Pop goes the weasel

There are more strands and trains of thought that could be followed from military psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan and the Ford Hood shootings than I could begin to count, never mind pick up and examine. I have no great urge to pursue the obvious ironies. The perennial imbalance of concern between western lives (whether thirteen US at Fort Hood, five British a few days earlier at Shin Kalay, or any other) and eastern ones (tens of thousands, uncommented) is not for this moment. The reflex to condemn Islam for harm done by one Moslem (though not to credit it for any good done by others) while separating individual from religion when the perpetrator is Christian, Jim Putnam has compellingly highlighted already.

One aspect which catches at me and holds me is one which may or may not be true, but nevertheless stands as an example of something incontrovertibly true.

Hasan's aunt and cousin, before fear silenced them, asserted that he had been harassed and abused because of his religion, his name, his ethnicity. Whether that is true or not, it is only too believable. It is very believable to anyone who has even fleetingly observed the canteen cultures of military communities (anywhere, of any nationality or culture). More than that, it is very believable to anyone who has seen how human beings behave in any closed community from campus to small town to workplace to neighbourhood to playground.

Within spatially constrained groups, as they get larger, our human urge to alienate "the other" turns inward and reaches pressure cooker levels. The other can be anyone who is different, in any way. Religion will do. Ethnicity will do. An unusual name, a weight problem, different opinions, just a quiet and inward nature, will do.

Whether or not Nidal Malik Hasan had been harassed and abused because of his religion, his name, or his ethnicity, it is certain from his actions on Thursday 5th November that he was, for whatever reason and by whatever mechanism, alienated.

To suggest that an alienated individual will automatically go postal and top the nearest random group of passers by is as grossly ludicrous, inaccurate and unfair as to make the same assumption on the basis of religion. People suffer alienation every day, in their thousands and millions, and never take it out on anyone else. I see two of my students, currently, being subtly victimised by their peer group, and neither of them will hurt a fly in return, never mind stage a Columbine or a Dunblane.

But: when an explosion does occur, there are two important differences between religion and alienation. Unlike religion (or ethnicity or name or sexual orientation or any number of other factors), alienation to the point of fracture lies, one way or another, behind every such explosion. And unlike religion, or ethnicity, or whatever, alienation is created by us: we, the populations around the alienated perpetrator, the ones who supply her/his victims, are also the ones who all too often create the alienation. And we are the ones who could stop doing so; but blaming religion, or ethnicity, or something intrinsic to the other, is so much easier.

As long as we create broken people, we will suffer the consequences.

Grapher 8

Golden Software's new version of its big gun product Surfer, reviewed here in June, was followed last month by an upgrade to version 8 of its page-oriented technical graphics sibling Grapher. [More]

Down by the sea

“Wide is the ocean, sweet gravity...” while that refrain from Cerys Matthews’ song¹ Ocean is intended as poetic metaphor, it is also appropriate to a scientific computing view of things. The size (roughly two thirds of planetary surface area) and mass (on the order of a quintillion tonnes, sloshing around daily under tidal pull) of the oceans are central to their importance and there is little on earth, from its core to the limits of atmosphere or from microbes to tectonics, that can be treated meaningfully without reference to these huge bodies of water and dissolved solutes.

[More...]

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1. Cerys Matthews, “Ocean”, on Cockahoop. 2003, London: Warner Music. 2564-60306-2

More just-like-that...

Further developments in the tale of the 360° protractor and the responsive publisher ("Just like that", 25 October).

I've just received a notification that the addition of a protractor direction option has been applied already and is in place with any new download. Not in a few weeks, but now.

Having fetched the new file and updates ... sure enough, there it is. Click on the zero degrees radius and an option box comes up; choose the direction of measurement either as a temporary selection or as default, and click OK. (To see the details you'll need to click for a full size view.)

Less than five days from query to implementation. Wonderful.

Strange phenomena*

An article in this morning's Irish Times caught my eye, and has continued to trickle through my mind as I try to disentangle my thinking about it.

In a nutshell: a clairvoyant has been predicting appearances by the virgin Mary, crowds have flocked to Knock as a result, and a bishop is asking that people stay away in the interests of authenticity.

As an atheist, I should perhaps know better than to try and make dispassionate, objective sense of a clash between religion and superstition ... but I find myself drawn along winding philosophical avenues into a philosophical labyrinth from which there is no return.

Yesterday I heard that “a large illustrated book publisher is looking for high-quality images of the unusual and the unknown”. The publisher concerned has simply tagged the request "phenomena"; a picture agency seeking to fulfill the request compiled a set of examples which broadly come under the heading "paranormal phenomena" – which is reasonable in the context, but set me thinking that the once firmly scientific word "phenomena" probably now means, to most ears, exactly that.

