June 7, 2004, 5:50 p.m. -- (Last
week's weblog)
Scroll down or click
here for the Transit of Venus links.
I'll be off to a conference for a week after Tuesday. Anything
you want to point to, say
it now..
Meeting
Al-Jazeera: From L.A. Weekly, a fascinating interview
with Samir Khader, a senior producer at the controversial Qatar-based news
network. Excerpt:
In the bar of the Roosevelt Hotel, Khader ordered a Coca-Cola
and gave me a rundown of his views. Though even such anti-Bush papers as
the Guardian have run glowing reports about the local elections being held
in Iraqi cities like Nassiriya, he dismissed them as a medieval sham in
which tribal chieftains pick their relatives to represent them. (“This
is not democracy,” he said, “this is dictatorship.”)
Nonetheless, like a lot of experts, he thought elections should be held
sooner rather than later. (“If I were Paul Bremer, I would give my
order to start elections in September,” he said. “You have
to start educating the Iraqi people in democracy, to choose their representatives.”)
The overall verdict? The Bush-Cheney team had had a brilliant military
plan — all Arabs were in agreement about that — but zilch for “the
day after.”
“Has the Arab world helped them with ‘the day after’?” I
asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Why should they?”
“Well, you as an Arab were telling me that you were glad Saddam
Hussein was gone.”
“And I told you that as a citizen,” Khader replied. “But
if you were a ruler in the Middle East, the first thing that would come
to your mind the day after is the following: ‘Who’s next?’ So
why should I help?”
“Let me change the question,” I said. “Has the Arab
intelligentsia helped the U.S.?”
“No. They can’t help it, because they don’t agree
with the justification for the war — WMD, ‘Saddam Hussein
represents a danger for the whole international community, he has ties
with al Qaeda,’ etc. Nobody believes in that.”
“But they agreed with the result, in the sense that they wanted
him deposed.”
“Yes, but they would have preferred that the result should have
come from within Iraq.”
“But it doesn’t come from anywhere within the Arab world.”
“And why is that?” Khader retorted. “Because all these
dictators are fully supported by the United States. All of them. Even
the Syrians.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so,” I said, “it
sounds like you’re playing games. It sounds like there’s
an opportunity for democracy there, and you’re not taking it. It’s
as if you’re saying, ‘I like this gift, but I don’t
like the way it’s wrapped, I don’t like the store you bought
it from, and the owner of the store killed my uncle.’”
“But believe me, this is the mentality of the Middle East!” Khader
exclaimed, suddenly becoming excited. “This is the way things go
on in the Middle East! Do you know that the Saudis, for example, will
never, ever forget that the ruling family in Jordan came from Saudi Arabia?
And that they are the legitimate rulers of the Hijaz, which is in the
western part of Saudi Arabia? This happened some 70 or 80 years ago,
but they didn’t forget it. They never forget. There is a saying, ‘The
revenge of an Arab lasts for 40 years,’ and obviously, I’m
part of that Middle East. I can’t think otherwise. You say it’s
a game, but it’s not a game. It’s the way things go on in
the region.”
Related: Saudi
women can own businesses: From Al Jazeera,
The Saudi cabinet, chaired by King Fahd, last week took a
landmark decision allowing women to obtain commercial licences.
Previously women could only open a business in the name of a male relative,
and religious and social restrictions excluded them from all but a few
professions such as teaching and nursing.
"This decision will certainly reduce social and economic pressures
on men, who are no longer capable of meeting family needs due to a drop
in personal income," said Nahid Tahir, a senior economist at National
Commercial Bank.
She said that creating employment had become a way of fighting "homegrown
terrorism". "It also has an important
security aspect in fighting terrorists in the kingdom, as the solution
to this problem is no longer of a purely security nature."
Tahir said 55% of university graduates in the oil-rich kingdom are female,
but the overwhelming majority stay at home because of the ban and a general
lack of job opportunities.
According to official figures, only 5.5% out of some 4.7 million Saudi
women of working age are employed. The cabinet also ordered government
ministries and bodies to create jobs for women, and asked the Chambers
of Commerce and Industry to form a committee for women to help train and
find jobs for them in the private sector.
It also decided that land will be allocated for the establishment
of industrial projects to employ women, and said in future all positions
in shops selling
women's clothes and accessories would be reserved for Saudi women. ...
Link
to this item | Comment
Atlantis
found? BBC seems to think so:
Satellite photos of southern Spain reveal features on the ground appearing
to match descriptions made by Greek scholar Plato of the fabled utopia
Dr Rainer Kuehne thinks the "island" of Atlantis simply referred
to a region of the southern Spanish coast destroyed by a flood between
800 BC and 500 BC.
The research has been reported as an ongoing project in the online edition
of the journal Antiquity
Satellite photos of a salt marsh region known as Marisma de Hinojos near
the city of Cadiz show two rectangular structures in the mud and
parts of concentric rings that may once have surrounded them
"Plato wrote of an island of five stades (925m) diameter that was
surrounded by several circular structures - concentric rings - some consisting
of Earth and the others of water. We have in the photos concentric rings
just as Plato described," Dr Kuehne told BBC News Online.
