Muslim.” What exactly is asecular Muslim, whether hardened or soft? Similarly, what could a “secular Christian” conceivably be other than some sort of mythical chimera? (It is different for Jews, of course; a “secular Jew” remains a Jew because the world persists in regarding him as such. But that is another matter.) Fatah is a good man and an important voice in the ongoing debate concerning Islam, but he cannot extricate himself from a legendary infatuation or acknowledge disagreeable historical and theological facts. One cannot cherry pick the Koran or romanticize Islamic history, as so-called “moderate Muslims” are obliged to do, without falling into incoherence. As a character in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album says, “our religion isn’t something you can test out, like trying out a suit to see if it fit! You gotta buy the whole outfit!” There is, to put it another way, no such beverage as Islam Lite. One drinks in the real thing or nothing; there is no substitute.
Bangladeshi author and former Muslim Abul Kasem, in a FrontPage Magazine interview, defines the majority of Muslims as believers “in name only.” Kasem is shockingly direct: the existence of a “moderate Muslim” is contingent upon a moderate Koran “since the life force of Islam is the Qu’ran.” But the Koran happens to be an extreme and violent document, and even if it is selectively ignored by practitioners of the faith, its fissile core can be activated at any time. For Kasem, as for the dissidents mentioned above, the term “moderate Muslim” or “secular Muslim” is an oxymoron. The use of the term “moderate Muslim,” he argues, is “truly misplaced” and muddles Western thinking in the attempt to defeat Islamic terror. I’m presuming this is an argument you too would candidly advance if the sociopolitical context were not so precarious, and if your place in Dutch society and as leader of a respectable political party permitted you to do so.
Still, you were on the money when, in a speech to the Dutch parliament, you compared Islam in Europe to a Trojan Horse. Here you were being perfectly forthright. Your metaphor was both mythologically and historically accurate. In 1529, the armies of Islam were camped before the gates of Vienna. They were beaten back. Today they are camped within the gates of Paris, the gates of Oslo, the gates of Malmo, the gates of Berlin, the gates of London, the gates of Birmingham, the gates of Brussels, the gates of Marseille, the gates of Amsterdam, and counting. In fact, as you and many of the politically aware—Bruce Bawer, Christopher Caldwell, Walter Laqueur, Bernard Lewis, the late Samuel Huntington, Melanie Phillips, Bruce Thornton, Claire Berlinski, Denis MacShane, Bat Ye’or, to name only a few—point out, Islam is now a major demographic force within the gates of Europe in its entirety. Vienna was only a temporary setback, a lost battle in a long and possibly successful war. Our ostensible sophisticates seem to have forgotten that Islamic time is not Western time.
I began this letter by assuring you that you have a far wider community of supporters than you might at times suspect. True, several conservative bien pensants and generally astute observers of the ideological world, such as Bill Kristol, Glenn Beck and Charles Krauthammer, have lately taken you to task on Fox News and elsewhere for your supposed intransigence, your explicitness and your “radical” stance vis à vis Islam, that is, your refusal to differentiate between a peaceable Islam and violent Islamism. The critical perspective adopted by these otherwise excellent writers toward the leftist collaboration with, or appeasement of, militant Islam, their awareness of the demographic menace posed by unchecked immigration, and the weaponized prose they habitually flourish would indicate they should be your allies rather than detractors.
So unfortunate a dereliction is highly problematic and, at first blush, inexplicable—unless, as a commenter to an article by Mark Steyn suggests, “perhaps the recent purchase of a substantial portion of News Corp.’s stock by a wealthy Saudi Arabian might be a factor in Krauthammer’s and Beck’s negative statements about Geert Wilders.” Diana West concurs: “this anti-Geert pundit solidarity will only delight stakeholder Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.” We have long known that Saudi money has infiltrated the media, the universities, the Hollywood illusion factory and the book publishing industry, with all the predictable consequences. But then, we also know that Kristol, Beck and Krauthammer are honorable men.
Maybe there is another explanation. Roger Simon hazards that Beck “is not particularly versed in European affairs”, which are plainly not his forte, and that Krauthammer may be subconsciously afraid that you are right, a likelihood “too depressing” to contemplate. For, Simon continues, “if Wilders is correct, and the line between Islam and Islamism is as blurred as the Dutchman posits, then we in the West are in very deep trouble indeed.” And this is a conclusion all too few of our intellectuals, “peace” constituencies, opinion shapers and power wielders, addicted to the ostrich syndrome and insulated from the mean streets of the real world, are willing to absorb. They have taken another route and are speeding down the highway to dhimmitude like Toyotas with stuck gas pedals. They would rather allow the approaching immiseration of the West at the hands of a resurgent Islam than stiffen their spines and act as they must if Western civilization is to survive. Which is why they do not want you in the game.
Nevertheless, despite such curious defections and betrayals, I think you may rest confident that you enjoy a stalwart following among those who have come to share both your fears and your salient assumptions. We monitor the court prosecution to which you have been subjected by a camarilla of judges who, as you say, “do not want to hear the truth about Islam.” As David Rusin shows in a compendious summary of “the growing deference to Islam in Europe’s courtrooms,” citing evidence of a most disturbing, if ludicrous, nature, “in the Netherlands, the bar association is leading the way to mollify Islamists.”
But there is a redeeming irony tunneling its way through these proceedings. You are in a win-win situation. A victory in court means you have been vindicated. A negative verdict also works in your favor, for a jail cell would give you an effective podium, though I doubt you would malinger there for long. It would then become glaringly obvious that your accusers are a pack of soi-disant anti-Dreyfusards, Vichy-type sellouts, cowards and hypocrites, and public demonstrations against your captors would be sure to follow. They are the ones in a self-inflicted bind, not you. Moreover, it is already common knowledge that your judges have substantially curtailed the number of expert witnesses you have called and are deliberating behind closed doors. Oddly enough, a bad day in court may translate into a good day at the polls. Indeed, according to someelectoral prognostications, you may shortly find yourself the prime minister of your country.
The cake appears ready for the oven. If all goes well, the next election may actually install you in the seat of power or, failing that, position you as a power broker. You have only to keep on being yourself and, of course, you need to stay alive. You have the courage and outspokenness of your murdered fellow Amsterdammers, Pym Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, but you also have what they did not, 24/7 protection. And, to reiterate, you are not alone. A growing company of the likeminded stand behind you. One way or another, you cannot lose, at least not in the Netherlands.
So in conclusion, as the current idiom enjoins: Go for it!