But all "phenomena" are not equal. One of my neighbours (who describes himself as “an uncompromising atheist – but an uncompromisingly protestant one”) supports the bishop's call with the observation that “apparitions may be real or they may be nonsense, but they shouldn't be confused with phenomena”.

Today, Dirk Dusharme points out to me by email (in connection with an entirely separate subject) that belief is belief and one cannot argue with that: one can only agree or disagree.

(Scientists, of course, have beliefs just like anyone else ... and so do atheists: they are just different beliefs.)

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• *Kate Bush, "Stange phenomena" on The kick inside. 1979: EMI Records.

Photesia

I was led to Riley and his story by a post on Unreal Nature, and spent several hours there or with the downloaded PDF. I spent some of that time crying.

Since I am stealing Julie's discovery, I'll make an exception and not give a reference to the site; you can get there via her post: "Concrete reality".

Just like that...

Responsiveness in a software publisher or supplier is always welcome, and more common than is often realised, but I've just experienced a particularly impressive case.

On Thursday, I downloaded a 30 day trial copy of FX Draw 3 – part of FX MathPack, a suite of mathematics resources for the secondary education market by Australian publisher Efofex and available in the UK from Chartwell-Yorke).

I had in mind buying a copy for use on a laptop with all the neighbourhood teenagers who drop in hopefully for assistance with homework, and in the café based outreach work with which I'm involved. Since the next topic likely to come up is bearings, I skipped to the angle measure resources and specifically to the onscreen protractors.

There are two protractors: 180° and 360°. Both are very flexible and intuitive to use: they can be drawn on the fly, during an explanation, in less than a second, with one flick of the mouse. For bearings work, the 360° is by far the preferable one ... but bearings are measured clockwise from north, and this protractor showed the full three hundred and sixty degrees only in the counterclockwise direction. After fiddling and exploring on my own for a bit, I emailed a query to Chartwell-Yorke.

On Friday I received a reply from Efofex: no, there was no clockwise scale, but they would add one.

Today, Sunday, another Efofex email dropped into my inbox: a clockwise scale on 360 degree protractors has been added to FX Draw (that's a sneak preview of it in the illustration – as always, click it for a larger view) and will appear in the next release (no date as yet for that release, which has to include other developments, but it's expected “in a few weeks”.)

You really can't fault that.

A prize worth having?

A thought provoking discussion from Paul Rogers (of Bradford University's Department of Peace Studies, and the Oxford Research Group) of the Nobel peace prize recently awarded to Barack Obama.

Whatever your views, it's worth reading the route by which Professor Rogers reaches his conclusion:

“It is easy enough to argue that the award of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama is at best premature and at worst a wasted opportunity. Putting it in context, though, and relating it to the possibility of progress on two of the crucial issues of the day - nuclear proliferation and climate change – it is far less clear that it was a bad decision. If, instead, it turns out to be one further factor that aids progress on these issues, then the 2009 Prize may turn out to be a much more far-sighted decision than many people believe.”

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• Paul Rogers, P., "A prize worth having?" in International Security Monthly Briefing 2009/08 (5). ORG.

Weekend egg blogging

My fascination with the infinite variations possible on an emptied eggshell continues.

Eggshells don't compare with crab shells , but ... here is this weekend's eggstract from the ongoing reggord.

Down through the layers of song

At JSBlog, Ray Girvan extols the joys of song "with layers of meaning".

Thinking about that, I realise that it holds the key to something about my own musical preferences which I have struggled to explain – to others or to myself.

On one hand, and it's perhaps the major strand, I have always been drawn to song lyrics; if they are backed up by good music, that's important too, but the lyrics come first. It started with attraction to storytelling songs (Woody Guthrie was an early childhood avourite) and then, in my teens, developed into "literary" ones. I love the verbal acrobatics of Catatonia, for instance, such as the line “so she buys wet fish” (in the Equally Cursed & Blessed song "She's a millionaire") which Matthews sang in such a way that “so she” slurred into “sushi” or the opening play on "treasure chest".

But then, on the other hand, I am primarily attracted to Kate Bush not by the lyrics (though they are interesting in themselves) but by the astonishing things she does with her voice.

Reading Ray's comments, I realise that layers of meaning are the key in both cases. Catatonia play with verbalised layers; Bush with the emotional effects of melody; both invite multiple readings of the result. Not that I reach the levels of layering displayed by Ray's German and Icelandic examples, but the principle is there.

So that's that sorted then; on to the next thing...