Dr Kuehne, of the University of Wuppertal in Germany, believes the rectangular
features could be the remains of a "silver" temple devoted to
the sea god Poseidon and a "golden" temple devoted to Cleito
and Poseidon - all
described in Plato's dialogue Critias....
Link
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Paperclip art: "Welcome to Justin
Schlecter's portfolio of
intricate geometric paperclip sculptures"
That's a delicate icosaspark at
right, which needs enlarging.. More images on the headline link.
Forbidden
Photos, Anyone? The
Village Voice addresses Transit
agency wants to ban subway photos by sponsoring
a contest for subway photos.
Link
to this item | Comment
ZeD - Open Source
Television: This looks interesting, wood
s lot points to it with these words:
The ZeD website is a user-moderated content community associated
with CBC Television's late-night TV project, ZeD. ZeD is a launch pad for
ideas, individuals and creative expression. It's a blend of short films,
micro-cinema, experimental works, performances by bands, poets, comics
and choreographers, and - always - contributions from the audience.
Link
to this item | Comment
Reporters Without Borders: Ivory
coast: Disappearance of Guy-André Kieffer
The authorities block the investigation and prevent questioning of people
close to the president
Reporters Without Borders said it appeared that the Ivorian authorities
are blocking a French legal investigation into the disappearance
of French-Canadian journalist Guy-André Kieffer.
In a letter, sent 21 May to the state prosecutor in Abidjan, the French
examining magistrate, Patrick Ramael complained of "a total block
on [his] investigations".
Michel Legré, brother-in-law of President Laurent Gbagbo's wife,
Simone Gbagbo, was the last person to have seen Kieffer before his disappearance.
In two interviews with Ramael, he gave him the names of at least eight
people, whom he said were involved in kidnapping the journalist.
... according to Michel Legré, several men snatched Kieffer
from the car park of an Abidjan commercial centre, bundled him into a
green four-wheel drive vehicle that took him to a military camp on the
orders of Patrice Bailly.
"Impunity seems unfortunately to remain the rule in Cote d'Ivoire," Reporters
Without Borders protested. "It is now essential that the Ivorian
authorities show renewed commitment to the legal and police co-operation
needed to pursue the inquiry and to the safety of witnesses.
More: Missing
reporter stirs trouble on three continents, from the Guardian
(U.K.).
Link
to this item | Comment
Magazine
Art: A free virtual database of magazine cover art
from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Link
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Is
trivia true? At Google Answers, someone pays
to find out:
A popular email circulating over the internet titled "So
you think you
know everything" makes 45 claims of fact. Maybe they're
all true,
maybe not. Some are super easy to research (I've done several
myself),
others maybe not so easy.
In addition to the $5 Answer price, I'll pay a tip of $1 for
every
fact credibly debunked and 50cents for every question credibly
demonstrated to be true.
Maybe this isn't enough money to get this question off the ground,
but
it's all I can afford to pay for pure entertainment value.
A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.
A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue.
A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.
A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th
of a second.
A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
A snail can sleep for three years.
Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial
on the
back of the $5 bill....
And more. Yes, most have answers. Such as, "A crocodile's
tongue is attached to the roof of its mouth and cannot move it."
Link
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How
Houdini's escape trick worked: Spoiler, of course, but you
always knew it was an illusion.
Link
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How
the leopard got its spots: Some Just So stories of animal
patterning. Skip the equations and get to the meat of it, like this,
An animal's tail can be thought of as a cylinder with a
steadily decreasing radius. The top is large enough to support two-dimensional
patterns like spots, but down at the bottom the domain becomes too small.
The region of high Activator spreads all the way around the tail and joins
up with itself, so that a spot becomes a stripe. The transition between
spots and stripes is shown very well by a cheetah's tail. This aspect of
the maths also explains why a spotted animal can have a striped tail, but
a striped animal can never have a spotted tail.
Via Patrick Blake
Link
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A free US address geocoder: Pinpoint your latitude and longitude
so you can find your way home.
Link
to this item | Comment
Thank you Doc: Doc Searls -- three weeks younger than
me, but a soulmate indeed, writes, "I think when I'm done with it, I'm
turning the Web over to Sheila."
I'd be honored to take the handoff of Doc's heavily used
secondhand Web. But I think he should keep it and use it up completely.
Link
to this item | Comment
12:42 p.m.
