Ultima Thule

"Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow; The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true."

2007-12-31T20:37:00.000-05:00

"An accountant in India House in London for more than 30 years and caregiver for his sister Mary (who, in a fit of mania, had stabbed their mother to death), Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was one of the great masters of the English essay.
The most intimate of the early-19th-century essayists, Lamb relied on stylistic artifice ('whim-whams', as he referred to his antique diction and far-fetched comparisons) and a contrived persona known as 'Elia'. As George L. Barnett has observed, 'Lamb's egoism suggests more than Lamb's person: it awakens in the reader reflections of kindred feelings and affections' (Charles Lamb: The Evolution of Elia, 1964). In the essay 'New Year's Eve', which first appeared in the January 1821 issue of The London Magazine, Lamb reflects wistfully on the passage of time." -- Richard Nordquist.

(My title is from Tennyson's In Memoriam; the illustration, published in 1890, is an engraving of Tron Church, Edinburgh, on New Year's Eve.)

David

"New Year's Eve"
by Charles Lamb

Every man hath two birth-days: two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration.

The one is that which in an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of old observances, this custom of solemnizing our proper birth-day hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand any thing in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

Of all sounds of all bells--(bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven)--most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected--in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal colour; nor was it a poetical flight in a contemporary, when he exclaimed

I saw the skirts of the departing Year.

It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us seems to be conscious of, in that awful leave-taking. I am sure I felt it, and all felt it with me, last night; though some of my companions affected rather to manifest an exhilaration at the birth of the coming year, than any very tender regrets for the decease of its predecessor. But I am none of those who--

Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.

I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties; new books, new faces, new years,--from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former) years. I plunge into foregone visions and conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with past disappointments. I am armour-proof against old discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play over again for love, as the gamesters phrase it, games, for which I once paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel. Methinks, it is better that I should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W----n, than that so passionate a love-adventure should be lost. It was better that our family should have missed that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds in banco, and be without the idea of that specious old rogue.

In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox, when I say, that, skipping over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love himself, without the imputation of self-love?

If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective--and mine is painfully so--can have a less respect for his present identity, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome; a notorious ***; addicted to ****: averse from counsel, neither taking it, nor offering it;--*** besides; a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not; I subscribe to it all, and much more, than thou canst be willing to lay at his door--but for the child Elia--that "other me," there, in the back-ground--I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master--with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient small-pox at five, and rougher medicaments. I can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christ's, and wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched its sleep. I know how it shrank from any the least colour of falsehood.--God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art sophisticated.--I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was--how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful! From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself,--and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being!

That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause; simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader--(a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly-conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia.

The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution; and the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony.--In those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December.

But now, shall I confess a truth?--I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like miser's farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away "like a weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I, and my friends: to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave.--Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me.

Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself--do these things go out with life?

Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?

Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which point me to them here,--the recognisable face--the "sweet assurance of a look"--?

In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying--to give it its mildest name--does more especially haunt and beset me. In a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and burgeon. Then are we as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon that master feeling; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity; moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral appearances,--that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus' sickly sister, like that innutritious one denounced in the Canticles:--I am none of her minions--I hold with the Persian.

Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death into my mind. All partial evils, like humours, run into that capital plague-sore.--I have heard some profess an indifference to life. Such hail the end of their existence as a port of refuge; and speak of the grave as of some soft arms, in which they may slumber as on a pillow. Some have wooed death--but out upon thee, I say, thou foul, ugly phantom! I detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar John) give thee to six-score thousand devils, as in no instance to be excused or tolerated, but shunned as a universal viper; to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of! In no way can I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melancholy Privation, or more frightful and confounding Positive!

Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are altogether frigid and insulting, like thyself. For what satisfaction hath a man, that he shall "lie down with kings and emperors in death," who in his life-time never greatly coveted the society of such bed-fellows?--or, forsooth, that "so shall the fairest face appear?"--why, to comfort me, must Alice W----n be a goblin? More than all, I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters! Thy New Years' Days are past. I survive, a jolly candidate for 1821. Another cup of wine--and while that turn-coat bell, that just now mournfully chanted the obsequies of 1820 departed, with changed notes lustily rings in a successor, let us attune to its peal the song made on a like occasion, by hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton.--

THE NEW YEAR

Hark, the cock crows, and yon bright star
Tells us, the day himself's not far;
And see where, breaking from the night,
He gilds the western hills with light.
With him old Janus doth appear,
Peeping into the future year,
With such a look as seems to say,
The prospect is not good that way.
Thus do we rise ill sights to see,
And 'gainst ourselves to prophesy;
When the prophetic fear of things
A more tormenting mischief brings,
More full of soul-tormenting gall,
Than direst mischiefs can befall.
But stay! but stay! methinks my sight,
Better inform'd by clearer light,
Discerns sereneness in that brow,
That all contracted seem'd but now.
His revers'd face may show distaste,
And frown upon the ills are past;
But that which this way looks is clear,
And smiles upon the New-born Year.
He looks too from a place so high,
The Year lies open to his eye;
And all the moments open are
To the exact discoverer.
Yet more and more he smiles upon
The happy revolution.
Why should we then suspect or fear
The influences of a year,
So smiles upon us the first morn,
And speaks us good so soon as born?
Plague on't! the last was ill enough,
This cannot but make better proof;
Or, at the worst, as we brush'd through
The last, why so we may this too;
And then the next in reason shou'd
Be superexcellently good:
For the worst ills (we daily see)
Have no more perpetuity,
Than the best fortunes that do fall;
Which also bring us wherewithal
Longer their being to support,
Than those do of the other sort:
And who has one good year in three,
And yet repines at destiny,
Appears ungrateful in the case,
And merits not the good he has.
Then let us welcome the New Guest
With lusty brimmers of the best;
Mirth always should Good Fortune meet,
And renders e'en Disaster sweet:
And though the Princess turn her back,
Let us but line ourselves with sack,
We better shall by far hold out,
Till the next Year she face about.

How say you, reader--do not these verses smack of the rough magnanimity of the old English vein? Do they not fortify like a cordial; enlarging the heart, and productive of sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the concoction? Where be those puling fears of death, just now expressed or affected?--Passed like a cloud--absorbed in the purging sunlight of clear poetry--clean washed away by a wave of genuine Helicon, your only Spa for these hypochondries--And now another cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, and many of them, to you all, my masters!

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"Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below."

2007-12-16T23:20:00.000-05:00

The immortal Beethoven was born on this day in 1770, 237 long years ago. There is, however, some dispute as to the exact day. According to Wikipedia: Beethoven's date of birth—usually given as December 16—is not known with certainty, but is inferred from circumstantial evidence. Well into adulthood, Beethoven believed he had been born in 1772, and told friends the 1770 baptism was of his older brother Ludwig Maria, who died in infancy; but Ludwig Maria's baptism is recorded as taking place in 1769. Some biographers assert that his father falsified his date of birth in an attempt to pass him off as a child prodigy like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but this is disputed. Children of that era were usually baptized the day after birth, but there is no documentary evidence that this occurred in Beethoven's case. It is known that his family and his teacher Johann Albrechtsberger celebrated his birthday on 16 December. While the evidence supports the probability that 16 December 1770, was Beethoven's date of birth, this cannot be stated with certainty.

What is not in dispute is the magnitude of his genius and the ineffable beauty of his music. Here is Leonard Bernstein, in his The Joy of Music, on one aspect of that music:

Many, many composers have been able to write heavenly tunes and respectable fugues. Some composers can orchestrate the C-major scale so that it sounds like a masterpiece, or fool with notes so that a harmonic novelty is achieved. But this is all mere dust—nothing compared to the magic ingredient sought by them all: the inexplicable ability to know what the next note has to be. Beethoven had this gift in a degree that leaves them all panting in the rear guard.

Beethoven broke all the rules, and turned out pieces of breath-taking rightness. Rightness—that's the word! When you get the feeling that whatever note succeeds the last is the only possible note that can rightly happen at that instant, in that context, then chances are you're listening to Beethoven. Melodies, fugues, rhythms—leave them to the Chaikovskys and Hindemiths and Ravels. Our boy has the real goods, the stuff from Heaven, the power to make you feel at the finish: Something is right in the world. There is something that checks throughout, that follows its own law consistently: something we can trust, that will never let us down.

(My title is from Joseph Addison's Song for St. Cecilia's Day; the piano illustrated is Beethoven's; the top piece of music is part of his manuscript for his sonata for piano and cello, Op. 69; the bottom is part of his manuscript for the supremely beautiful Op. 111, Beethoven's last piano sonata.)

David

"A profusion of pink roses bending ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring."

2007-12-14T23:40:00.000-05:00

WHEN daisies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,

I found these unbelievably beautiful photographs in the July 31, 2007 issue of the Daily Mail. From the article:

"It's incredible what you can find in an ordinary garden if you look closely enough.
Amateur photographer Brian Valentine specialises in making the everyday look exotic with the wonders of macro photography, using special lens to magnify his subjects."

By the way, the title of this post is from William Carlos Williams, and the verse quoted above, from Loves's Labours Lost, concludes with this warning:

The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!—O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

David

A drop of magic: Amazing pictures of flowers captured in a drop of rain | the Daily Mail

"The imperial ensign, which, full high advanced, Shone like a meteor, streaming to the wind"

2007-12-13T11:45:00.000-05:00

Today is the 200th anniversary of the first recorded meteorite fall in America, in Weston, Conn. Below is an article about this famous incident
from the December 13th edition of The Christian Science Monitor .

The top illustration is a rather fanciful depiction of the meteorite fall from a contemporaneous broadside; the bottom illustration is a photograph of the actual meteorite. If you are interested in buying pieces of meteorites, I found a website for you: Michael Blood Meteorites.

Meteors are rarely mentioned in poetry; my title is from Milton's Paradise Lost.

David

First recorded U.S. meteorite blazes back for bicentennial | csmonitor.com

from the December 13, 2007 edition

First recorded U.S. meteorite blazes back for bicentennial --
Connecticut towns celebrate a 'thunder stone' of significance

By Cathryn J. Prince, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
Weston, Conn.

Darkness clung to the early morning sky on Dec. 14, 1807, as Judge Nathan Wheeler started out on his morning constitutional along a country road near here. Suddenly the heavens exploded as a fireball raced across the horizon – whizzing sounds and three sonic booms cracked the quiet as rock rained down.

Judge Wheeler ran back to his home, and, for a brief moment, thought Armageddon had arrived.

At the same time, 30 miles down the road, Isaac Bronson, a former field surgeon in the American Revolution, dozed in a speeding stagecoach. Suddenly the cab rattled and shook, and the inside lit up like daylight. Nearby houses shuddered.

Dr. Bronson urged the terrified driver to continue, even though he, too, feared the end of the world was nigh. He'd seen horrible things on the battlefield, but nothing had prepared him for this.

Both learned men, Wheeler and Bronson were sought by journalists and scientists for testimony of the event. According to their accounts, the two were positively stumped about what had zoomed before their – and much of New England's – eyes.

Though scientific understanding of what happened would not jell for decades, the awesome event is considered a scientific turning point: It was the first recorded meteorite fall in America.

What became known as the "Weston Fall" was the last in "a triumvirate of well-documented and analyzed falls that conclusively swayed acceptance of their extraterrestrial origin," says Richard Binzel, chairman of planetary sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Preceding Weston were falls in Wold Cottage, England, in 1795 and L'Aigle, France, in 1803.)

The bicentennial is being commemorated here Dec. 14. At 6 a.m., history buffs, space enthusiasts, and interested locals will gather with the historical societies of Weston and nearby Easton (the actual ground zero spot) to bury a time capsule containing the history of scientific knowledge gained since the sonic boom shook the towns. In this way a forgotten piece of history is being reintroduced to this bucolic town. A panel of scientists from the likes of MIT and Yale University – who are still parsing the significance of the Fall – is planned. Local students are writing essays on the scientific strides since the Fall; and throughout the year schools are incorporating meteor-themed science, math, and language arts in the curriculum.

• • •

The way news of the Weston Fall ricocheted around the young nation offers telling – if quaint – hindsight, considering today's great scientific speculations about asteroids hitting the earth.

Upon hearing of the Weston Fall, President Thomas Jefferson was rumored to have said: "I would more easily believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven." Although no evidence exists that he uttered those words, "It typifies the thinking of the day," Dr. Binzel says. "It was the turn of the century and it was a turning point in understanding meteorites. Until then, meteorites were thought to be a weather phenomenon. Another name for them was actually thunder stones."

Indeed, most people scoffed at the notion that meteorites came from outer space – a belief not far removed from those held as long as three centuries earlier in Europe. Accounts from 1492 detail a meteorite falling on Eisenheim, Germany. Locals hauled it into a church where they kept it chained, lest it fly away.

"I can't stop thinking about Chicken Little," says Judy Albin, a trustee of the Weston Historical Society and co-chair of the meteorite committee. "The sky was falling; it must have been an absolutely amazing, incredible, frightening thing."

Certainly Mrs. Gardner of Wrentham, Mass. was concerned over the Weston Fall. Heeding Benjamin Franklin's advice, she rose before sun-up to log her daily weather observation. Peering out her window, she saw a fiery orb race through the sky. The sphere, which looked about half the size of the full moon to her, was traveling south between 40,000 and 50,000 m.p.h. before it entered the atmosphere. She wondered, according to her account in a local newspaper, "Where was the moon going to?"

The Weston Fall faded from local historic markers as well as the national conscience. But it has staying power in the scientific community, which continues to study the meteorite, a 26-pound chunk of which sits on a lighted pedestal at Yale's Peabody Museum. (Scattered magnetized shards of it remain in the backyards of local residents.)

"The grains, the seeds, of the solar system are inside meteorites," says Dr. Karl Turekian, a Peabody curator and professor of geology and geophysics at Yale. "Weston retains some of these seeds and so that's important. If we didn't have meteorites we wouldn't know what the Earth was made of or how old it is."

While the meteorite's importance wasn't fully understood in 1807, certainly many divined a significance in the event and the debris it left.

When farmer Elijah Seeley went to check on his cattle he found them in a neighboring pasture. The terrified bovines had jumped a wall. Seeley called his wife, and they began carting away pieces of the still warm meteorite. These black-crusted stones differed from the usual crop of rocks otherwise known as New England potatoes.

Upon reaching Weston that cold morning, Bronson sent word to Yale about the otherworldly event. The university dispatched Benjamin Silliman and James Kingsley to interview witnesses. When they interviewed Wheeler they decided that because he wasn't "influenced by fear or imagination" his word could be trusted.

But when they visited the home of William Prince, they were just plain disgusted. Clearly the Prince family (no relation to this reporter) didn't believe the early bird caught the worm. They barely noticed the explosions, according to Silliman's 1807 report published in The Connecticut Herald. "Not even a fresh hole made through the turf ... about twenty-five feet from the house, led to any conception of the cause, or induce any other enquiry than why a new post hole should have been dug where there was no use for it," according to Silliman's.

When the Princes finally checked the hole, they found a "noble specimen," wrote Silliman.

Aside from interviews, Silliman collected as many stones as possible to study. And a tug of war erupted between locals and the Yale professors for pieces of the meteorite.

