Iran is a threat to Israel?

Israel's foreign minister Tzipi Livni wrote an Op-Ed in Haretz a while ago saying "Iran's nuclear arms do not pose an existential threat to Israel". So what supports the judgment of those who think so?

To give some context to who Tzipi Livni is: from a Jan 22, 2006 Wa-Po interview

Tzipi Livni, is a rising star in Israel's centrist Kadima party. Although she grew up in a right-wing Likud family, Livni, 47, strongly supported Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's decision to withdraw Israeli troops and settlements from the Gaza Strip as well as his formation of a new party -- which is favored to win the most votes in elections set for March.

Kadima Party did win in March 2006 ushering Kadima Party led by Ehud Olmert into Power.

Back to the Iranian threat. The chronology of the collective efforts of a few from the U.S administration to the domestically raise the threat of Iran provides the context for the latest reports from Pentagon of Iranian ships threatening U.S ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

from April of 2006, Seymour Hersh reported in his rather long New-Yorker piece "Iran Plans":

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack.

The war plans, the article states, included the use of tactical nuclear weapons and that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the such a use of nuclear weapons.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/27/061127fa_fact?printable=true

Al Franken bags key endorsement

Minnesota Public Radio reports:

The political arm of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 5 voted Saturday to back Franken, a comedian turned candidate.

The union represents 43,000 public and nonprofit employees in the state. Its leaders said in a news release that Franken's membership in four entertainment unions and his proven ability to raise money for the campaign put him in a stronger position than Ciresi.

lawsome

From the Women's Press

After a Philadelphia prostitute was gang-raped at gunpoint by four men, she sought justice in court. The 20-year-old single mother, who worked for a service advertised on craigslist, agreed to have sex with two men for money. Instead, one of the men pulled a gun, robbed the woman, and forced her to have sex with himself and three friends at gunpoint, stating that if she did not cooperate he would kill her. In court, Municipal Judge Teresa Carr Deni dismissed the rape and sexual assault charges. stating "she consented and didn't get paid. I thought it was a robbery."

Can you believe this?

Its kinda sad

Its kinda sad to hear this. Also weird. From an interview by Dick Cheney in 1994.

body parts of grammar

going head to head

going toe to toe

walking shoulder to shoulder

my lips to your ears

Iraq : Daily Life

A slice of life from bloggers in Iraq

Aunt Najma from Mosul writes:

I'm sick of talking about the bad situation. I just hate the mornings, there's always shooting and many explosions. .... I always have doubts that I'll be able to make it to college - the roads are rarely open.... My cousin drove me home the other day - building after building, destroyed, burnt. Black signs announcing deaths. .... I asked my cousin about a destroyed building I hadn't seen before. He said it was months ago. I was shocked. I didn't ask about the ones that followed.

We're really strangers in our country... oh well, excuse me, I don't think "our" should be used anymore. I'm not sure whose country it is, but it's not mine for sure.

Reality Realised

Iran plans to crack down on vice: which includes decadent films, drugs, and alcohol. The campaign has the blessing from the Supreme Leader: Ayatollah Khomenei.

as any good first step involves, they are going for the biggest of threats to society: women's clothing.

should people start paying attention to Ayaan Hirsi Ali?

shoot!

dumblaws.com says:

In Lousiana, it is illegal to rob a bank and then shoot at the bank teller with a water pistol.

full text of the Louisiana Law

hat tip: heard on the freethought radio.

building a bureaucracy

just pick a favorite bureaucratic website and see the document requirements page. for instance the consulate of any country and their page listing documents for any particular service. My wager is over 100 years requirements would have been added or replaced, but only rarely will they be dropped.

The list will grow and continue to grow. at our expense.

dot or no dot

Because Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, adding or removing dots from a Gmail address won’t change the actual destination address. Messages sent to yourusername@gmail.com and y.o.u.r.u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com are all delivered to your Inbox, and only yours.

Gmail allows only one registration for any given username. Once you sign up for a particular username, any dot variations are made permanently unavailable for new accounts.