Thursday 11 March 2010

"Pilgrim non grata in Mecca"; Dowd visits Saudi Arabia and learns nothing

Did Saudi Prince Saud al-Faisal cut off the bunny’s ears and scoop out its little brain?   Maureen Dowd is the choc bunny candidate here....

I shook my head in amazement at Maureen Dowd’s admission of her ignorance of Islam (“Pilgrim non grata in Mecca”, IHT/New York Times, 11 March 10).  For she reveals not only her ignorance (“… on my odyssey to Saudi Arabia, I tried to learn about the religion that smashed into American consciousness on 9/11…”), but also her ignorance of how just ignorant she is.

For example, having by her own admission only just commenced this study of Islam she nonetheless opines to Saudi’s Prince Saud al-Faisal that “… when 15 Saudi hijackers .. flew into the twin towers, Islam had been hijacked as well.  He nodded.”  Well he might.  No doubt he could no believe his luck at having such a naïve and “useful idiot” parroting the favourite line of Islamic apologists, namely that the “Religion of Peace” has been hijacked by a “tiny minority of extremists”. 

In fact, al-Qaeda’s aim in attacking the twin towers was clearly set out by Osama bin Laden:

“Does Islam, or does it not force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually?  Yes.  … The matter is summed up for every person alive: Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die.”  [1]

These Qaeda writings both before and after 9/11 are grounded in Islam’s roots of jurisprudence.  Which is why no Muslim, “moderate” or otherwise, has even attempted to refute them. All mainstream sects and schools of Islamic jurisprudence teach as a matter of faith that Islam is intrinsically political and that Muslims must wage war against unbelievers and subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law.  That is a matter of verifiable fact.

A couple of other items: In the second of a series of three articles on her visit to Saudi,  “Arabia: Inshallah, Obama” (March 6), Dowd says “With two little words, Barack Hussein Obama thrilled the Muslim world. “Salaam aleikum,” he said, offering the traditional Arabic greeting “Peace be upon you” at the start of his Cairo speech last year.” [2]

As many observers better informed than Obama (and Dowd!) noted at the time, the greeting of Salaam aleikum is used only between Muslims.  The greeting from a non-Muslim to a Muslim is Assalaam alaikum.  That was ignorant of Obama  -- and of Dowd -- and did nothing to halt the scuttlebutt that he is a closet Muslim...