But today Yale, Weston, and Easton are cooperating quite nicely – without the help of a planetary Dr. Phil to celebrate this little big bang.

Copyright © 2007 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

"Can such things be, And overcome us like a summer's cloud, Without our special wonder?"

2007-12-12T22:20:00.000-05:00

I found this beautiful photograph of an immense cumulonimbus on a fascinating website, The Cloud Appreciation Society. It was taken by © Karen Titchener in Lusk, Wyoming. (My title is from Anthony and Cleopatra.)

David

"Sweet compulsion doth in music lie"

2007-10-10T15:39:00.000-04:00

Today had almost slipped by me when my daily email from Composers Datebook arrived, and I read the following note:

"[Today we celebrate the birthday] of the great 19th century Italian opera composer, Giuseppe Verdi, whose mother had told him he was born on October 9th. Like a good son, Verdi always celebrated that day -- even when he later learned that a church registry proved the date was actually October 10th.

"Verdi was born in Parma in 1813 at a time when that part of Italy was under French rule. And so, Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was registered at birth as Joseph Fortunin François Verdi. His parent were dirt poor, but when Verdi died at the age of 87 in 1901, he was the most famous Italian of his time and his funeral was a state event involving thousands."

Today would therefore be a good time to send Verdi lovers to two long and passionate essays that Helen posted last year about her beloved Verdi, and that I reposted earlier this year: the first one, Musings on Verdi's Requiem, on February 8th; and the second one, Further thoughts on Verdi's Requiem, on February 18th.

David

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank."

2007-10-07T16:50:00.000-04:00

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.” -- The Merchant of Venice

I doubt that even Shakespeare could have imagined a more magically beautiful scene than this! It accompanied Aussiegirl's September 29, 2006 post, which I have pasted in below. Rarely have I seen a more evocative photograph -- so I decided it deserved one more showing,

David

Feeling blue? Maybe it's the moonlight!

By Aussiegirl

Moonlight becomes you -- or does it? Maybe the lyricist enjoyed seeing his beloved bathed in a blue haze? Her lipstick probably looked blue too. Read on about the mysterious properties of moonlight.

NASA - Strange Moonlight

Sept. 28, 2006: Not so long ago, before electric lights, farmers relied on moonlight to harvest autumn crops. With everything ripening at once, there was too much work to to do to stop at sundown. A bright full moon—a "Harvest Moon"—allowed work to continue into the night.

The moonlight was welcome, but as any farmer could tell you, it was strange stuff. How so? See for yourself. The Harvest Moon of 2006 rises on October 6th, and if you pay attention, you may notice a few puzzling things:

1. Moonlight steals color from whatever it touches. Regard a rose. In full moonlight, the flower is brightly lit and even casts a shadow, but the red is gone, replaced by shades of gray. In fact, the whole landscape is that way. It's a bit like seeing the world through an old black and white TV set.

"Moon gardens" turn this 1950s-quality of moonlight to advantage. White or silver flowers that bloom at night are both fragrant and vivid beneath a full moon. Favorites include Four-O'clocks, Moonflower Vines, Angel's Trumpets—but seldom red roses.

2. If you stare at the gray landscape long enough, it turns blue. The best place to see this effect, called the "blueshift" or "Purkinje shift" after the 19th century scientist Johannes Purkinje who first described it, is in the countryside far from artificial lights. As your eyes become maximally dark adapted, the blue appears. Film producers often put a blue filter over the lens when filming night scenes to create a more natural feel, and artists add blue to paintings of nightscapes for the same reason. Yet if you look up at the full moon, it is certainly not blue. (Note: Fine ash from volcanoes or forest fires can turn moons blue, but that's another story.)

3. Moonlight won't let you read. Open a book beneath the full moon. At first glance, the page seems bright enough. Yet when you try to make out the words, you can't. Moreover, if you stare too long at a word it might fade away. Moonlight not only blurs your vision but also makes a little blind spot. (Another note: As with all things human, there are exceptions. Some people have extra-sensitive cones or an extra helping of rods that do allow them to read in the brightest moonlight.)

This is all very strange. Moonlight, remember, is no more exotic than sunlight reflected from the dusty surface of the moon. The only difference is intensity: Moonlight is about 400,000 times fainter than direct sunlight.

So what do we make of it all? The answer lies in the eye of the beholder. The human retina is responsible.

The retina is like an organic digital camera with two kinds of pixels: rods and cones. Cones allow us to see colors (red roses) and fine details (words in a book), but they only work in bright light. After sunset, the rods take over.

Rods are marvelously sensitive (1000 times more so than cones) and are responsible for our night vision. According to some reports, rods can detect as little as a single photon of light! There's only one drawback: rods are colorblind. Roses at night thus appear gray.

If rods are so sensitive, why can't we use them to read by moonlight? The problem is, rods are almost completely absent from a central patch of retina called the fovea, which the brain uses for reading. The fovea is densely packed with cones, so we can read during the day. At night, however, the fovea becomes a blind spot. The remaining peripheral vision isn't sharp enough to make out individual letters and words.

Finally, we come to the blueshift. Consider this passage from a 2004 issue of the Journal of Vision:

"It should be noted that the perception of blue color or any color for that matter in a purely moonlit environment is surprising, considering that the light intensity is below the detection threshold for cone cells. Therefore if the cones are not being stimulated how do we perceive the blueness?" --"Modeling Blueshift in Moonlit Scenes using Rod-Cone Interaction" by Saad M. Khan and Sumanta N. Pattanaik, University of Central Florida.

The authors of the study went on to propose a bio-electrical explanation--that signals from rods can spill into adjacent blue-sensitive cones under conditions of full-moon illumination (see the diagram, right). This would create an illusion of blue. "Unfortunately," they point out, "direct physiological evidence to support or negate the hypothesis is not yet available."

So there are still some mysteries in the moonlight. Look for them on Oct. 6th under the Harvest Moon.

Caveat Lunar: This story makes some generalizations about what people can see at night but, as with all things human, there are exceptions: Some people can read by moonlight; others have no trouble seeing the red petals of a moonlit rose. These people have "moonvision," boosted by an extra-helping of rods or unusually sensitive cones. Are you one of them?

"The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations."

2007-10-06T00:06:00.000-04:00

Oscar Wilde seems to have been one of history's great conversationalists. In The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde, an anthology by Alvin Redman, we find a fascinating example of the rarefied heights that his conversation could reach. The following quotation is from page 22 of this book. (The title of this post is of course another fine example of Wilde's wit.)

David

"Few remain of those who heard his talk, but his many biographers are unanimous in acclaiming Wilde as the supreme conversationalist. The descriptions are many and varied, and Wilde himself, in the character of Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, has left a most apt description, by example, of his conversation. He describes Lord Wotton's talk in the following short extract:

'He played with the idea, grew wilful; tossed it into the air and tranformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and Philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of Pleasure wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of Life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts spread before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod the huge press at which the wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides. It was an extraordinary improvisation.'

"This was Wilde himself, buoyantly guiding the narrative through many bright bejewelled caverns until he reached the daylight of his story, and then smilingly turning back to find new adventures for his words."

"I am as vigilant as a cat to steal cream"

2007-10-05T23:29:00.000-04:00

Looking through a collection of clippings I had saved, I came across this article from 1994; it may have been from the New York Times. At any rate, the author, whose name is not given, is obviously a very keen observer of cats, and writes wittily as well as lovingly of these wonderful creatures. (My quote is from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, and belongs to that irrepressibly charming rogue, Falstaff.)

David

Strategy on four paws

The first thing you should know about strategic thinking in cats is this: Sometimes cats don't think strategically.

Sometimes cats just fall deeply asleep and have no idea of what is going on around them. Mongol cat-eating hordes could be laying waste the countryside; a cat would not be aware.

I have one cat who sleeps on her back with her paws up in the air. All she needs are little X's on her eyes and a lily between her paws, and she could become a cartoon dead cat. She is not, at these moments, thinking strategically.

But many times she is.

One concept familiar to strategically oriented cats is the lap as redoubt or watchtower. The cat will leap into the lap of the homeowner, apparently to have a nice snuggle and general all-around stroke event. That is her "cover story", as we say in cat-strategy circles.

Actually, she is waiting for her enemies. She is uniquely sensitive to all the entrances to the room. She has selected one particular doorway as the most likely direction from which her enemies might emerge. She stares fixedly at that doorway, ears alert, eyes wide.

Suppose the homeowner were to stroke the cat at that moment. Foolish, foolish homeowner. The homeowner, in this instance, is merely high ground--his job is to remain motionless and carry on with whatever sedentary activity he was pursuing before the cat arrived.

In this scenario, the homeowner is the peaceful villager going about his agrarian lifestyle. The cat is the samurai, protecting the village from marauders. And you don't pet a samurai. Get a clue!

Like all warriors, cats get restless in the absence of real enemies. A cat patrols its territory for weeks on end, ceaselessly on guard against all predators, also ceaselessly searching for living sources of food--your very dumb birds, your very slow mice--and yet finding nothing of interest.

A cat will hide in the shrubbery or position itself behind potted plants. A cat will select the top of a fence or a crockery cabinet and stare through slitted eyes at the landscape below. Ever alert to the slightest sound, the slightest change in air pressure, the slightest flicker of shadow, it will remain true to its sacred duty unless there's new food in the bowl or something.

And yet, nothing comes. A cat gets a little paranoid at times like that. All that watchfulness and no enemies--perhaps there is a larger plot to confound it. That's it, a conspiracy to devalue its function and make its mission in life meaningless. And the conspiracy is obviously being masterminded by--that thin strip of plastic!

Pounce! Slash! Disembowel! Dash about meaningfully! Hurl yourself on your back as though in the final stages of a death struggle! Leap up! Attack! Stand still! Wash!

It's a display designed to strike fear into the hearts of all who see it. It's the slaughter demo, a key ingredient in the strategic thinking of cats.

Sometimes a cat will be taking just a little nap and suddenly a suspicious sound will arouse it. It will gaze frantically about like a police constable arriving too late at an accident. "Now then, what's all this?" it will seem to say, in the bogus British accent it employs on these sad occasions.

Then it will assume control. It will patrol the perimeters of its territory. Sometimes it will get down on its belly and inch slowly through a particularly dicey bit of landscape. Once again, the craven enemy has fled; once again, peace has returned to the valley.

Ostentatiously, the cat goes to a prominent place, lies down gracefully, and arranges itself in a perfect circle.

The unwary might think that it was resting and unvigilant. But its eyes move and its tail lashes; it is setting a trap.

But soon it is time for a nap again.

Hamsters on Viagra take center stage at Ig Nobel awards

2007-10-05T23:04:00.000-04:00

In addition to overcoming jet lag, it looks like Viagra can also help a hamster with its golf swing.
David

Hamsters on Viagra take center stage at Ig Nobel awards

Scientists who discovered that Viagra helps hamsters overcome jet lag and a Japanese researcher who extracted vanilla favoring from cow dung won top honors Thursday at the 17th annual Ig Nobel Awards.

The Igs, as they are known, are chosen by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine to highlight scientific achievements that, in the words of editor Marc Abrahams, "first make people laugh and then make them think."

Among the winners were a British-US duo for a penetrating report on the effects of sword swallowing and a Spain-based team who answered the question of whether rats can discriminate between Japanese and Dutch spoken backwards.

"It was a surprise, it was the last thing we expected," said Nuria Sebastian-Galles, one of the Barcelona team of scientists, of the findings. The awards, she said, "bring out the freak inside most scientists."

Seven of the 10 winners this year paid their own way to accept the awards, which were handed out by six real Nobel Prize laureates.

Although pelted by paper airplanes, as per tradition, each winner expressed delight at receiving the small trophies affixed with a chicken and an egg.

Asked why chickens were chosen as this year's theme, master of ceremonies Abrahams looked astonished and said only: "How could you not?"

Some scientists have complained that the satirical awards unfairly tarnish legitimate research. Others say a sense of fun humanizes scientists.

"I don't take it as an insult at all," said Brian Witcome, a British radiologist who won the medicine prize for his sword-swallowing research.

"Humor adds to research," he said. His co-author, US scientist Dan Meyer even gulped down a short sword before thanking the whooping crowd with the hilt between his teeth.

Past winners who showed up included the creator of the pink plastic flamingo, the inventor of a hiding alarm clock and a researcher who reported the first known case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.

"To the best of my knowledge, this behavior has not been observed in chickens," Dutchman Kees Moeliker deadpanned.

Research highlighted by this year's awards ranged from a study of how sheets wrinkle and how the word "the" causes headaches for indexes, to why humans can't stop eating when presented with an apparently endless bowl of soup.

Some winners tried to explain their research but if they talked for more than 60 seconds they were interrupted by an eight-year-old girl who repeatedly intoned, "Please stop, I'm bored."

Nonetheless, Dutch scientist Johanna van Bronswijk managed to describe why she is doing a census of the mites, insects, spiders and other creatures with which humans share their bed. "I found that you never sleep alone," she said.

Diego Golombek, the Argentine who found the cure for hamster jet lag, thanked his assistants "for going to the store to get the Viagra for us."

Also honored was a Taiwanese man who patented a device to net bank robbers, but who could not attend the ceremony because he has apparently vanished.

"Someone in Taiwan suggested the man is trapped inside his machine and is there to this day," Abrahams said.

The highly-coveted peace prize was given to a US Air Force laboratory for researching what the committee dubbed the "gay bomb" -- a chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.

No one showed up to collect the award but a disco ball dropped over the stage and Abrahams said the bomb would be demonstrated before an official censor of the evening's activities intervened.

Japanese researcher Mayu Yamamoto, who received the chemistry Ig for her work extracting vanilla flavor from cow dung, got an additional honor: a local ice cream shop created a new flavor, the "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist," in her honor.

Yamamoto said she first learned of her award by email and thought it was a joke but decided to go to the ceremony because "I want everyone to know about my research."

As if further levity were needed, the ceremony was punctuated with goofy "Moments of Science" and a contest to win a date with a Nobel laureate billed with the slogan: "He's shapely, he's sassy and he's smarter than you."

© 2007 AFP

Scientist invents computer pillow to stop snoring

2007-10-04T18:17:00.000-04:00

Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past—they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power—
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not—what they will,
And shake us with the vision that’s gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows—Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow?—What are they?
Creations of the mind?—The mind can make
Substances, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.

This beautiful passage is from the beginning of Byron's long poem, The Dream. It's not clear just how we might find out what this peaceful cat is dreaming about, but I think it is clear that cats, able to sleep just about anywhere, will never have need of such a pillow.

David

October 03, 2007

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German scientist has come up with a solution for snoring -- a computerized pillow that shifts the head's sleeping position until the noise stops.

Daryoush Bazargani, professor of computer science at the University of Rostock and the pillow's inventor, was displaying a prototype of his pillow at a health conference in Germany on Wednesday.

"The pillow is attached to a computer, which is the size of a book, rests on a bedside table, and analyses snoring noises," Bazargani told Reuters.

"The computer then reduces or enlarges air compartments within the pillow to facilitate nasal airflow to minimize snoring as the user shifts during sleep," he said.

The ergonomic pillow can also be used for neck massages.