-from Am I receiving someone else's email?

making sense of the absurd

If you have time on your hands, then the following piece is recommended for reading; Making Sense of the Absurd. It sort of goes through a list of things that starts to blur the line between absurd, right and wrong. It isn't making the case that religion isn't absurd, but that we probably take too many scientific statement for granted. for instance:

7. Parallel lines never meet.
8. The sum of the interior angles of a triangle is 180°.

Well, these aren't quite accurate. There's an implicit constraint on these statements that they are true only in euclidean (planar) geometry. In non-euclidean geometry, these statements can take wild turns. For example, on the surface of a sphere like our own planet, we can start at the north pole, walk south 1 mile, east 1 mile and north 1 mile and return exactly to our starting point. Our turns were approximately right angles and our return also consists of a right angle, meaning that the triangle we walked had interior angles summing up to almost 270° (to the nit-picky, this isn't strictly true--in order to get exactly 270°, we'd need to walk all the way down to the equator, but I'm too lazy to walk that far). And while we're talking about the globe, we can observe the long parallel longitudinal lines to see that they can indeed meet twice: once at each pole. In other more intriguing spaces, such as lobechevskian space whose shape is often compared to that of a saddle, we can find parallel lines that intersect exactly once. And if the real-world example of the globe isn't enough to discredit the universality of propositions 7 & 8, we could look at the math supporting Einstein's theory of special relativity which relies on non-euclidean math to derive its results.

women for religion?

I have often heard that our morals come from religion. take one example where it does not: Women and Men are created equals. There is no religious orthodoxy in history that has not attempted in the name of religion and/or religious scripture to oppress women. examples abound: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and they all regulated women's bodies, thoughts, behavior, and actions.

when women have secured their equality by struggling against religious orthodoxies, why do they still flock to religion?

oh on the corridor

overheard on the corridor: "It wasn't my wife this time. It was another random variable."

On faith : Sir John Houghton

Sir John Houghton: One of the most important statements as a scientist: "I don't know". One of the most important statements you should be prepared to make as a believer. "I don't know". Both evolutionists and religious fanatics can learn a bit from this man.

democracy

Cheese eating, yuppy French had a election, where all the jobless people wandered into voting booths, to avoid the sun. They had 85% turnout. U.S, the paragon of democracy, so much that there is enough left to be exported to Iraq. The most touted turnout for elections in U.S. history had a record 55% turnout.

French election is also very significant in the sense of Sarkozy offer a new direction that explores a freer economy that tilts away from labor and provides greater freedom to employers. Ms. Royal offers a more socialist program that has energy and vision. It remains to be seen which way the election will go as the first round votes are close.

Simwinga's green model

Hammerskjoeld Simwinga wins $125,000 for the award, sometimes called the Nobel prize for the environment.

He helped set up bee-keeping and fish-farming projects for people in the North Luangwa valley, where elephant numbers had shown a dramatic fall. He persuades local people they can earn money by keeping elephants alive.

Mirroring the experience of Muhammad Yunus, who said over 95% of loans go to womenfolk:

Over 70% of loans are made to women and Mr Simwinga says they are the backbone of the programme. "We deliberately pushed our resources to the womenfolk in the community because we knew that working with the women was the strongest part of persuasion," he told Reuters news agency.

As an inspiring story of resolve and progress, Mr. Simwinga describes:

He inherited the North Luangwa Wildlife Conservation and Community Development Programme (NLWCCDP), when its US founders Delia and Mark Owens were forced to leave in 1996.

Despite fears it would collapse, Mr Simwinga, known as "Hammer" and named after UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold who died in a 1961 air crash in Zambia, instead managed to expand the project.

"If I had left as well then the work we had worked for so many years to build would have just collapsed," he said.

news link: BBC World Service

Poem event at Boston University

profiling shooter?

livescience.com you can't profile school shooters

One of the problems, they say, is : There are far too many people who are depressed and lonely are not mass-murderers. And how ever finely you make up a profile, the number of false-positives* will be more than true mass-murderers that fit that profile. This reminds of the Bayesian estimation "paradox" that Arunn on Nanoscience posted a while back.

Example: False positive in a medical test (example taken from [1])

A “false positive” in medical terminology is a situation when ... a person not actually having a particular disease or conditions may be returned a positive result in a test. ... Suppose that a test for a disease generates the following results.

(1) If a tested patient has the disease, the test returns a positive result 98% of the time, or with probability 0.99
(2) If a tested patient does not have the disease, the test returns a negative result 96% of the time, or with probability 0.96.

Suppose also that only 0.1% of the population has that disease, so that a randomly selected patient has a 0.001 prior probability of having the disease. The question now is what is the probability that a positive test results in a false positive?

from back of the envelope calculations:

If there are 1000 people, 1 person has the disease. of the 999 people only 96% were detected. so 39.96 were detected positive, but don’t have the disease. So only 1 in 40 people detected to have the disease really do have the disease.