Back in the US, at an Imax theatre [sic!] Dowd was “surprised when the movie said that the Kaaba was built by Abraham…”.  Well, Abraham was likely a mythical figure and the Kaaba is widely held to have been build by pagan tribes in the region.  That is basic knowledge.

Dowd spent quite some time with the handsome Prince Saud, it seems, mentioning him in all three articles [2], and she’s clearly in thrall to him and his “aviator glasses”, his “black and gold robe and tinted glasses” and demeanor of a “Hollywood mogul.”

But the Prince punked her and punked her good.  It would have been easy, one suspects, as she gives off the air of one most willing to be duped by the handsome Arab, with his "stable of Arabian horses and one oversized white bunny”.  Little did she know -- though the Prince surely did: there was one other American bunny in the tent.  One that had just had its ears nibbled off with sweet sounding words -- the words the west so wants to hear!  -- and the brains gently scooped out.

On the plus side: Well done, Maureen, to have begun your study!  I must say, about time, isn't it?  Better late than never, though.  But keep going; you have much to learn.   Start with the Koran.  It’ll open your eyes, though it is certainly less pleasant on the ears than the sweet nibbling taqiyya of the Saudi Prince Mogul.

[1]  The Al Qaeda Reader.  Raymond Ibrahim, ed.  Doubleday, 2007.   p 42
[2]   “Loosey Goosey Saudi”, NYT, March 2, 2010.  Here.
        “Arabia: Inshallah, Obama”, NYT, March 6, 2010.  Here.
        “Pilgrim Non Grata in Mecca”.  NYT, March 9 2010.  Here.

Wednesday 10 March 2010

"Algebra in Wonderland"


We have all long known of the mathematical bent of Charles Dodgson, writer of the Alice stories, as "Lewis Carroll".  After all, he was professor or Mathematics at Oxford.  In this article , though, Melanie Bayley sheds some fascinating light on some aspects I didn't know about:  like the algebraic references to Alice's change in size, the meaning of the Cheshire cat's grin, "pig and pepper" parodying the principle of continuity, and more.

As we have Alice again on the big screen, courtesy of Tim Burton, this is very timely and I wanted to save the link above.  Burton was interviewed on BBC radio yesterday, but showed no indication that he knew even the smallest part of the mathematics of Alice's adventures, and I wonder if he does.

In times of slight madness of US Tea Partiers, it's nice to come back to the "sanity" of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare's Tea Party, here in this early March of the second decade of our new millennium.

Article copied below, for ease of reference.

The New York Times

March 7, 2010
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Algebra in Wonderland