Bazargani said several U.S. firms were interested in manufacturing the pillow.

"I invented it because I snore," he said. "I tried all sorts of products, but nothing worked. I hope people who use it will sleep more peacefully."

"A cat may looke on a King"

2007-10-02T23:30:00.001-04:00

I first found this striking photograph of what appears to be a staring contest between a cat and a goldfish -- then I decided to post Gray's fine poem to accompany it.

David

Thomas Gray (1716-1771)

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes

'Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dy'd
The azure flow'rs that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclin'd,
Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declar'd;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw: and purr'd applause.

Still had she gaz'd; but 'midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The Genii of the stream;
Their scaly armour's Tyrian hue
Thro' richest purple to the view
Betray'd a golden gleam.

The hapless Nymph with wonder saw:
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretch'd in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat's averse to fish?

Presumptuous Maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch'd, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between.
(Malignant Fate sat by, and smil'd)
The slipp'ry verge her feet beguil'd,
She tumbled headlong in.

Eight times emerging from the flood
She mew'd to ev'ry wat'ry god,
Some speedy aid to send.
No Dolphin came, no Nereid stirr'd;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard.
A Fav'rite has no friend!

From hence, ye Beauties, undeceiv'd,
Know, one false step is ne'er retriev'd,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wand'ring eyes
And heedless hearts is lawful prize,
Nor all, that glisters, gold.

The Triune God of Christianity

2007-10-02T18:26:00.000-04:00

This is a long essay that Helen wrote last November as an email to an internet friend.

David

[By Aussiegirl]

There is an aspect of Buddhism and Hinduism that speaks to
the mystical truths and certainly their techniques of meditation are
quite sophisticated. But I think that true universal Christianity comes
closest to expressing the ideal relationship of man to God. However,
there are charlatans in Christianity, and the various sects get
overinvolved in their dogmatic arguments with one another. If you get
back to the very basic message that Christ brought -- that the kingdom
of God is within you -- and that you are one with the Father -- in other
words -- you and God are made of the same stuff -- if you recognize that
indwelling God spirit and commune with it -- if you come to an awareness of
love for your fellow man as a reflection of God's love for his creation,
you understand that it is only through the love of one person to another
that the glory of the Creator and his love can be expressed. Then the
cycle is complete. In addition, I've learned a great deal from the true
Jewish Kaballah -- this is my distillation of what I've read. In the
beginning there was a Prime Creative Force in the universe -- we cannot
imagine what it was because we are too limited in our minds -- this
great creative energy -- a great Wisdom -- a great Thought -- for some
reason decided to make itself manifest in a physical universe -- hence
the Big Bang. In doing so he made Himself manifest in the world through
his creation -- he does not stand outside it -- he is immanent
throughout what we see (which is in reality an illusion -- there the
Hindus and Buddhists have it right -- quantum physics points to that
very idea when we realize that there is a curious necessity for an
observer to collapse the wave function into the quantum function that we
can then measure). As such, you and I, and everyone in the world -- and
everything in the world are not just made of stardust, but we are like
shards of the shattered glass of God's creation. And in this creation
is life -- and man -- who is possessed of the same God spirit as the
creator -- and who has the power to rise above his physical being and to
recognize his spiritual origins, recognize that he was once part of a
great whole -- a great unity. That is why we feel an existential
loneliness, I believe, even in the midst of happy company. We know deep
down that we have been cleaved off some great Unity -- and when we have
those transcendant moments when our soul and our spirit merges with all
creation and we feel "at one" -- then that is one of the greatest
religious experiences we can have. We recognize our unity with all
creation, and that is why we cannot kill, nor hate nor destroy --
because it would be like destroying your own house, or your own family.
Of course on a day to day level we cannot live this way, but we have
this realization always at the core of our being. For years I thought
little of the "Father, Son and Holy Ghost" aspect of Christianity -- I
said the words and crossed myself in church and said my prayers.
Many people seek Islam because they find the idea of a unitary God who
is like a stern master to be more understandable than a Triune God.
Now, if the Church fathers were interested in making a religion that
would appeal to all Gentiles (Christ came to bring the true spirit of the teaching of the Jewish God to all mankind), they would not have invented such a difficult concept as the Triune God.

Well, this is my conception -- purely my own but based on much reading
of Orthodox theology and quantum physics (it's amazing to me how
congruent science and religion truly are). God the Father -- is the
Great Wisdom that existed prior to the Big Bang -- and expressed himself
in the great explosion of creation -- but that is not enough -- a God
that creates a plaything and then sits outside his creation is nothing
more than a little despot who builds an ant farm and watches the little
ants scurrying about. No -- this God IS his creation. And for some
reason God saw fit to create life -- and man -- perhaps because in our
primitive understanding -- how else could he appreciate his creation
without also taking part in it in a physical way. And in order to fully
comprehend that difficult lot of man and his suffering here on earth,
God became a man -- Jesus Christ -- and suffered all the humiliation,
injustice, pain and death that men suffer -- and taking it upon himself
he assured man that this life was not the end -- that this was but one
manifestation of his spirit, but that the eternal dance of the spirit
has gone on from before time -- and will continue until the end of time
- through eternity. We are like bubbles on a sea that bubble up, and
disappear -- but the essential element returns to the water it came
from. And so we have God as The Son -- God has experienced physical
life through his son and understood the grief and loneliness and pain of
existence. Who could have been more abandoned than Christ in Gethsemane
and on the Cross? Even his disciples abandoned him. Yet something
happened to convince these cowardly men to suddenly be filled with
spirit and to preach the gospel even upon pain of torturous death. This
must give us pause. And then we have "The Holy Ghost" -- or the Holy
Spirit -- and this is the spirit of God that is always present in the
universe, that we can tap into at any time, that is working in us even
when we are not aware of it. Well, these are my current beliefs. I
cringe at the Christians who blithely quote scripture without a true
understanding of what the scripture says. I don't like any sects that
narrow the view of God that is so all-encompassing and possesses such
surpassing beauty and harmony. But we are on Earth, where nothing is
perfect, certainly not people and certainly not institutions. So I am
left with my own deep beliefs that encompass many ideas.

September musing

2007-09-19T20:18:00.000-04:00

It was on this day, September 19, in 2004 that Helen -- Aussiegirl -- began her blog. Over the next 27 months she managed to add nearly 2200 posts. It's been half a year since anything new has been added, and I thought it only appropriate to start the fourth year by posting a meditative essay that she wrote a little over a year ago but never published.

The beautiful illustration, of the month of September, is from an old edition of Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar, his first major poetic work, published in 1579.

David

By Aussiegirl

As always, September has brought a sudden end to summer. It always seems to happen that way here in Washington. August hung on for what seemed an eternity with its hazy heat and late-summer cricket-serenaded doldrums, and then September came along and rang the curtain down with cool rains and cooler temperatures. There is always something to the change of seasons which brings thoughts of the death of what has been and the birth of what is yet to come. Perhaps this is why those of us who live in temperate climes tend to a more philosophical frame of mind. And it makes us aware of the passage of time, that flow that we are all on that carries us along the wave of existence, yet weaving an illusion of permanence and reality. In truth, the present moment is but an illusion, a knife-edge of an infinitesimal point between the past and the present - the moment that has just passed and the one that has yet to transpire. It is only our consciousness that bridges this divide and creates the bubble of awareness that creates a sense of reality. Perhaps the Eastern philosophies are correct when they tell us that all is illusion, and current physics also leads us to contemplate such mysteries. This, however, is a subject for another time. I find that I am in a melancholy mood as the seasons change inevitably, as I see the death of one season and the onset of another. And these thoughts bring me to contemplate the state of our civilization, and I can't help but feel that I am witnessing the twilight, or the autumn, of our once glorious age. I find that I am returning to and reveling in the glories of our Western Civilization, and cherishing them as you would something which you know may soon vanish. I'm only glad I won't be here to see it, but there are so many young ones who will inherit a horrible future, and the present political class has abandoned all pretense at leading and courage in deference to political power and money. Complete and utter corruption rules the day. Was it ever any different? I wonder if we have become too civilized? Too peaceful? Too rational and intellectual, while at the same time emotionally committed to retreat and pacification and appeasement. We are addicted to postponing the unpleasant medicine for our short-term pleasure and comfort. Sometimes I think that there are certain racial tribes or types in this world that have by their history and genetic selection become adapted to a more warlike makeup. I think that those in the West have over the centuries of civilization bred aggression out of their genes. The genes that contributed to success in our Western culture were genes that favored intellectual achievement and high intelligence, a cooperative nature to enable someone to work in and participate in a complex industrial and technological culture. We may simply have evolved into two distinct genetic types -- and when it comes to war -- the aggressive and warlike is likely to win. But perhaps there's still time for Western man to rediscover his inner savage. After all, homo sapiens was able to kill off the far stronger Neanderthals.

Happy birthday, Fryderyk, may your music live forever!

2007-03-01T13:32:00.000-05:00

Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin (in French, Frederic Francois Chopin) was born on this day in 1810 -- he was to die after only 39 short years on October 17, 1849. Helen has written elsewhere about her beloved musical pantheon that included, in addition to Chopin, only Beethoven and Verdi. Here I have gathered four interesting and perceptive observations about Chopin.
[Concerning the illustrations: The top one is the famous portrait painted in 1838 by Chopin's friend, Eugene Delacroix -- the bottom one is the only known photograph of Chopin (commonly mistaken for a daguerreotype), believed to have been taken by Louis-Auguste Bisson in 1849.]

David

A distinguished English amateur pianist described Chopin at a salon:
Imagine a delicate man of extreme refinement of mien and manner, sitting at the piano and playing with no sway of the body and scarcely any movement of the arms, depending entirely upon his narrow feminine hand and slender fingers. The wide arpeggios in the left hand, maintained in a continuous stream of tone by the strict legato and fine and constant use of the damper pedal, formed a harmonious substructure for a wonderfully poetic cantabile. His delicate pianissimo, the ever-changing modifications of tone and time (tempo rubato) were of indescribable effect. Even in energetic passages he scarcely ever exceeded an ordinary mezzoforte.

One of his students, Friederike Muller, wrote the following in her diary about Chopin's playing style: His playing was always noble and beautiful; his tones sang, whether in full forte or softest piano. He took infinite pains to teach his pupils this legato, cantabile style of playing. His most severe criticism was "He—or she—does not know how to join two notes together." He also demanded the strictest adherence to rhythm. He hated all lingering and dragging, misplaced rubatos, as well as exaggerated ritardandos ... and it is precisely in this respect that people make such terrible errors in playing his works.

Artur Rubenstein said of Chopin: Chopin was a genius of universal appeal. His music conquers the most diverse audiences. When the first notes of Chopin sound through the concert hall there is a happy sigh of recognition. All over the world men and women know his music. They love it. They are moved by it. Yet it is not "Romantic music" in the Byronic sense. It does not tell stories or paint pictures. It is expressive and personal, but still a pure art. Even in this abstract atomic age, where emotion is not fashionable, Chopin endures. His music is the universal language of human communication. When I play Chopin I know I speak directly to the hearts of people!

Ernest Hutcheson, in his The Literature of the Piano, has this to say: Chopin's greatest distinction, the quality in which he outpointed all others, lay undoubtedly in the astonishing originality and appropriateness of his writing for the piano. He divined the soul of the instrument, and his every phrase, technical pattern, and ornament sounds inevitably proper to the chosen medium. ... The utter originality of Chopin's genius has never been questioned. He had no predecessor and no successor. ... Chopin came and departed like a comet from remote space.

Aussiegirl reviews Kobzar's Children

2007-02-18T18:01:00.000-05:00

This is a review that Helen wrote for Amazon.com last July. It is a well-writen and impassioned review, and I think it deserves to be reprinted on her blog so a greater number of people can read it.

David

Kobzar's Children: A Century of Untold Stories by Ukrainians
by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
Edition: Paperback
Price: $11.01

A superb and gripping book about the Ukrainian immigrant experience, July 10, 2006 Reviewer: Aussiegirl

In the introduction to this collection of short historical fiction, memoirs, and poems touching upon a century of the history of Ukrainian immigrant experience, Marsha Skrypuch writes the following:

"When you don't write your own stories, others will write them for you."

And in publishing this marvelous collection of stories she begins the process of putting the record straight. Like Marsha, I too grew up with the realization that I belonged essentially to an invisible and completely unknown ethnic group -- Ukrainians, whom no one seemed to have ever heard of, and if they had, they said things like -- "That's the same as Russian, isn't it?"

As Marsha explains in the foreword, the kobzars were Ukraine's wandering blind minstrels, who in the ancient tradition of Homer memorized long epic historical poems that spoke of the great events of Ukrainian history, and in doing so kept a population that was largely illiterate in touch with their great heritage.

During Stalin's times, in addition to their traditional role they kept people apprised of the repressions and persecutions and famine, and so they came to the notice of Josef Stalin, who called for a national conference of kobzars. Hundreds showed up, and all were shot. There are a few kobzars who survived to tell the tale, and a very few who carry on the tradition today.

Because Marsha does not speak Ukrainian, she did not have access to the emigre literature that spoke of the immigrant experience, and of experiences in Ukraine. But Ukrainians are inveterate story tellers, and as fortune would have it, the writers of these tales are either witnesses themselves to the events they describe, or are children of parents who told vivid tales of their own experiences, and as such the works have a compelling and hypnotic interest.

I couldn't put the book down. I frankly had expected a charming work aimed at children, but how mistaken I was. Although this book is suitable for all ages capable of reading at this level, it is of no less interest to the adult reader as to the young reader. It never talks down to its audience. In the same way that I remember my own parents relating the many stories of our family, no punches are pulled. Harsh reality and horror and danger take their place alongside tales of humor, childhood pranks, and misunderstandings.

Beginning in the early part of the century, the stories span everything from a memoir of homesteading in the early 1900's in the wilds of western Canada, to a first-hand horrifying account of a young child's suffering and survival during the Stalin-created Ukrainian famine genocide of 1933, in which at least seven million Ukrainians perished. Tales of helping out in a family grocery store take their place alongside a psychologically insightful meditation on the interior life of an elderly Ukrainian woman living in her memories while confined to a nursing home. One of the stories relates the shocking history of how Ukrainians were unjustly interned in hard labor camps by the Canadian government during WWI, and subjected to treatment that is sadly reminiscent of Soviet gulags. This is a chapter of immigrant history I knew absolutely nothing about. There's a delightful tale about the tragicomedy of attempts to move the grave of one family member from one cemetery to another, followed by a grim personal memoir of surviving Auschwitz. The stories span a century of experience, beginning in the early 1900's and ending with a charming Christmas time tale that takes place during the exciting days of the Orange Revolution.

Ukrainians do not talk down to their children. We do not protect them from the harsh realities of history and of repression. Perhaps this is why Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent are generally highly sensitive to any encroachments upon their freedoms and dangers gathering in the world. We have experienced, if not first-hand, then through the tales of our parents, the kinds of things that can happen if people forget their history.

As such, Marsha Skrypuch has done a great service by publishing this book. Not only has she introduced the literature and history of Ukraine to immigrants who may no longer be in touch with the language of their ancestors, but she also exposes the stories of these people to a wider American and Canadian audience.