E=mc2 (Documentary)

I was checking out the documentary about E=mc² . The documentary attempts to bring to the fore the contribution of one of the greatest minds of the century, Albert Einstein, his equation relating mass, energy, and the speed of light. If we cut through the melodramatic presentation with the Victorian charms and the bourgeois society and its workings, rest of the documentary takes us through the most important developments that made Einstein's discovery possible. As Newton said 'standing on the shoulders of Giants', the documentary attempts to show the giants on whom Einstein stood to see farther than light, figuratively speaking.

The first important milestone happened to be the idea that various forms of energy though having an existence independent of their own, are inter-related and can be changed from one form to another. Heat in the steam, and electricity in the wire, and magnetism of the magnets were all examples of energy in the pristine form, all having a common undercurrent: "energy". Michael Faraday showed that electrical energy can be used to create magnetism in objects and vice versa. The theory of electro-magneitc waves and electromagnetic field came to be proposed for the first time.

The debate that then ensued was about the conservation of matter. That it can neither be created nor be destroyed. It was shown by Antoine Lavoisier, assisted by his wife Marie Anne, that water can be converted to steam, then passed through iron and then condensed at the other end. The liquid at the other end is water, but is lesser in mass than initial. The hydrogen gas collected along with the water in the container and the rust that had formed by reaction between iron and oxygen accounted for the missing mass.

The next crucial part was that energy was proportional to the square of the velocity. It was shown by a Dutch scientist that when a lead ball is dropped on to a box of clay, it makes 4 times deeper impression when dropped from twice the height. Thus providing evidence to the squared relation, though it went against the proposals of Newton at that time. It took a century to gain general acceptance among the scientific community. Major headway in these episodes was played by Gottfried Leibniz and Emilie du Chatelet. Emilie du Chatelet lead a prolific role in science apart from excelling in arts, and raising a family of 3 children. She translated the Newton's Principia in French.

We are then taken back to Faraday who had then proposed that light itself as a form of energy and hence an electromagnetic wave. It caused much furor as people were still grappling with the idea of the mysterious interplay between Electricity and Magnetism that Faraday himself had demonstrated earlier. Maxwell came along to show that mathematics did permit such a possibility. But then Maxwell also suggested that, to be consistent with his theory, even if one were to travel at the speed of light (690 million mile per hour), one would observe light traveling at the 690 million mile per hour away from them. If you travel next to a car at the same speed as that car, that car would then appear stationary to you. The proposal was counter-intuitive.

Einstein for his part, had to reconcile this fact. He realized that this is possible if the hands of the clock were to move slowly at higher speeds. Thus time was no more independent of the space, measured in watches. Space and time were now related. This dealt an incredible blow to 3 centuries of resolute faith in the scientific belief that time was an absolute.

Einstein began to wonder, what would happens if train were to be accelerated to the speed of light, and more fuel were added to it to accelerate it further? Will it travel at a speed greater than light? That's not possible. So, he concluded that the added energy must be converted to mass of the train to conserve energy.

Thus it allowed him to derive the relation between energy, mass, and velocity of light. E=mc^2

The documentary then goes on the show the meteoric rise of Einstein among the ranks and his proposal for special and general relativity of which a nice introduction can be found on shallowthgts.

So definitely get hold of the documentary and see it. You will learn about women who played very important role in science and have remained relatively unknown. You also get to see the coming together of important scientific developments, each one a truly great milestone.

IMDB: tt0476209

(an updated repost from the past)

equality indeed (joke alarm)

Kurt quipped on the CT forum: "We have been a horrible animal. after the Spanish inquisitions, the two world wars, Hiroshima, Roman games. Its clear the earth is trying to get rid of us." Joyce Carol chimed in the middle with the question "But which sex is doing this stuff?" without a second thought Kurt Vonnegut made the snarky comment "Women are no good at doing science, you know? We discovered that at Harvard." (see the video)

I thought this was a nice short exchange for more reasons than one. Kurt may have meant that - In Cat's cradle Kurt talks about the detachment of scientists from the impact their discoveries have on the world, however disastrous they may be. Especially that this is independent of gender. But if you twist his statement it could also mean "If Women claim they can do the most wonderful discoveries just as well as men have in the past, they should accept with calm deference that they are capable of committing the very same horrors as well."

History has shown only few contributions of significance from women. Naturally so. So why would anyone search history to point to the potential of women or the capacity of women to be creative as evidence? Rather, why not believe in the inherent equality of men and women as the basic hypothesis of natural law? Desmund Tutu described of man (and women) "he(she) is capable of most evil acts as he(she) is of the most elevated."