A vivid view of things

It's good to see VIVID back after a lull.

Anyone who agreed with, disagreed with, or otherwise reacted to my Soul searching posts (17th and 27th September) may be interested in readin Animals and us: an off-planet view of a species in denial.

“We know that the alien will quickly discover what we are doing; and, assuming a sensitive disposition, will likely reel in dismay at the kinds of things that go on to assess how much of these various substances must be injected, smothered, rubbed or otherwise forced into the flesh, eyes and organs of animals to make them blind, paralysed, crippled or dead, and thereby to enable us to rate the substances as toxic or safe.”

Ugh.

“US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has blocked the public release of 44 pictures of foreign detainees abused by their captors, saying their release would endanger American soldiers. The Obama administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court late on Friday saying that Gates has invoked new powers blocking the release of the photos.”

(Irish Times, 15 Nov, 2009)

From the moral hope in the days after Obama's election to ... this.

With our tails between our legs

In the countries which have troops there, opinion is shifting increasingly in favour of withdrawing them from Afghanistan. In the two main provider states, US and UK, president Obama and prime minister Brown are both obviously considering it as an option; populations in both countries are ahead of them.

I am one of those who doubt that the troops are doing anything useful there. As with Iraq, the intervention in Afghanistan was incompetent at best and ... at worst would take more time and heart than I have for it at the moment. But withdrawal will be yet another in the long chain of betrayals which we perpetrate over and over again: enter, promise the world, realise the cost and withdraw leaving locals to carry the can. Even as I agree that troops should be withdrawn, I am deeply ashamed.

Fragility

I was talking to a group of teenagers on a community education programme, and they started discussing the subjects they were doing. After a while, they got around to sociology, and the sociologist who is teaching them.

“It's all about feminism, nothing but feminism,” said one of the lads, “she's a feminist, and it's indoctrination.”

I know the person concerned, and this sounded extremely unlikely. Although she is no doubt a feminist (and quite right too), I never remember her ever having mentioned feminism – and her opposition to anyone either delivering or accepting indoctrination is strong and passionate. She would always be scrupulous about presenting both her own views and those of which she disapproved with equal neutrality

“Well”, I said, “you've only been doing it for six weeks, and feminism is a very important force in the way the world has changed over the past century – especially the past forty years or so. You need to learn about the forces which shape society, and the ways in which society is viewed by those who study it. Feminism is part of both. When I was at school, it would have been less so; but now you need to see it alongside others like Marxism and...”

“Marksism?” he queried, looking puzzled, “Is that about how our work is marked?”

Pop goes the weasel

There are more strands and trains of thought that could be followed from military psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan and the Fort 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".