This book must and will, by its very nature, find a wide audience. It is gripping, well-written, well-balanced, and paced with a mixture of lighter and darker topics, and in the end is a testament to the basic humanity that binds us all into one common human experience.

History comes alive when we read about the lives of individuals. What once existed only as a page in a history book or a phrase with a date attached, suddenly becomes a gripping personal drama that anyone can identify with.

Buy this book, read it. You don't have to be Ukrainian to thoroughly enjoy it and to profit by it. We are all enriched by enlarging our knowledge of history and the very human stories that make up that history.

The kobzars indeed live, and this book carries on that great Ukrainian tradition. Every country needs its kobzars.

Further thoughts on Verdi's Requiem

2007-02-18T10:32:00.000-05:00

In April 2003 Helen sent this email to her internet friend veritas about the Requiem that she loved so much. Half of the email are quotes from George Martin's book, but the quotes only strengthen her own ideas about this magnificent work. Half a year later she attended a performance at Kennedy Center, and her impressions and thoughts about that performance I have already posted below. By the way, this portrait of her beloved Verdi was her favorite -- in it she saw virility yet sensitivity, a flair and appetite for life, great intelligence -- in Matthew Arnold's words, Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole -- everything that she felt in his music.

David

veritas -- I mentioned Verdi's Requiem the other day --- indulge me while I
ramble -- as promised -- my little exigesis on the Verdi Requiem -- a
Requiem for the living -- not the dead -- as Verdi was an agnostic --
and unafraid.

Unlike Berlioz, Cherubini and Mozart, all of whom used the traditional
text of the Requiem Mass based on a medieval poem written by Thomas of
Celano containing a terrifying vision of the judgement day (Dies Irae)
which was calculated to terrify the listener into virtue, Verdi added
an additional text, the "Libera Me", which although not an integral
part
of the mass, could follow it on solemn occasions and was occasionally
set to music: "Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna, in die illa
tremenda..." "Free me, oh Lord, from eternal death, on that terrifying day."

This has the effect of changing the emotional impact of the Requiem in
typical Verdian fashion. First -- he hammers the first line of the
"Dies Irae" portion over and over giving the whole section an undertone
of terror -- rather than the way Mozart did it which is to recite the
whole text in order. Then -- he ends the whole Requiem on a note of
uncertainty and supplication as first the soprano pleads urgently
"Libera me Domine, de morte, in die illa tremenda..." Free me, oh Lord,
from death, on that terrible day..." and then --- the chorus joins in
in an almost frightened whisper ---- "Libera me, libera me, libera me...."

From George Martin's Verdi: His Music, Life and Times:

"He [Verdi] succeeded, not only by the excellence of his music, but
also
by stirring in the audience the ancient feelings and fears of primitive
man peering nervously into the night, trying to find his God and
establish some sort of relationship with him. By the end of his
Requiem
Verdi has his singers and audience praying for peace and light, not for
the dead, but for themselves, the living. .... In both Berlioz and
Mozart the musical climax of the poem comes on "Rex Tremendae
Majestatis", making the poem primarily one in praise of God. Verdi, on
the other hand, emphasized the Salva Me which, with the constantly
recurring Dies Irae, make the poem of an individual's terror on the day
of judgment. It is as though an angry God had come down in the
Holocaust and, standing on the altar, was pointing a fiery finger at
"you, you, and you: damned"; while of the people some pressed forward,
others knelt where they were, and all called out to Jesus: "Salva Me!"

".... Verdi's final section plunges the singers and audience back into
the personal drama as though someone had said the wrong thing and God
had suddenly reappeared. The soprano is the soloist, asking to be
freed
from eternal death (Libera Me), and at the mention of judgment by fire,
the Dies Irae begins to build up in the orchestra. Suddenly it bursts
out in all its fury, terrifying and awful, and the broken suppliants
almost sob their request for peace and light for the dead. But then,
as
in the Dies Irae section, their thoughts turn to themselves: Libera Me,
Libera Me. .... Libera Me, they sing, calling on the magic of music
and
words to save them from the terror of the unknown. But magic, even in
a
group, does not answer an individual's fears. One by one they fall
silent, drop their neighbor's hand and peer out into the night, alone.
"Libera me", the soprano pleads alone, "Free me, Lord, from eternal
death on that awful day." "Free me", each one breathes. "Free me".
.... The audience, whether it intellectually wants to or not, becomes
emotionally involved in the sheer rush of sound in the final fugue and,
like the chorus and soloists, asks for some sort of emotional release.
This Verdi, also quite deliberately, refuses to give it. There is no
sudden burst into a sunny amen, no vision of a kind God or promise of
intersession; there is only dwindling power and continued uncertainly.
Such, said Verdi, is man's lot in life."

"No church gives such an answer; they all offer some happy solution to
the quest for assurance that life and life after death have certainty
and meaning. In this respect Verdi's Requiem is not a religious work
and the Roman Church is quite right to ban it. In not offering a clear
solution Verdi reflected the increasing uncertainty of the end of the
nineteenth century when Darwin and the new science were shaking
traditional beliefs. And Verdi, who anyway had never held them, was
far
too honest an artist to fake an ending that he did not himself feel.
.... But even if the Requiem is agnostic in that it does not offer a
Catholic, Lutheran or Hindu resolution to the fears it raises, it is
religious in the sense that it recognizes the fears and needs of man
and
suggests that there is some sort of Creator or Being with whom man
ought
to develop a relationship."

Well -- that's about it --- I hope you enjoyed your trip through Verdi
land at least as much as I enjoyed musing on it. Like Beethoven, a
world unto himself, in which one can lose one's self -- and find the
heart of humanity, God and truth.

All the best -- Helen

Musings on Verdi's Requiem

2007-02-08T17:10:00.000-05:00

This is another very long and very beautiful email that Helen wrote to veritas, her internet friend, on October 20, 2003, soon after -- perhaps the same evening -- we had returned from hearing a performance of Verdi's immortal Requiem at the Kennedy Center. Her heart was full of the beauty we had just experienced, and as always, she just had to get it down in words before it had vanished.

Towards the end of the email her thoughts naturally turn to the mystery of life -- and to music: how beautiful and sad that everything beautiful in life passes ---like music -- only
exists in time --- we cannot freeze it --- we cannot hold it --- we cannot admire it when we like --- only in the passage of time does it exist -- like us ---- so ---the ultimate mystery -- and perhaps --- this is why music moves us so deeply.

She was delighted when I found this quotation from The Leaden Echo, a poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins, in which he poses the same question: How to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away? -- and then gives his answer, in the companion poem The Golden Echo, that beauty comes from God, and returns to God. This seemed to match her own feelings.

David

Hi veritas --- well --- we had a wonderful time -- beautiful weather --
beautiful drive into Washington through the foliage of Rock Creek
Parkway -- almost all the way from our house down directly to the
Kennedy Center - makes a beautiful drive -- beautiful winding creek,
heavy forests on either side with a strip of bike/hike trail and picnic
areas -- people jogging, biking, picnicking -- lovers strolling and
taking pictures of one another -- leaves drifting softly down and
flying
over the pavement everywhere -- soft rich colors -- blue sky -- perfect
October day in Washington - and then the Ken Cen -- nice architecture
--
sort of neo-Greco-classical -- you'd know the correct phrase -- echoing
the rest of the monuments nearby -- the Washington monument looming in
the distance - the famous/infamous Watergate Hotel next door -- all
those expensive shchmancy-fancy stores -- Christian Dior, etc. -- a
little taste of how the other half lives --- but all lovely. We've
been
there before of course -- but not for about a year.

Inside -- red carpets, crystal chandeliers, mirrored walls and
enormous ceilings -- a fitting place for a center for the performing
arts - housing the Opera House, Concert Hall and the Eisenhower Theater
-- lovely. The place was sold out --- I love to people watch -- all
sorts -- young, old, frumpy and dowdy and casually dressed (why don't
people make an effort?) some sweet old things in wheelchairs being
pushed up the ramp and I thought - you dear, dear sweet ones -- once so
young -- your hearts so full -- and now -- is this what you want to
hear
-- the Requiem -- is it not a bit too close to home? -- but then I
thought -- no it is always the right time for beauty and at that age --
perhaps a Requiem is perfect -- as a little reminder of where they are
headed perhaps. Sweet and sad thought.

The house was sold out -- the seats were divine --- the music --
heavenly --- 2 choruses combined in strength -- must have been 200
voices -- some even in the little balconies surrounding the stage ---
offstage trumpets -- glorious -- wonderful -- and at the end -- the
quiet libera me, libera me, libera me ---- it ended --- hushed silence
from the audience -- the conductor slowly lowered his arms and bowed
his
head almost as if in prayer --- and still the audience was so
spell-bound that no one wanted to spoil the effect or intrude on the
spell -- until finally someone began to applaud -- and then -- a
standing ovation -- people were cheering!!! shouting!!! --- it was
like a football game -- but these people were cheering beauty and
transcendence -- how happy that made me.

(I wrote the following impressions down shortly after I got home --
sorry for being prolix -- just thought I'd include them)

Heaven, I'm in heaven ---------or -- to be more exact I was -- I have
drifted a little lower now that it is over but still I can hear the
melodies -- the heartache - the supplication -- the truth --- the drama
---- of mankind -- of his lot --- of his fate -- cast down here on
earth
-- not understanding why or where -- but still --- with moments like
this -- and with geniuses like this that have been bestowed on us --
can
we doubt that God exists? That something or someone created us --- with
these feelings, these emotions, this intellect, this questing feeling,
and the ultimate knowledge --- the knowledge of death -- which animals
sense but do not know or fear the way we do --- why was this given to
us???

Verdi has taken me on a journey -- even though I know this piece by
heart -- have heard it many times -- hearing it in that great hall --
live -- with real people pouring their hearts and talents and energies
into it -- I understood it and experienced it fully for the first time
--- Verdi -- that unbelievable colossus --- how could he have been
human
to create such music -- but Verdi --- who spent his life in the theater
-- giving us drama -- the drama of people living and loving and killing
and dying --- he understood the human heart like no other ---- gave us
his final drama in the Requiem --- and gave us the truth --- a glimpse
of something immortal we should all pursue -- that we are driven to
pursue -- but --- ultimately --- he is right -- Verdi the agnostic ---
laid it out --- ultimately we cannot know -- ultimately it is all a
question ---- and he was so honest ---- there it is in all its majesty
and pathos and tragedy and joy -- the human drama -- La Divina Comedia
---- mankind --- gifted or cursed with these sensibilities, faced with
the knowledge of his own extinction -- yet has inklings and strivings
higher.

In the music I experienced the highs and the lows of human existence
---
the doubt, the fear, the supplication, the joy, the ecstasy, the wrath
of God and possible judgement -- the calls of the trumpets heralding
the
judgment day --- the casting out from heaven -- and then -- the
pleading, the fear, the childish appeal -- please -- save me -- don't
leave me here alone --- remember me --- free me -- free me ---- yes --
this is the ultimate human drama and Verdi saved it for his last -- and
he truly understood it and gave it to us straight -- we can never be
sure --- and so it all ends on an uncertain whisper --- no amen -- no
glorious radiant modulation into major key as the sun breaks out -- no
-- uncertainty and doubt - after all the tumult and pleading and drama
--- a whisper -- libera me -- libera me -- libera me.

If men like this existed --- if talent like this existed -- if music
like this exists -- there must be a God --- else where does all this
magnificence point? What is its purpose ---- it has nothing to do with
procreating the species -- or survival of the fittest --- no ---
because
music like this exists I KNOW there is a God and something divine and
mysterious that we can only dimly apprehend -- but I know it -- and
that
is why I cannot live without it. It is not in the churches with the
silly robes and the pointy hats and the sermons and the piece of bread
and wine in the mouth or even in the cloying insufferable quoting of
the
bible in your face -- flung --- here --- take this and this --- you are
nothing because I read the bible and quote it --- but do these people
look into the heart of another human being -- truly look? that is
where the answer lies --- no --- it is there --- in humanity's quest
for
higher things and beauty.

So --- I soared on angel's wings -- on Verdi's mighty talent -- and the
talents of all those people who played and sang so magnificently -- the
soprano -- my God -- 5 feet wide --- but what a voice!! --- soaring,
ringing tones -- with supple, pliant lines and beautiful control --
such
feeling -- just exactly the way I would hope it would be sung --
excellent mezzo-soprano -- lovely bass --- with a flexible lyrical
sound
-- not too strident -- and a heavenly tenor -- a last-minute substitute
but wonderful -- lyrical clear tones -- a singer of lieder -- which
suits this piece more than a heavier tenor like Domingo -- the
Ingemisco
is one of the loveliest and most tender melodies -- and he sang it
divinely -- hitting the high C effortlessly and brilliantly. The
soprano
ends the whole piece along with the chorus and orchestra -- singing a
reprise and fullfilment of the beautiful theme adumbrated in the
opening
-- Requiem -- rising each time to a high note -- and finally to the
highest -- gliding up effortlessly to heaven.

Well -- this is me -- now -- tonight --- but such a perfect performance
will not soon be forgotten -- and such a lovely day -- how beautiful
and
sad that everything beautiful in life passes --- like music -- only
exists in time --- we cannot freeze it --- we cannot hold it --- we
cannot admire it when we like --- only in the passage of time does it
exist -- like us ---- so --- the ultimate mystery -- and perhaps ---
this is why music moves us so deeply.

Well, veritas ----- this has been long --- but you know how I love this
stuff -- and Verdi --- and Beethoven and Chopin --- they point the way
because they saw inklings of something higher --- and that's where I
look for inspiration -- to the great artists through history -- not the
forgotten priests with their intrigues and their politics and their
indulgences --- who remembers them now ---- we remember beauty --- we
remember art --- we remember Christ ----- but all who claim to tell us
how to live our lives are just as we are --- and just as mystified if
they would but look into their hearts.

Have I gone on too long??? I usually do --- but you are a good friend
and will not mind ---- my love to you all --- truly --- let me
know how you are --- Helen

Tea and milk -- nonmiscible

2007-02-08T13:25:00.000-05:00

It's not that they can't be mixed, but, according to the following article, they shouldn't be. Aussiegirl -- Helen -- was always concerned about the health of her readers -- their political health, their spiritual health, and of course their physical health. She never saw this report, but I think she would have wanted me to post it.
Helen, being from Australia, loved her tea, but lately she had become enamoured of mocha java -- we bought the beans at our local Safeway and ground them in our little handy-dandy Braun grinder. After a few minutes the delectable fragrance of coffee would waft its way in to her. She said that the fragrance seemed to arouse her little grey cells, at which point another Aussiegirl post was on its way.

David

cbs4denver.com - Researchers Find Milk Blocks Antioxidants In Tea

Researchers Find Milk Blocks Antioxidants In Tea
Dr. Dave Hnida
Reporting

(CBS4) DENVER Drinking tea improves heart health but something as tiny as a splash of milk can cancel the benefits.

Doctors have known for a long time that tea, whether it be green, black, orange or pekoe, contains substances that protect the heart.

"I grew up adding milk to my tea," said CBS4's Dr. Dave Hnida. "My mom and grandmother did it so I did it. They are English and that's what this study is all about."