Oxford, England
SINCE “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was published, in 1865, scholars have noted how its characters are based on real people in the life of its author, Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll. Alice is Alice Pleasance Liddell, the daughter of an Oxford dean; the Lory and Eaglet are Alice’s sisters Lorina and Edith; Dodgson himself, a stutterer, is the Dodo (“Do-Do-Dodgson”).
But Alice’s adventures with the Caterpillar, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and so on have often been assumed to be based purely on wild imagination. Just fantastical tales for children — and, as such, ideal material for the fanciful movie director Tim Burton, whose “Alice in Wonderland” opened on Friday.
Yet Dodgson most likely had real models for the strange happenings in Wonderland, too. He was a tutor in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and Alice’s search for a beautiful garden can be neatly interpreted as a mishmash of satire directed at the advances taking place in Dodgson’s field.
In the mid-19th century, mathematics was rapidly blossoming into what it is today: a finely honed language for describing the conceptual relations between things. Dodgson found the radical new math illogical and lacking in intellectual rigor. In “Alice,” he attacked some of the new ideas as nonsense — using a technique familiar from Euclid’s proofs, reductio ad absurdum, where the validity of an idea is tested by taking its premises to their logical extreme.
Early in the story, for instance, Alice’s exchange with the Caterpillar parodies the first purely symbolic system of algebra, proposed in the mid-19th century by Augustus De Morgan, a London math professor. De Morgan had proposed a more modern approach to algebra, which held that any procedure was valid as long as it followed an internal logic. This allowed for results like the square root of a negative number, which even De Morgan himself called “unintelligible” and “absurd” (because all numbers when squared give positive results).
The word “algebra,” De Morgan said in one of his footnotes, comes from an Arabic phrase he transliterated as “al jebr e al mokabala,” meaning restoration and reduction. He explained that even though algebra had been reduced to a seemingly absurd but logical set of operations, eventually some sort of meaning would be restored.
Such loose mathematical reasoning would have riled a punctilious logician like Dodgson. And so, the Caterpillar is sitting on a mushroom and smoking a hookah — suggesting that something has mushroomed up from nowhere, and is dulling the thoughts of its followers — and Alice is subjected to a monstrous form of “al jebr e al mokabala.” She first tries to “restore” herself to her original (larger) size, but ends up “reducing” so rapidly that her chin hits her foot.
Alice has slid down from a world governed by the logic of universal arithmetic to one where her size can vary from nine feet to three inches. She thinks this is the root of her problem: “Being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.” No, it isn’t, replies the Caterpillar, who comes from the mad world of symbolic algebra. He advises Alice to “Keep your temper.”
In Dodgson’s day, intellectuals still understood “temper” to mean the proportions in which qualities were mixed — as in “tempered steel” — so the Caterpillar is telling Alice not to avoid getting angry but to stay in proportion, even if she can’t “keep the same size for 10 minutes together!” Proportion, rather than absolute length, was what mattered in Alice’s above-ground world of Euclidean geometry.
In an algebraic world, of course, this isn’t easy. Alice eats a bit of mushroom and her neck elongates like a serpent, annoying a nesting pigeon. Eventually, though, she finds a way to nibble herself down to nine inches, and enters a little house where she finds the Duchess, her baby, the Cook and the Cheshire Cat.
Chapter 6, “Pig and Pepper,” parodies the principle of continuity, a bizarre concept from projective geometry, which was introduced in the mid-19th century from France. This principle (now an important aspect of modern topology) involves the idea that one shape can bend and stretch into another, provided it retains the same basic properties — a circle is the same as an ellipse or a parabola (the curve of the Cheshire cat’s grin).
Taking the notion to its extreme, what works for a circle should also work for a baby. So, when Alice takes the Duchess’s baby outside, it turns into a pig. The Cheshire Cat says, “I thought it would.”
The Cheshire Cat provides the voice of traditional geometric logic — say where you want to go if you want to find out how to get there, he tells Alice after she’s let the pig run off into the wood. He points Alice toward the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. “Visit either you like,” he says, “they’re both mad.”
The Mad Hatter and the March Hare champion the mathematics of William Rowan Hamilton, one of the great innovators in Victorian algebra. Hamilton decided that manipulations of numbers like adding and subtracting should be thought of as steps in what he called “pure time.” This was a Kantian notion that had more to do with sequence than with real time, and it seems to have captivated Dodgson. In the title of Chapter 7, “A Mad Tea-Party,” we should read tea-party as t-party, with t being the mathematical symbol for time.
Dodgson has the Hatter, the Hare and the Dormouse stuck going round and round the tea table to reflect the way in which Hamilton used what he called quaternions — a number system based on four terms. In the 1860s, quaternions were hailed as the last great step in calculating motion. Even Dodgson may have considered them an ingenious tool for advanced mathematicians, though he would have thought them maddeningly confusing for the likes of Alice (and perhaps for many of his math students).
At the mad tea party, time is the absent fourth presence at the table. The Hatter tells Alice that he quarreled with Time last March, and now “he won’t do a thing I ask.” So the Hatter, the Hare and the Dormouse (the third “term”) are forced to rotate forever in a plane around the tea table.
When Alice leaves the tea partiers, they are trying to stuff the Dormouse into the teapot so they can exist as an independent pair of numbers — complex, still mad, but at least free to leave the party.
Alice will go on to meet the Queen of Hearts, a “blind and aimless Fury,” who probably represents an irrational number. (Her keenness to execute everyone comes from a ghastly pun on axes — the plural of axis on a graph.)
How do we know for sure that “Alice” was making fun of the new math? The author never explained the symbolism in his story. But Dodgson rarely wrote amusing nonsense for children: his best humor was directed at adults. In addition to the “Alice” stories, he produced two hilarious pamphlets for colleagues, both in the style of mathematical papers, ridiculing life at Oxford.
Without math, “Alice” might have been more like Dodgson’s later book, “Sylvie and Bruno” — a dull and sentimental fairy tale. Math gave “Alice” a darker side, and made it the kind of puzzle that could entertain people of every age, for centuries.
Melanie Bayley is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Oxford.