Here comes Venus:
 |
1882
Transit of Venus
An
image of one of the 1700 plates taken worldwide
during the 1882 transit, showing Venus crossing
the disk of the Sun. Also visible is the image
of the ruled glass reticle mounted in front of
the plate and the vertical line in the centre
is that of a thin silver plumb line that hung
between the plate and grid. The small dots on
the picture were caused by defects in the glass
photographic plates.
|
Tomorrow's transit of Venus is already under way in southern
New England as the sun rises. The passage of the planet across
the sun is viewable from 5:11 a.m. to 7:25 a.m. (Don't look
directly at the sun. You know this.)
Ladd Observatory at Brown will be webcasting
it here.
From Dave Huestis, historian for R.I.'s Amateur Astronomical
Society, Skyscrapers
Inc., whose essay Transit
of Venus: A Rare Astronomical Event lays out the science
and more.
The transit of Venus begins at 5:13 UT (universal time;
also known as Greenwich Mean Time). We are four hours behind
UT, so at 1:13 a.m. EDT, the Sun is obviously below our
horizon. By the time the Sun rises for us - 5:11 a.m. EDT,
the transit will be well in progress. Give the Sun a few
minutes to rise above the horizon, though you may be able
to see Venus' silhouette even before the Sun fully clears
the horizon. From that point until 7:26 a.m. EDT, we will
be able to follow the transit through its completion. Look
for the black drop effect just before Venus begins to exit
the solar disk, around 7:06:31 a.m. EDT. Reference accompanying
graphic with detail insert once again.
Now, several words of caution are necessary to state here.
Do not stare or take occasional glimpses at the rising
Sun without protection! Just because the sunlight may be
dimmed by the dense atmosphere when the Sun is low on the
horizon, do not be tempted to stare at it. Number 14 welders
glass is one safe method to use. DO NOT use exposed film
of any kind. This method is not safe....
...Here's one (site) that plans on providing 200 mirror
sites to satisfy the demand - http://www.vt-2004.org/central/.
...
(A quick note: Seagrave Observatory will not be open to
the public for this years' transit. Since the transit occurs
with the Sun very low in the early morning sky, our tree
studded eastern horizon will prevent any observations from
Seagrave.)
Because many of these sites all call themselves "Transit
of Venus," I'm referring to their urls:
http://www.vt-2004.org/ is
a lare site from the European Southern Observatory. Good
kids pages, history, webcams.
http://transitofvenus.auckland.ac.nz/ Interesting
site from New Zealand with unique info about Captain Cook
and Maori
transitofvenus.org:
a general portal on the event, useful for teachers.
Predictions
for the 2004 Transit of Venus by fred Espenak, of NASA's
and Jay Anderson, Environment Canada. Viewing times around
the world, weather predictions, links. One of the best
places to view the eclipse is Iraq!
Java
applet: If you're into the mechanics of it all....
The
June 2004 transit of Venus: From astrology.com: "Venus
transits seem to presage great shifts in human consciousness..." Compact
correlation of earlier transits to historical breakthroughs
and the emergence of women.
Venus
Transit: Venus - Goddess of the Morning Star astrologer Maya
White discusses the mythology and symbology of Venus,
and offers links to many writings by the Mayan
calendar /-Harmonic Convergence folks, who expect telepathy
to grow after the transit:
As should be obvious from the initial discussion Venus
Transits may be alone among astronomical events to have
a track record that associates them with major steps in
the development of the Global Brain. (The completion of
the Atlantic telegraph cable in 1874 may for instance be
seen as the creation of a kind of corpus callosum connecting
its Western and Eastern Hemispheres). Because of this track
record the Oneness Celebration at this Venus Transit is
not just another one in a number of global meditations
that for different reasons have been proposed in recent
years. Rather, previous ones, most notably the Harmonic
Convergence or Harmonic Concordance, may be regarded as
preparatory for the Oneness Celebration, the Venus Transit
of June 8, 2004. This will carry the major breakthrough
in the development of a new telepathic field on planet
Earth, and the co-creation of this is a pre-requisite for
attaining the Enlightened state of Oneness by the time
the next in this pair of Venus Transits occurs on June
6, 2012. For all those wanting to help birth Gaia Harmonica,
the new harmonious Global Brain, the Oneness Celebration
is the time to do it.
From Gaspee.org:
"Florence Parker Simister, in her book Streets of
the City: An Anecdotal History of Providence, p57 relates
that it was Joseph Brown who was at the forefront of citywide
excitement about the transit of Venus across the sun in
1769. He purchased the observatory equipment such as a
reflecting telescope and measuring devices for the observatory
set up in Providence at the site of what is now known as "Transit
Street". The precise measurements of architecture
would have been applied in Joseph Brown's extracurricular
interest in astronomy. The next such showing of the transit
of Venus will be on Tuesday, June 8, 2004."
Physics professor T.J. Keefe at CCRI has a
nice page of links, leading with an engraving from
Harper's Weekly magazine of April 28, 1883:
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com