Researchers were trying to figure out why England has more heart disease than Germany, France, or Asia where nearly everyone drinks tea without milk.

In England, they typically add milk.

Researchers tested the blood vessels of people who drank tea with milk and without milk and there was a huge difference in how the blood vessels of the body reacted.

Tea contains antioxidants called catechins and polyphenols which cause the blood vessels of the body to relax. However, researchers found that a milk protein, called casein, blocks the effects of the antioxidants.

So they experimented on humans who drank tea with and without milk. The milk drinkers did in fact have blood vessels that stayed stiff and rigid. They measured it with ultrasounds.

The study only included 16 people but it was 16 out of 16 that lost the protection.

"That makes you wonder if milk also may block other heart protective effects and cancer fighting substances normally found in tea," said CBS4's Dr. Dave Hnida.

Coffee also has catechins and polyphenols that are found in tea.

© MMVII CBS Television Stations, Inc.

Aussiegirl's thoughts on music -- especially on her beloved Beethoven

2007-02-02T14:00:00.000-05:00

In going through the emails that Helen had saved, I came across this exchange of emails from August 2002 with veritas, an internet friend. [The spacing is irregular, but that's because the emails came from her WebTV archive, and I didn't reformat them.] I don't know what the occasion was, probably something on Lucianne.com that sparked their interest, but it gave rise to some very interesting ideas and thoughts, e.g. Helen's very original thoughts on Beethoven's use of the trill. Helen loved music, loved it passionately -- indeed, she loved life passionately -- especially the music of the members of her personal musical pantheon: Beethoven, Chopin, Verdi -- just those three, no others. But Helen was also an intensely spiritual person, and whatever she wrote or thought about, thoughts of life and death, of God and the afterlife, are never far from her mind -- as in these emails.

Helen wrote a lot about politics and other related topics, but I think that to really understand her and how essential things of the spirit were to her, you have to read what she wrote and thought about music, and about the Divinity that she thought only music can let us glimpse. You will find quite a few posts about music that she did publish in her blog, but I've found a few more things that she wrote and put into emails. I don't think she will mind my publishing them.

David

Thoughts on Beethoven

Monday, August 19, 2002

I am an "amateur" in the true Latin meaning of the phrase -- i.e.
"lover" of music. Also amateur pianist --- enough to make me truly
humble and amazed at the technical prowess, talent and sheer openness to
a higher power that a true interpretive genius possesses.
But back to my beloved Beethoven ---- where to begin???
Firstly --- I have always found Beethoven to be very funny!!! Funny in
the sudden explosive ha-ha way, as he catches you off guard and
surprises you with joy and naughtiness at the most unexpected times. I
once told my husband this and he was quite shocked --- for his reverence
for the master was of the worshipful and very serious variety (as is
mine). I find myself reveling in the sheer joyousness of this amazing
man --- who suffered so much and had so much to be bitter about -- and
yet --- was never conquered but produced such transcendent music. I had
never run across this idea -- but that never stops me from trusting my
own reaction to things of the soul. Then I read a review in the
Washington Post by their music critic, Tim Page, who ALSO found
Beethoven to be very funny, and chastised a recent performance for being
too deadly serious and missing the rollicking fun. But this is of
course, just one little element in the universe that is Beethoven.
As to the discussion regarding Frank Lloyd Wright --- as I re-read the
thread it really seemed to me to boil down to an essential question that
remained unanswered ---- the posts seemed to break down into two main
ideas ---- Frank Lloyd Wright was a genius architect well ahead of his
time who had revolutionary ideas ----- and ------ that he was basically
a rotten human being. My own post was somewhat informed by this idea,
even though unspoken --------- this is why Beethoven is so high (really
highest) in my personal pantheon (I rate Verdi as the greatest Opera
composer, and Chopin in a class by himself vis-a-vis the piano.)
The question is: Can a man (or woman) be rated a true artist and genius
who is basically a rotten human being?
This is probably a matter of personal opinion --- to my way of thinking
--- to me -- the composer, (or architect, artist, writer, etc.) is
giving us a glimpse, not only of his soul, but especially in music ----
a window into ---- shall we call it heaven? ---- God???? ---- the
secrets of the Universe --- Life??? --- Death???? Ultimate Meaning????
(By the way --- Ann Sophie Mutter --- in an interview had this same
idea
---- interestingly your pick for the Trios --- as well as the
uncommonly
decent human being, Rostropovich --- who braved the Soviet system and
sheltered in his home both Shostakovich AND Solzhenitzyn. Let me know
your reasons for picking these performances if you can, as well as the
reason for the Tokyo String quartet.)
They have somehow been given this gift --- this quirk of their brain,
this genius of the soul that enables them to see things that we, mere
mortals, cannot on our own. But through their genius, (yes, and hard
work, and tears and suffering and toil) we can glimpse and experience
these snatches of paradise through their eyes.
That is why I cannot really get excited about the music of Wagner ----
what I hear is basically his rotten soul and monumental ego --- and I
don't really want to go there. If a man's creations do nothing more than
glorify the man --- his own ego----- that is ultimately the vision that
we see --- it stops with him --- and goes no further.
When I read about the lives of my favorite composers I usually discover
that the music (not suprisingly) is a reflection of the man. Puccini for
example, was rather a show-off, dandy sort of guy, who was rather
trivial in some of his personal life. Unfortunately, so is his music
---
very pretty, but not very profound. La Boheme, closest to his heart and
his impoverished student days, is his best work IMO.
Likewise, Bellini --- a talent truly dead way before his time----- but
still --- a wastrel and gambler --- ultimately composer of pretty tunes.
But Verdi --- ahhhh ----- Verdi ---- the OTHER titan --- titanic not only in his music, but his uncompromising honesty and generosity and greatness of character.
And Chopin ---- unfailingly modest, polite, thoughtful and tender
------
never cruel --- never boastful ------ loathed playing in public ----
where Liszt --- the supreme showman and superstar of his day failed to
achieve the heights of composition that the frail Chopin attained.
So ------- thanks for posting your email ------ you may be sorry reading
such a long response from me ---- but my husband and I are delighted to
find a fellow soulmate along the highway of Beethoven ---- so many times
people who are professional musicians can be very snobby about these
things ---- we ---- as it sounds you are too ------ are simply passionate!
Hope to hear from you sometime ------ a lifetime is not enough to
encompass Beethoven ---- Artur Schnabel, after a lifetime of performing
his music, wrote that as an old man he was just beginning to understand
it! That's why I really hope there is life after death ----- so we may
go on learning and understanding ---- and know that people like
Beethoven were not just random conglomerations of cells --- but little
bits of God, rained upon humanity to illuminate and gladden our hearts
through this difficult journey we call life!
Our best to you ---- please write --- so nice to share thoughts with
another thoughtful soul ---- Aussiegirl

More Thoughts

Wednesday, August 24, 2002

Well my ---- what a conversation ---- thanks for your two replies --- no
apologies necessary ---- time and plumbing wait for no man, as was once
famously said by someone. As for your design projects --- how lovely to
be doing something tangible, creative and useful!
We also get that satellite channel --- 2 of them actually (with all the
other garbage they have on you think they could come up with a few more
---- like one exclusively for the keyboard, or chamber music, or one
type of music, or opera, etc. --- but nooooo --- there are a hundred
other junkie ones that I have to eliminate from my remote so I won't
have to waste time scrolling through them ---- oh the petty aggravations of the modern world!
But why waste time with such trivialities --- it occurs to me that we
live not only like kings of old but have luxuries even undreamed of by
the richest of ancient men. The old aristos used to employ musicians who
could be summoned at a moment's notice --- even in the middle of the
night when the fancy struck the old goat --- to play a ditty or two. We,
at the touch of a button summon, up the geniuses of the ages played by
the finest artists of the last 60 years or more and can compare,
contrast, criticize, etc.
In olden times "chamber music" was created and played in the "chamber"
for selected audiences ---- Bach evidently was never fussy about
transposing works from one instrument to another ---- he was quite
comfortable to say ---- "we have a horn, but not a fiddle, you say ---
here -- let me just rewrite this quickly for the instruments at hand,
etc." Likewise -- Liszt (and others) transposed symphonic works to
the piano, so that smaller audiences could hear these works. In Verdi's
time there were huge organ-grinder kind of things (without the monkey)
that cranked out the latest of Verdi's top ten --- so the sausage
merchant could learn "La Donna e Mobile" and sing it out as he sliced the morning salami.
So --- aren't we lucky ???? I am feeling rich as Croesus and lots like
old Unca Scrooge when he would run his fingers through all his piles of
coins because today, upon returning from a shopping trip, the hubby and
I discovered a little package gracing our front door ------ my 9!!! CD
set of Wilhelm Kempff playing the complete Beethoven Sonatas (Sonaten) Oh joy!!!
But I'm off the subject -- sorry. As to your interesting comment about
the Carl Haas ---- I wish I had heard that lecture. Yes --- I agree ---
that is one of the astonishing things about Beethoven --- his
unexpectedness ----- one thing I have just started to notice is his use
of the trill ----- it's hard to describe this without humming what I
mean but I'll try ----- you know how in earlier music, BB (before
Beethoven) --- there was a conventional ending to many phrases that
begins with a trill and then goes da-da-dum. like ----- trrrrrrrrrrr
da-da-dum. Oh dear, hope you know what I mean. But Beethoven starts
a trill ---- you can hear this especially in the one violin concerto,
and also in the Appassionata which I just listened to most recently
----- he starts the instrument trilling ---- and the trilling continues
-- and you wait for the conventional da-da-dum ------ but no ----- wait
------ the harmonies under the trill start doing magical things and
changing subtly ---- shivers start running down your spine --- you wait
for the resolution --- surely it must be the end of the phrase -- but no
----- the trill continues and and the tension builds and builds and
suddenly it is like a window slowly opens onto a new horizon and we
slowly are raised to a newer, higher plane and it resolves --- not as an
end --- but as the beginning of a new idea. It is truly stupendous!
As to similar figures in other fields --- I would have to think about
that for a while ---- and my knowledge of other fields is quite general
---- but ----- what an idea. Perhaps it is that music, unlike any other
fine art (literature, painting, architecture --- the other arts
pertaining to the various senses) is so immediate, mysterious,
spiritual, and ------ organic. Like laughter, it is a truly human and
spiritual thing. It is essentially unknowable and undefinable ---- like
God --- if you believe in something like that --- or the universe ----
it appeals directly to the emotions without the filter of our intellect
and brain --- I think that they have discovered that musical experts
listen to music with a different part of their brain --- they are
analyzing it intellectually -- someone like you or me or anyone else who
simply listens and is moved, probably listens with the emotional side.
Why is a particular piece sad??? Why happy??? What makes it so?? Why
does it have the powerful impact on us emotionally that it does?? I
don't know ---- but it is also universal and cross-cultural --- at least
Western Classical music is --- witness the Tokyo String Quartet playing
the best Beethoven quartets, Yo-Yo Ma, etc. etc.
Probably Shakespeare qualifies in his field ---- but again --- he is
pretty limited to the English-speaking world ---- he is hard to
translate ----- ANYBODY is hard to translate properly (and being
Ukrainian and doing some little translating of my own I really
appreciate the difficulty).
Likewise the visual arts ---- they don't have the gobsmacking impact on
emotions (at least to me) that music does. I mean --- Beethoven just
gets inside your head and sets you on fire ---- even Michaelangelo can't
do that for me -- as beautiful as his works are. They still have to pass
some filter, or something and don't go directly to the heart of thematter.
But perhaps this isn't the question --- there surely are people
throughout history who were indispensable --- I'll leave that for
another time and let you get back to your life. It is great to lay
these
thoughts out on "paper" ---- hubs and I discuss them all the time but
there's nothing like having to commit your thoughts to "paper" to
making
you think more clearly. That remains to be seen if I have done that.
BTW --- loved your comment about "self-inflicted education" ---- may I
plagiarize you? (IMHO it is the best kind of education) Also --- big
chuckle over the Mahler writing to employ every Scandinavian musician.
Thanks --- sorry to be so long again --- write when you have a chance.
(In a similar vein as the Mahler comment --- there is an anecdote about
some conductor rehearsing the orchestra for a perfomance of Wagner. He
supposedly said something like: "Now those singers up there are trying
to be heard above the orchestra -- it is our job to see that they are
not!" ---- and another favorite was the advice given to a student
conductor --- "Don't even look at the brasses --- it only encourages them!" ;-)

(veritas talking:)

Me: Where to start? Years ago I heard a program by Carl Haas on NPR
[shhhh!
Don't tell anyone!] discussing Beethoven. Haas, if you've never heard
his program, was a concert pianist [Hah! I should be telling a pianist
THAT! Of course you know Haas.] . He was illustrating the perfection of
Beethoven's originality. Haas would play a passage and point out certain
aspects of how the theme developed. He'd then continue the passage with
an "expected" continuation--after which he'd play it as Beethoven wrote
it. Every time, the "expected" continuation sounded fine, "normal"
--until he played Beethoven's. And what HE wrote was RIGHT. You:
"...music critic, Tim Page, who ALSO found Beethoven to be very funny,
and chastised a recent performance for being too deadly serious and
missing the rollicking fun."
Me: The "early music" orchestras are often good remedies to this. Itseems
the tempi of Beethoven's symphonies, especially, got slower and slower
as his music got more and more "important." I've heard that he marked
the tempi carefully, so this shouldn't be a problem, but... [Academy of
St. Martin in the Fields is usually a good compromise between the
"modern" sound we're used to and a smaller-orchestra, differently-tuned
instruments sound that is closer to what was contemporary for his time;
don't know what Beethoven they have in their catalog]. I'm happy to
listen to early-music orchestras that aren't too absolutist [gut strings
and such]. It's sometimes revealing to hear Beethoven with a smaller
orchestra, I think. More "open" sound sometimes, lighter melodies; "Fun"
more accessible. Parochially, I prefer, overall, a great modern
orchestra for Beethoven, perhaps because it's how I was introduced to
the music. Not a Mahler-sized orchestra [I think he wrote to keep every
musician in Scandinavia employed], but a normal-sized modern one. [A
nice interruption: I have the satellite receiver on the "light classics"
channel, and they're playing Vaughan Williams Fantasia on Greensleeves.
Beautiful, even if not played by Rampal...] Me: As you know, there's a
big tempo problem with the national anthem, too.
Once you've heard it played by a real military band [perhaps in part
because they're used to 120-beat march steps?], you won't go back.
Don't start me on those anthem "singers...." Grrrrrr. Me: Ever hear
Beethoven live? Sorry, GOTTA [!] get back to my responsibilities.
Best to you and Aussieguy [?]. More later. Many thanks for a nice note and
good conversation.

veritas

Two more photos of Aussiegirl

2007-02-02T12:06:00.000-05:00

Lady Liberty asked to see more photos of Helen -- I found these two in her "My Pictures" file. The top one is from when her family was living in Dee Why, Australia. It was taken around 1953, which would make Helen 6 years old. The ocean was not far from their house, and Helen loved to wade around in the tidal pools. The other is from 1974, when Helen was 27 years old.

David

She was grand. She was a novel native of today

2007-01-20T16:54:00.000-05:00

[Amil Imani, that courageous Iranian patriot who Helen considered to be one of her dearest friends, sent me this email and asked me to post it. The beautiful poem seems to capture the essence of that bright star that was Aussiegirl.]

This poem is by one of Iran's best contemporary poets, Sohrab Sepehri. He died of cancer in 1981.

I would like to dedicate this poem to my everlasting friend, Helen, whose memory will remain with me until the end of my time.

Amil Imani

She was grand.
She was a noble native of today,

She was grand.
Her realm was all boundless spheres.
And she sensed, so intensely, the ways of water and the earth.

The tone of her voice pictured
the anxious sadness of the truth.
Her eyes recalled the live direction of the roots.

And her hands, one day,
waved tender steam of generosity
and floated us in the stream of care.

She played the intimacy of her soul,
And she portrayed the straightness of her love
in all sharp bends of her time,
for the mirrors.

She was alike the rain,
full of freshness of the flow.
She was alike the tree,
spread in the ease of lights.

She was always calling early years of the breeze
And she forever tied strings of her words
to the neat relevance of rivers.

One night, for us
she spelled so plainly the green prayer of innocence
that we reached out for the kind texture of the soil
and we revived alike refreshing accent of a pail.

Many times we saw:
with plenty of wooden baskets, she left
to gather bushes of golden plaques.

But it couldn't be
that she'd stand in front of crystal belief of the birds.
Thus she went to the limits of naught
and laid in the wake of white serenity of the lights.

And she didn't believe,
She didn't believe at all,
that within revolted intonation of the gates
we would be left massively alone.

Even to taste a piece of fruit,
we are now left extremely alone.

Aussiegirl's photo

2007-01-16T15:05:00.000-05:00

I just discovered that the funeral home that will be conducting the
service for Helen tonight has a website, and Helen's photo is published
therein.

Here is the URL for the funeral home website.

If you click on "Sign & View Family Guest Books", you will get an
alphabet page. Clicking on "s" will get you to a list of names.
Clicking on "Schieber, Helen" will get you to the page with her photo.
The photo was taken at a favorite local restaurant on her birthday in 2003, hence a while before the need for oxygen confined her to her home. If I do say so myself, she looks radiant, a beautiful combination of beauty of face and soul -- with great intellgence thrown in.

There's also a guest book to sign if anyone feels so inclined. At
least now you can put a face to Aussiegirl!

David

``````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
[Here is an email I just received, which ties in with what I just posted above. I'll try to add more photos of Aussiegirl to this blog, but, since she isn't here to show me how to do it, it may take a while.]

David, I also would like to thank you for continuing to post any of Aussiegirl's writings.

I have two requests. The first has been asked by someone else as well. Would you consider posting pictures of Helen, maybe through her life, on this blog? Also, an idea: what if all those who were connected to Helen, personally, or through her blog, wrote a little something about their unique relationship to her and how it affected them?

I will be dedicating my next blog to her this weekend. Thank you so much. Strength to carry you through!

Lady Liberty

Aussiegirl, a shooting star

2007-01-16T09:40:00.000-05:00

[Paulette MacQuarrie, one of Helen's many Ukrainian friends on the internet, sent me this email, which with her permission I am posting.]

David, thank you for carrying on Helen's blog. It will be bittersweet to read posthumously what she had written while she was with us, but still, perhaps it will be healing. And I'm sure she would have approved.

If you get a chance to read it, I posted a tribute to Aussiegirl at my blog

Words are so inadequate to describe how special she was. But as one of the many bloggers whose lives she enriched and illuminated, I managed to come up with this, which I posted as a comment at cybercossack.com. If you would like to post it, feel free. Regardless if you do or not, I hope that it will comfort you at least a little bit.

Paulette

Every now and again a shooting star appears in the darkness of the night sky, and those who catch a glimpse of one consider themselves very privileged indeed.

I have never seen a shooting star. But to me, that is what Aussiegirl was in my life. I didn’t know her very long, in fact, had never even met her. Our friendship began, and grew, in the blogosphere. She helped me overcome my fears, gave me writing and technical tips, and encouraged her readers to visit my website and my blog.

How she found the time, while battling such a debilitating disease, to send encouraging and supportive emails and also share her thoughts and feelings, is a mystery to me. It just speaks to what a rare and precious gift she was.

I shall mourn this loss. But I will also be forever grateful for having had the great privilege to experience the beauty that Halya brought into the world, for a fleeting moment in time.

Vichnaya Pam’yat, Aussiegirl.

BonnieBlueFlag remembers Helen

2007-01-15T15:33:00.000-05:00

BonnieBlueFlag asked me, David, Helen's husband, to post her beautiful tribute, which I am doing here. It then occurred to me that, although Aussiegirl is no longer here to comment on the passing political scene, with side trips to literature, science, and religion, her unique voice hasn't been completely stilled, since I have found several drafts of things she had written and then not posted. I want to keep her memory alive as long as I can, which means keeping her beloved blog going as long as I can. So I shall be posting these writings, hopefully not against her wishes. In addition, I've found several emails she sent to herself on her MSNTV site, and I shall be posting them also. I figure that almost everything that Aussiegirl wrote was of value, because of her wit, depth of thought, and ease of expression. One more reason to keep the blog going is so that her readers can dip into her archives -- she began Ultima Thule September 19, 2004, and since then she managed to publish 2457 posts on a dazzling variety of themes, from politics through literature to music.
Judging from the response, some 150 replies, to Lucianne.com's Memorial Thread, Helen as Aussiegirl touched many, many lives, and I feel blessed to have lived with such a dynamic person for some 32 years. May she rest in peace.

Our Dear Friend, Helen,

by: BonnieBlueFlag

The glow of my computer screen has dimmed ever so slightly, it probably would not be noticeable to anyone else, but for me it has lost the warm glow of knowing that Helen is there waiting for me just beyond the azure blue desktop.

We met via e-mails regarding Lucianne.com, just as she had met so many others, but something clicked between us, and we formed a bond that would last for a long time. Somehow we seemed to cram the story of our entire lives into our e-mails. I felt that I knew Helen better than most of the people who had been in my life for many more years.

After our first tentative e-mails to be sure that neither of us was a 13 year old boy in disguise, we discovered that in spite of our extremely different backgrounds, we had much in common, along with a great many quirks, foibles, and funny stories to share.

I knew from the beginning that she was someone special and very unique. Her heart and soul were just bursting at the seams to be out in the world and to be part of the action. However, her body was never as strong as her spirit, and fortunately for many of us around the world, the miracle of the Internet and her computer keyboard brought us to her doorstep.

Those of you who know that I was originally a contributor to "Ultima Thule," may think that I have been suspiciously quiet the last few days, but I have been unable to write more than a few words at a time without breaking down in tears.

John Donne's words, ". . . Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." keep running through my head, because Helen was most certainly involved with mankind, and we have all been diminished by her loss.

And while my grief feels unbearable at this moment, I would never give up all the e-mails we shared, or the mutual encouragement through troubled times and good times. Helen is forever firmly ensconced in my heart.

Helen loved all of you who responded to her, and believe me it took all of us to keep her mind vibrant and occupied. She had so many talents and interests that no one person could keep up with her. In turn each of us was somehow enriched by having known her.

My deepest sympathies are with Helen's beloved husband, David, and to her sister, Julie. I know their hearts are broken, and their lives will never be the same without the love, understanding, and enthusiasm, that she brought to them every day.

BonnieBlueFlag

Final Aussiegirl update -- sad news!

2007-01-13T22:32:00.000-05:00

This is a sad day for Ultima Thule readers: its creator and guiding spirit, Aussiegirl, passed away this afternoon at around 2 p.m. The operation was successful, but unfortunately the cancer, which it turns out had been working away symptomlessly for months, had already spread and was attacking her organs. Try as they could, her excellent doctors couldn't bring her system under enough control to allow them to start chemotherapy.

She was only 59, and had many years of wonderful writing and thinking ahead of her. She was already planning an article about her stay in the hospital -- what a treat we were robbed of, with all the insights and witty writing that she could have so easily given such an article!

She was very appreciative of all the prayers and good wishes that her many readers, from around the globe, sent her way. The cancer was too powerful, but they still gave her spiritual comfort -- and Aussiegirl was a wonderfully spiritual person.

Aussiegirl update no. 2

2006-12-19T21:00:00.000-05:00

Well, Aussiegirl was discharged from the hospital tonight, and is enjoying being home again, playing with her cats, and especially being out of the hospital, with those all night long interruptions for yet one more blood pressure measurement. She's planning on getting better, and as soon as possible resuming the helm of Ultima Thule.

Happy birthday, Beethoven!

2006-12-16T10:13:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

(Today is the immortal Beethoven's birthday, so I have decided to republish my 2005 birthday post that included the poet Franz Grillparzer's beautiful funeral oration. I have also included Pindar's comment that gives some additional information on the funeral.)

December 16, 1770 - March 26, 1827

In commemoration of the birthday of the great titanic genius who was Beethoven, no better words could be uttered than those delivered at his graveside. Beethoven sleeps, while we live on the dream of the unutterably beautiful and profound music that he left behind.

The Graveside Funeral Oration for Ludwig van Beethoven
Written by the poet Franz Grillparzer

Standing by the grave of him who has passed away we are in a manner the representatives of an entire nation, of the whole German people, mourning the loss of the one highly acclaimed half of that which was left us of the departed splendor of our native art, of the fatherland's full spiritual bloom. There yet lives—and may his life be long!—the hero of verse in German speech and tongue; but the last master of tuneful song, the organ of soulful concord, the heir and amplifier of Handel and Bach's, of Haydn and Mozart's immortal fame is now no more, and we stand weeping over the riven strings of the harp that is hushed.

The harp that is hushed! Let me call him so! For he was an artist, and all that was his, was his through art alone. The thorns of life had wounded him deeply, and as the cast-away clings to the shore, so did he seek refuge in thine arms, O thou glorious sister and peer of the Good and the True, thou balm of wounded hearts, heaven-born Art! To thee he clung fast, and even when the portal was closed wherethrough thou hadst entered in and spoken to him, when his deaf ear had blinded his vision for thy features, still did he ever carry thine image within his heart, and when he died it still reposed on his breast.

He was an artist—and who shall arise to stand beside him?

As the rushing behemoth spurns the waves, so did he rove to the uttermost bounds of his art. From the cooing of doves to the rolling of thunder, from the craftiest interweaving of well-weighed expedients of art up to that awful pitch where planful design disappears in the lawless whirl of contending natural forces, he had traversed and grasped it all. He who comes after him will not continue him; he must begin anew, for he who went before left off only where art leaves off. Adelaide and Leonora! Triumph of the heroes of Vittoria—and the humble sacrificial song of the Mass!—Ye children of the voices divided thrice and four times! heaven-soaring harmony: "Freude, schöner Götterfunken," thou swan song! Muse of song and the seven-stringed lyre! Approach his grave and bestrew it with laurel!

He was an artist, but a man as well. A man in every sense—in the highest. Because he withdrew from the world, they called him a man-hater, and because he held aloof from sentimentality, unfeeling. Ah, one who knows himself hard of heart, does not shrink! The finest points are those most easily blunted and bent or broken. An excess of sensitiveness avoids a show of feeling! He fled the world because, in the whole range of his loving nature, he found no weapon to oppose it. He withdrew from mankind after he had given them his all and received nothing in return. He dwelt alone, because he found no second Self. But to the end his heart beat warm for all men, in fatherly affection for his kindred, for the world his all and his heart's blood.

Thus he was, thus he died, thus he will live to the end of time.

You, however, who have followed after us hitherward, let not your hearts be troubled! You have not lost him, you have won him. No living man enters the halls of the immortals. Not until the body has perished, do their portals unclose. He whom you mourn stands from now onward among the great of all ages, inviolate forever. Return homeward, therefore, in sorrow, yet resigned! And should you ever in times to come feel the overpowering might of his creations like an onrushing storm, when your mounting ecstasy overflows in the midst of a generation yet unborn, then remember this hour, and think, We were there, when they buried him, and when he died, we wept.

At 5:58 PM, Pindar said...
Thanks, Aussiegirl, for posting this beautiful and inspiring funeral oration for my favorite composer. And your words echoed deep within my soul: "Beethoven sleeps, while we live on the dream of the unutterably beautiful and profound music that he left behind". Here are a few extra facts that I found: On the afternoon of Thursday, March 29th, 1827, between 10,000 and 30,000 people gathered for the funeral of Ludwig van Beethoven.
The actor Heinrich Anschütz read the funeral oration written by Franz Grillparzer, Austria's greatest dramatic poet, in front of the doors of the Währing Cemetary (now Schubert Park). Also, it turns out that Grillparzer (1791-1872) first met Beethoven in 1803, and in 1823 the two men made plans to collaborate on an opera--but nothing came of it.

Spaceweather.com: December 2006 Aurora Gallery

2006-12-16T10:04:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Spaceweather.com sent me an email with the following note: Solar wind streams buffeting Earth's magnetosphere have sparked high-latitude auroras several times this month--notably Dec. 6th-8th and again on Dec. 12th. The really big display occured on Dec. 14th when a CME hit Earth and sparked a severe geomagnetic storm.
Be sure to go to this link for 5 pages of spectacular photos of auroras -- the one accompanying this post is but one.

Spaceweather.com: December 2006 Aurora Gallery

Aussiegirl update

2006-12-14T21:00:00.000-05:00

Good news for all of Aussiegirl's many readers! She successfully underwent a two-hour surgery today, with no complications. She'll be in the hospital a while longer -- and let me tell you, she can't wait to get back to her keyboard and resume blogging. She wishes to thank all those kind readers who sent her their encouraging get-well wishes. Just keep checking in here, and before you know it she'll be back!

Guglielmo Marconi

2006-12-12T23:09:00.001-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Today is a very important date in the history of radio. On this day in 1901 Marconi ... but let's let Wikipedia tell the story: A major advantage of radio is its ability to provide communication over water. Marconi quickly began to build high-powered stations on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in order to communicate with ships at sea (In 1904, a commercial service was established to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ocean-going ships, which could incorporate them into their onboard newspapers). At the same time, he was quietly investigating whether it was possible to signal completely across the Atlantic, in order to compete with the transatlantic telegraph cables.
Marconi soon made the stunning announcement that on 12 December 1901, using a 122-metre (400-foot) kite-supported antenna for reception, he had personally received at Signal Hill in St John's, Newfoundland (now part of Canada) signals transmitted by the company's new high-power station at Poldhu, Cornwall. The distance between the two points was about 3,500 kilometres (2,100 miles).

If you wish to read more about the early days of Marconi and radio, here is the link:Guglielmo Marconi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

ATTENTION SKYGAZERS: The 2006 Geminid Meteor Shower peaks Dec. 14

2006-12-12T16:45:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Get ready to watch a wonderful display of nature's fireworks over the next two days! But first read this article to discover that the source of the Geminids remains a mystery. How can this be so? Read on!
The beautiful photograph is of the Geminid meteors photographed in Dec. 2004 by Jason A.C. Brock of Roundtimber, Texas.

NASA - The 2006 Geminid Meteor Shower

The best meteor shower of the year peaks this week on Dec. 13th and 14th.

"It's the Geminid meteor shower," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, Alabama. "Start watching on Wednesday evening, Dec. 13th, around 9 p.m. local time," he advises. "The display will start small but grow in intensity as the night wears on. By Thursday morning, Dec. 14th, people in dark, rural areas could see one or two meteors every minute."

The source of the Geminids is a mysterious object named 3200 Phaethon. "No one can decide what it is," says Cooke.

The mystery, properly told, begins in the 19th century: Before the mid-1800s there were no Geminids, or at least not enough to attract attention. The first Geminids appeared suddenly in 1862, surprising onlookers who saw dozens of meteors shoot out of the constellation Gemini. (That's how the shower gets its name, the Geminids.)

Astronomers immediately began looking for a comet. Meteor showers result from debris that boils off a comet when it passes close to the Sun. When Earth passes through the debris, we see a meteor shower.

For more than a hundred years astronomers searched in vain for the parent comet. Finally, in 1983, NASA's Infra-Red Astronomy Satellite (IRAS) spotted something. It was several kilometers wide and moved in about the same orbit as the Geminid meteoroids. Scientists named it 3200 Phaethon.

Just one problem: Meteor showers are supposed to come from comets, but 3200 Phaethon seems to be an asteroid. It is rocky (not icy, like a comet) and has no obvious tail. Officially, 3200 Phaethon is catalogued as a "PHA"—a potentially hazardous asteroid whose path misses Earth's orbit by only 2 million miles.

If 3200 Phaethon is truly an asteroid, with no tail, how did it produce the Geminids? "Maybe it bumped up against another asteroid," offers Cooke. "A collision could have created a cloud of dust and rock that follows Phaethon around in its orbit."

This jibes with studies of Geminid fireballs. Some astronomers have studied the brightest Geminid meteors and concluded that the underlying debris must be rocky. Density estimates range from 1 to 3 g/cm3. That's much denser than flakes of comet dust (0.3 g/cm3), but close to the density of rock (3 g/cm3).

So, are the Geminids an "asteroid shower"?

Cooke isn't convinced. 3200 Phaethon might be a comet after all--"an extinct comet," he says. The object's orbit carries it even closer to the Sun than Mercury. Extreme solar heat could've boiled away all of Phaethon's ice long ago, leaving behind this rocky skeleton "that merely looks like an asteroid."

In short, no one knows. It's a mystery to savor under the stars—the shooting stars—this Thursday morning.

Key Space Weather Secret Revealed

2006-12-11T22:47:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

I found this article on Lucianne.com, posted by Photoonist, who added this very interesting comment: How about this: what if it's not just space weather, such as the aurora, that's affected? If you've been at this site for some time or are otherwise interested in the geophysical sciences then you know that the earth's magnetic field is beginning to slowly weaken in preparation for yet another magnetic pole swap. That would mean that energetic charged particles begin to penetrate farther into the earth's atmosphere. What kind of effect would these increasing reactions have on the earth's overall weather system? algore, call your office.

SPACE.com -- Key Space Weather Secret Revealed

Key Space Weather Secret Revealed
By SPACE.com Staff

Space weather on Earth has long been thought to be largely a measure of the Sun's output. But mounting research reveals it is metered more by our own planet's changing magnetic field than was known.

When the Sun hiccups as it did last week, huge blasts of radiation and matter can be flung into space. Storms arrive with a magnetic charge, plus or minus. Our own planet has a varying magnetic field.

Scientists knew that the alignment of these fields had something to do with the odds of a satellite being disabled or a colorful Northern Lights sky show ensuing.

The new study shows that the Northern Lights, also called aurora, and other space weather near Earth are driven by the rate at which the Earth’s and Sun’s magnetic fields connect, or merge, and not just by the solar wind’s electric field.

The merging occurs way out in space, at a spot between the Earth and Sun, roughly 40,000 miles above our planet’s surface. Researchers have now developed a formula that describes the merging rate of the magnetic field lines and accurately predicts 10 different types of near-Earth space weather activity, such as the aurora and magnetic disturbances.

“Having this formula is a big step forward for understanding how the Sun and Earth interact,” said study leader Patrick Newell of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).

Space weather scientists had long assumed that near-Earth space weather phenomena could best be predicted by the behavior of the solar wind electric field. But Newell and his colleagues were the first to put this theory to a rigorous test with many data sets from a number of years.

They looked at NASA satellite observations of global auroral activity, NOAA satellite observations of the stretching of the Earth’s magnetic field lines on our planet's nightside, and Air Force satellite observations of the access of solar wind particles to the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

The research further disabuses the notion that space is empty. The region between Earth and the Sun is full of energetic particles, most of which are generated Sun. Temperatures of a few million degrees accelerate a stream of these particles, called the solar wind, to roughly one million mph.

Polonium 210

2006-12-11T22:10:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

An article on the history and relative ubiquity of polonium 210. Polonium was of course discovered by Marie Curie in 1898 and named after her native Poland.
Accompanying this photograph of Pierre and Marie was this charming and sweet excerpt of a letter that Pierre wrote to Marie exploring the possibility of marriage:

“We have promised each other (is it not true?) to have, the one for the other, at least a great affection. Provided that you do not change your mind! For there are no promises which hold; these are things that do not admit of compulsion.

“It would, nevertheless, be a beautiful thing in which I hardly dare believe, to pass through life together hypnotized in our dreams: your dream for your country; our dream for humanity; our dream for science. Of all these dreams, I believe the last, alone, is legitimate. I mean to say by this that we are powerless to change the social order. Even if this were not true we should not know what to do.... From the point of view of science, on the contrary, we can pretend to accomplish something. The territory here is more solid and obvious, and however small it is, it is truly in our possession.”

Polonium - Alexander V. Litvinenko - Vladimir V. Putin - New York Times

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: December 3, 2006

THE trail of clues in the mysterious death of Alexander V. Litvinenko may lead to Moscow, as the former spy claimed on his deathbed. But solving the nuclear whodunit may prove harder than Scotland Yard and many scientists at first anticipated.

The complicating factor is the relative ubiquity of polonium 210, the highly radioactive substance found in Mr. Litvinenko’s body and now in high levels in the body of an Italian associate, who has been hospitalized in London. Experts initially called it quite rare, with some claiming that only the Kremlin had the wherewithal to administer a lethal dose. But public and private inquiries have shown that it proliferated quite widely during the nuclear era, of late as an industrial commodity.

“You can get it all over the place,” said William Happer, a physicist at Princeton who has advised the United States government on nuclear forensics. “And it’s a terrible way to go.”

Today, polonium 210 can show up in everything from atom bombs, to antistatic brushes to cigarette smoke, though in the last case only minute quantities are involved. Iran made relatively large amounts of polonium 210 in what some experts call a secret effort to develop nuclear arms, and North Korea probably used it to trigger its recent nuclear blast.

Commercially, Web sites and companies sell many products based on polonium 210, with labels warning of health dangers. By some estimates, a lethal dose might cost as little as $22.50, plus tax. “Radiation from polonium is dangerous if the solid material is ingested or inhaled,” warns the label of an antistatic brush. “Keep away from children.”

Peter D. Zimmerman, a professor in the war studies department of King’s College, London, said the many industrial uses of polonium 210 threatened to complicate efforts at solving the Litvinenko case. “It’s a great Agatha Christie novel,” he said. “She couldn’t have written anything weirder than this.” [....]

As in any good murder mystery, the deadliness was foreshadowed. Marie Curie, who discovered the radioactive element in 1898 and named it after her native Poland, organized its close study. One of her polonium workers died in 1927 from apparent poisoning, according to Susan Quinn, author of “Marie Curie: A Life” (Simon & Schuster, 1995). Another worker lost her hair.

At first, mines provided minute samples nearly invisible to the human eye. But the debut of nuclear reactors let scientists make polonium 210 by the pound. The substance emits swarms of subatomic rays, and the Manhattan Project in 1945 used them to trigger the world’s first atom bombs. Such initiators became the global standard for basic nuclear arms.

President Eisenhower, eager to promote “atoms for peace,” had the high heats of polonium 210 turned into electricity for satellites. But the batteries lost power relatively fast because of the material’s short half-life, just 138 days. The United States made few such spacecraft.

By the 1960’s, researchers worried increasingly about polonium 210’s deadly health effects. Harvard researchers found it in cigarette smoke and argued that its concentrations were high enough to make its radioactivity a contributing factor in lung cancer.

Vilma R. Hunt, who helped lead the studies, called polonium 210 a nightmare for health workers, and perhaps sleuths, because it tended to move about in unexpected ways. “It crawls the walls,” she said in an interview. “It can be lost for a while and then come back.”

Though dangerous when breathed, injected or ingested, the material is harmless outside the human body. Skin or paper can stop its rays cold.

Industrial companies found polonium 210 to be ideal for making static eliminators that remove dust from film, lenses and laboratory balances, as well as paper and textile plants. Its rays produce an electric charge on nearby air. Bits of dust with static attract the charged air, which neutralizes them. Once free of static, the dust is easy to blow or brush away. [....]

An antistatic fan made by NRD, of Grand Island, N.Y., contains 31,500 microcuries of polonium 210 — or, in theory, more than 10 lethal doses. The unit often sells commercially for $225.00. Repeated calls to NRD were not returned, but the company in sales literature describes its products as unusually safe.

The company’s antistatic brushes contain less polonium, typically 500 microcuries of radiation. The three-inch brush often sells on the Web for $33.99. In theory, by spending $203.94, before tax and any handling charges, and then disassembling six brushes, someone with lab experience could accumulate a lethal dose.

In Tennessee, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory sells dozens of types of rare nuclear materials to American manufacturers. But Bill Cabage, a lab spokesman, said it sold no polonium 210 because Russia was able to do so much more inexpensively.

“That’s typical” of exotic radioisotopes, he said. “We can’t compete with their prices.” [....]

Still, several experts held out the possibility that close examination of polonium 210 residues from Mr. Litvinenko’s body or from the multiple sites where it has been found around London might reveal nuclear fingerprints that could throw light on the baffling case.

“What they’ll be looking for is radioactive contaminants made at the same time,” said Dr. Happer of Princeton. “They’ll do the best they can technically,” hoping to find a match between the London samples and the known attributes of the world’s stocks of polonium 210. “But my guess,” he added, “is that it will take an informant” to clear up the mystery.

Rogue theory of smell gets a boost

2006-12-11T20:56:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

An interesting and novel explanation of how we smell -- I mean how our noses work.

news @ nature.com - Rogue theory of smell gets a boost - Physicists check out a bold hypothesis for how the nose works.

Rogue theory of smell gets a boost
Physicists check out a bold hypothesis for how the nose works.
Philip Ball

Smell might be down to the vibrations of molecules rather than their shape

A controversial theory of how we smell, which claims that our fine sense of odour depends on quantum mechanics, has been given the thumbs up by a team of physicists.

Calculations by researchers at University College London (UCL) show that the idea that we smell odour molecules by sensing their molecular vibrations makes sense in terms of the physics involved1.

That's still some way from proving that the theory, proposed in the mid-1990s by biophysicist Luca Turin2, is correct. But it should make other scientists take the idea more seriously.

"This is a big step forward," says Turin, who has now set up his own perfume company Flexitral in Virginia. He says that since he published his theory, "it has been ignored rather than criticized."

Most scientists have assumed that our sense of smell depends on receptors in the nose detecting the shape of incoming molecules, which triggers a signal to the brain. This molecular 'lock and key' process is thought to lie behind a wide range of the body's detection systems: it is how some parts of the immune system recognise invaders, for example, and how the tongue recognizes some tastes.

But Turin argued that smell doesn't seem to fit this picture very well. Molecules that look almost identical can smell very different — such as alcohols, which smell like spirits, and thiols, which smell like rotten eggs. And molecules with very different structures can smell similar.

Most strikingly, some molecules can smell different — to animals, if not necessarily to humans — simply because they contain different isotopes (atoms that are chemically identical but have a different mass).

Turin's explanation for these smelly facts invokes the idea that the smell signal in olfactory receptor proteins is triggered not by an odour molecule's shape, but by its vibrations, which can enourage an electron to jump between two parts of the receptor in a quantum-mechanical process called tunnelling. This electron movement could initiate the smell signal being sent to the brain.

This would explain why isotopes can smell different: their vibration frequencies are changed if the atoms are heavier. Turin's mechanism, says Marshall Stoneham of the UCL team, is more like swipe-card identification than a key fitting a lock.

Vibration-assisted electron tunnelling can undoubtedly occur — it is used in an experimental technique for measuring molecular vibrations. "The question is whether this is possible in the nose," says Stoneham's colleague, Andrew Horsfield.

Stoneham says that when he first heard about Turin's idea, while Turin was himself based at UCL, "I didn't believe it". But, he adds, "because it was an interesting idea, I thought I should prove it couldn't work. I did some simple calculations, and only then began to feel Luca could be right." Now Stoneham and his co-workers have done the job more thoroughly, in a paper soon to be published in Physical Review Letters.

The UCL team calculated the rates of electron hopping in a nose receptor that has an odorant molecule bound to it. This rate depends on various properties of the biomolecular system that are not known, but the researchers could estimate these parameters based on typical values for molecules of this sort.

The key issue is whether the hopping rate with the odorant in place is significantly greater than that without it. The calculations show that it is — which means that odour identification in this way seems theoretically possible.

But Horsfield stresses that that's different from a proof of Turin's idea. "So far things look plausible, but we need proper experimental verification. We're beginning to think about what experiments could be performed."

Meanwhile, Turin is pressing ahead with his hypothesis. "At Flexitral we have been designing odorants exclusively on the basis of their computed vibrations," he says. "Our success rate at odorant discovery is two orders of magnitude better than the competition." At the very least, he is putting his money where his nose is.

Let us celebrate the birthday of the "beautiful-shape viewer"

2006-12-11T17:09:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Today's Fact of the Day column in scotsman.com alerted me to the following news: On this day in 1781 David Brewster was born in the Borders town of Jedburgh. Brewster made his first telescope at the age of ten and enrolled in Edinburgh University when he was 12. His most popular invention, however, was the kaleidoscope. He was knighted in 1832.
Below I have posted the Wikipedia article about the kaleidoscope -- which tells you probably more than you wanted to know about this interesting device. Brewster also devised the name, putting together Greek kalos "beautiful", eidos "shape", and scope "observation instrument", to arrive at "a beautiful-shape viewer".

Kaleidoscope - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The kaleidoscope is a toy containing small, brightly-colored tumbling objects, and a set of mirrors which reflect the view of the tumbling objects into repeating, symmetric patterns. The tumbling objects — typically coloured beads or pebbles — are enclosed in a transparent or translucent chamber mounted at one end of a tube; the viewer looks in the other end of the tube. Mounted lengthways along the inside of the tube are either two or three striplike mirrors which combine and form the image.

If the mirrors are mounted at a 45° angle to each other, eight duplicate views are created. A 60° angle leads to six views, or 90° to four. As the object chamber is rotated, the tumbling of the objects within presents the viewer with an infinitely-varying succession of colors and patterns. Although the composition within one triangular cell of the view is arbitrary, the overall pattern is beautifully symmetric because of the reflections in the mirrors. A two-mirror model yields a single pattern isolated against a black background, while a three-mirror (closed triangle) model yields an infinitely-repeating pattern that seems to fill the entire field of view.

Kaleidoscope tubes can be made inexpensively of cardboard, or elegantly out of brass, wood, or other fine materials. The tumbling objects can be beads, semiprecious stones, chips of glass, or almost any imaginable substance. Sometimes the object chamber is filled with liquid so that the items float and move in a more fluid manner. Some high-quality kaleidoscopes have lenses at one or both ends to gather light and/or sharpen the image.

For a 2D symmetry group a kaleidoscopic point is a point of intersection of two or more lines of reflection symmetry. In the case of a discrete group the angle between consecutive lines is 180°/n for an integer n≥2. At this point there are n lines of reflection symmetry, and the point is a center of n-fold rotational symmetry. See also symmetry combinations.

Known to the ancient Greeks, it was reinvented by the Scot Sir David Brewster in 1816 while conducting experiments on light polarization, and it was patented in 1817. The initial design was made from a tube in which Brewster placed pairs of mirrors at one end, and pairs of translucent disks at the other end. Between the two, he placed the beads. Initially intended as a science tool, it was quickly copied as a toy. Brewster believed he would make money from his popular invention. However, a fault in his patent allowed others to copy his invention. In America, Charles Bush popularized the kaleidoscope. Today, these early products often sell for over $1,000. Cozy Baker collected kaleidoscopes and wrote books about the artists who were making them in the 1970s through 2000. Cozy is credited with energizing a renaissance in kaleidoscope making in America. Craft galleries often carry a few, while others specialize in them and carry dozens of different types from different artists and craftspeople.

Experts Puzzle Over Halt of Bird Flu

2006-12-10T22:19:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Ah tolja an' ah tolja an' ah tolja!

Experts Puzzle Over Halt of Bird Flu - Forbes.com

Experts Puzzle Over Halt of Bird Flu
By MARIA CHENG

Earlier this year, bird flu panic was in full swing: The French feared for their foie gras, the Swiss locked their chickens indoors, and Americans enlisted prison inmates in Alaska to help spot infected wild birds.

The H5N1 virus - previously confined to Southeast Asia - was striking birds in places as diverse as Germany, Egypt, and Nigeria, and a flu pandemic seemed inevitable.

Then the virus went quiet. Except for a steady stream of human cases in Indonesia, the current flu epicenter, the past year's worries about a catastrophic global outbreak largely disappeared.

What happened?

Part of the explanation may be seasonal. Bird flu tends to be most active in the colder months, as the virus survives longer at low temperatures. [....]

While the pandemic has not materialized, experts say it's too early to relax.

"We have a visible risk in front of us," said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, coordinator of the World Health Organization's global influenza program. But although the virus could mutate into a pandemic strain, Fukuda points out that it might go the other direction instead, becoming less dangerous for humans. [....]

Flu viruses constantly evolve, so the mere appearance of mutations is not enough to raise alarm. The key is to identify which mutations are the most worrisome.

"We don't really know how many changes this virus has got to make to adapt to humans, if it can at all," said Dr. Richard Webby, a bird flu expert at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Tennessee. [....]

Though scientists are bracing themselves for increased bird flu activity in the winter, there are no predictions about where it might appear next. The WHO's Fukuda said it would not be a surprise to see it appear in new countries.

Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

FSB colonel named in Litvinenko poison plot

2006-12-10T00:35:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Mikhail Trepashkin, the latest entry in the ever more curious poisoning plot.

Telegraph | News | FSB colonel named in Litvinenko poison plot

FSB colonel named in Litvinenko poison plot
By Helen Womack in Moscow and Colin Freeman, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 2:39am GMT 10/12/2006

An imprisoned Russian dissident has given The Sunday Telegraph revealing testimony in which he names a serving state security colonel as a key figure in the poisoning of the former spy Alexander Litvinenko.

Mikhail Trepashkin, a lawyer being held in a penal camp in the Urals, gave his information via an intermediary after the Kremlin refused to let him be questioned by Scotland Yard detectives who have travelled to Moscow. In testimony that he fears could put his own life at risk, Mr Trepashkin named the colonel as one of four FSB security service officers who appeared in masks alongside Litvinenko at a 1998 press conference, when the former agent accused his superiors of ordering the assassination of the oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

The Sunday Telegraph has been told the colonel's full identity, but is not publishing it for legal reasons. Mr Trepashkin, 50, who has repeatedly expressed his desire to speak to British police, said: "They need to be speaking to this serving FSB officer. I believe he is of key importance to their inquiries."

He also gave details of how he thought the plot to kill Litvinenko in London with a lethal dose of radioactive polonium 210 would have been hatched. The "hit" would have been planned over a long period, he said. "They needed to follow him and find out how he lived and what security arrangements he had. They wanted to make the death look natural. What they did not reckon with was that the polonium 210 would act so quickly and leave a trail." He had further information to corroborate his claims, he said, but would reveal the full details only in an interview with British police.

Mr Trepashkin is also a former agent of the FSB — the successor agency to the KGB — and was jailed in 2004 for allegedly disclosing state secrets. His supporters insist the charges against him were to prevent his disclosing evidence of FSB involvement in a series of apartment bombings in Russia in 1999 that killed 300 people.

The bombings, blamed at the time on Chechen militants, gave President Vladimir Putin the political justification for a military campaign against the breakaway republic of Chechnya that hugely boosted his domestic popularity.

Mr Trepashkin was present at Litvinenko's press conference the year before, when he alleged that the security services had been running death squads to kill businessmen hostile to Russian government interests.

The claims, which enraged the Kremlin, led to sackings in the FSB and Litvinenko's own brief detention before he fled abroad and eventually claimed asylum in Britain.

None of the masked fellow officers who appeared with him at the 1998 conference has ever been publicly identified. It remains unclear why, having apparently risked their lives and careers by siding with him with at the time, they might have later turned against him.

But Mr Trepashkin says the masked agent he has named is the only one still serving in the FSB, indicating someone who somehow still enjoys the confidence of the Kremlin.

Mr Trepashkin was answering questions passed to him by The Sunday Telegraph into EK-13, a low-security jail in Nizhny Tagil in the Middle Urals region, where he has a year still to serve. He now expects to be transferred to a tougher prison for speaking out, and fears being attacked or even killed in jail.

He is regarded by international human rights groups as a genuine political prisoner. Unlike some of the figures in the Litvinenko affair, he has no history of making wild or exaggerated claims.

Pioneers' lives put on university website

2006-12-09T19:36:00.000-05:00

By Aussigirl

Here is a story from the Dec. 8th issue of the Winnipeg Free Press. When you go to the website, you will find three sections described thus: (1) View over 10,000 digitized archival documents relating to immigration and immigration policy in western Canada from the holdings of the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections and the University of Saskatchewan Archives; (2) View three hundred images from the holdings of the archives of Oseredok, the Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre. The images are presented along with an accompanying historical narrative pertaining to the experience of Ukrainian immigrants in western Canada; (3) Experience this learning tool designed for students and teachers in grade six. Contains lesson plans and activities for teachers, a historical text with accompanying images of archival material, and a fun, yet educational, game for students relating to immigration and immigration policy in the early-twentieth century.
The photograph above, with this accompanying description, is one of many from Oseredok: A photograph taken by Ivan Bobersky of a Ukrainian immigrant woman and her children in Winnipeg, Manitoba, dated ca. 1920s. Look at the fear and uncertainty -- and determination -- in their faces. Here they are in a new land, surrounded by strangeness and the unfamiliar. What brave ancestors!

Pioneers' lives put on university website
By Kevin Rollason

LEARNING about the hardships of immigrant homesteaders on the prairies through their own letters, diaries and photos is only a few clicks of a mouse away.

Called the Prairie Immigration Experience, almost 15,000 documents from the archives of the University of Manitoba, the University of Saskatchewan, and the Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre in Winnipeg have been digitized and put on a new website.

Brett Lougheed, of the U of M's archives and special collections department, said about 5,000 of the images come from documents stored at his university, while about 15,000 come from the University of Saskatchewan. The Ukrainian Cultural and Education Centre has its 300 images on a link from the website's main page.

"A lot of people had this material in their basements and they wanted it to be saved so they gave them to us," Lougheed said on Thursday.

"Now anyone with a computer can access this material 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

He said documents on the website show the struggles faced by immigrants from various nationalities. These include Czech, Danish, English, Jewish, and Ukrainian.

As well, Lougheed said some of the collections include audio interviews with immigrants while one has a video clip.

"Ease of access was the main reason why we wanted to do this. It wasn't done for preservation reasons, but to improve access, but if there is less handling of the archival material itself, it can be maintained for much longer."

Lougheed said seven of the archival collections on the website come from the University of Saskatchewan while the rest come from the University of Manitoba.

Lougheed said a separate link will take Grade 6 students -- and their teachers -- to an education site made up of lesson plans, activities for teachers and an educational game.

The Prairie Immigration Experience website can be reached here.

© 2006 Winnipeg Free Press. All Rights Reserved.

America: Muslims' Heaven on Earth

2006-12-09T19:19:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Another thought-provoking article by the brilliant Amil Imani.

FrontPage magazine.com :: America: Muslims' Heaven on Earth by Amil Imani

America: Muslims' Heaven on Earth
By Amil Imani

People are familiar with Islam’s classification of the world into the Dar-ul-Solh—the hose of peace, meaning the house of Islam—and the Dar-ul-Harb—the house of war, meaning the house of non-Islam. Ironically, the self-proclaimed house of peace, from its early years, has waged war against the house of war.

Also there is a little-known third “house” according to Islam—Dar-ul-Aman—the non-Islam house of safety where Muslims find refuge. We already know which of the three houses America is to Al Qaeda, the Iranian mullahs, the Taliban, the Muslims Brotherhood and their ilk. We are posing this question to the rank and file Muslims, particularly to the arrivals of recent years who are finding refuge in the non-Islamic world, including the United States of America:

Which house is America to you?

America and other welcoming and generous non-Islam Dar-ul-Aman have given you refuge with opportunities for a decent life denied to you in your own Dar-ul-Solh by the ruthless and deceptive holy men of Allah who rule it.

Dear Muslim, reciprocity is a high human virtue. The kind people of Dar-ul-Aman deserve your in-kind response. You physically left the Dar-ul-Solh because it was and is abject failure in delivering its promises about a good life in this world. What guarantee is there that Islam’s the “pies-in-the-skies” promises about the next world—a world of virgins for the faithful male with rivers of milk and honey to energize him—are any more reliable?

What about the Muslim women? Are they going to be compensated for their enslavement by the men of Allah? Or, women, even in Allah’s paradise, remain in perpetuity “objects” of entertainment for men?

Now that you have seen for yourself the misery of Islamic system and you have sought a better life in the Dar-ul-Aman of the “infidels,” you need to take other steps: bid farewell to the Islamic mindset, abandon Ummehism, and enlist yourself in the rank of the democratic and tolerant people. Once freed from the oppressive and discriminating yoke of Islam, you can lend a hand to the protection and nurturance of democracy—a system of peoples’ rule with a proven record of being the best instrument for the realization of humanity’s aspirations.

The democratic rule of Dar-ul-Aman is not a void system invented by the infidels, as your devious self-serving theocrat leaders claim. Democracy is the best product of humanity’s caring and decent people: the rule of the people, by the people, for the people.

Democracy, by its accommodating and benign nature, is susceptible to corruption and even destruction by forces from within and from without. With this realization in mind, the founding fathers of the United States enshrined the Constitution to safeguard and protect the rule of the people.

Dear Muslim, being born human comes with a precious gift: the gift to think and decide for yourself. Islam has robbed you of this gift from birth. Parents, aided by relatives and brainwashed by slaveholder imams and mullahs, colluded and did the thinking for you when you were still in no position to exercise your right. They branded you as Muslim, simply because you were born in a Muslim family. Cattle are branded, not humans. Cattle are owned by others. Humans are not. Having branded you “Muslim,” those who robbed you of your gift of self-determination dared you to leave their bondage under the threat of death as apostate.

Dear Muslim, you have been intelligent enough to forsake the failed Islamdome for a better life elsewhere. Dar-ul-Aman has given refuge. Now that you are in a free society, you want to reclaim your stolen gift of liberty and freedom of choice. You want to shatter the shackles of Islam that has enchained you from birth. You want to take your place in the ranks of the supporters and promoters of liberty that democracy provides and Islam destroys.

Dear Muslim, you know full well that it is Islam’s dysfunctional doctrine with its Stone Age rule of Shari'a that is responsible for the abominable conditions of the Islamic countries.

Contrary to the preachers of hate—the Islamic clergy of vested interests—the “infidels” are not your enemies: they demonstrate their goodwill by giving you refuge; your deadly enemy is the doctrine of Islam that keeps you captive even in freedom.

Given that the formerly vast and largely segregated planet earth has shrunken into a “global village,” the disparate peoples isolated from one another for millennia are now in the same community. These people are in urgent need of adopting a social compact that would allow individuals as well as groups maximum latitude of faith, coupled with responsibility, and free of any practices that infringe on the rights of others or demonize them.

Regrettably, Islam is incompatible with such a harmonious compact. As an article of faith, Islam considers all non-Muslims, even the so-called People of the Book, as infidels—people who are to be subjugated or cleansed from Allah’s earth.

The Muslims have taken a great step by coming to a Dar-ul-Aman in search of self-betterment. Now, they need to take the next step of purging their minds of the Psychosocial Virus of intolerant Islam. They want to do all they can to give their children the gift of humanness by not doing what their parents did to them.

America is not perfect. No human enterprise ever is. Yet, America is the closest country to a true Dar-ul-Aman in the broadest sense. And it is Americans, overwhelmingly “infidels,” who make America what it is. While America opens its doors to the poor, the hungry, and the oppressed of the world, Americans open their hearts to the less fortunate people of various lands through their unsurpassed generosity. No nation gives more aid to international charities, as percentage of its gross domestic products, than the American people.

This “Refuge,” a nation of all nations called America, is indeed the harbinger of the not too far away world of the future, a future world where liberty rules supreme and fascism of all forms, including Islamofascism, will be remembered as horrific impediments to humanity’s forward-march toward making this global village a reflection of heaven.

House approves measure to preserve WWII internment camps

2006-12-05T21:55:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

How about preserving the detention camps where people like my parents were interned after WWII and subject to forcible deportation to the Soviet Union following the Yalta accords? My parents and family including my mother and young sister, including people with babies and children, were kept in former POW camps under armed guard, with armed sentries at the guard towers and behind barbed wires. They were many times forcibly moved from camp to camp and treated brutally by American soldiers who beat my father with the butt of a rifle. As people were being transported to what they thought were Soviet camps, women began throwing their children off the backs of trucks and jumping off and running into the woods as soldiers fired at them. This was a horrible miscarriage of justice that is little talked about. My parents barely escaped forced repatriation (and sure death) only by smuggling out a letter to General Eisenhower and telling him of our plight. He then sent his adjutant who examined the situation and gave them Eisenhower's personal word that they would not be forcibly moved.

KRT Wire | 12/05/2006 | House approves measure to preserve WWII internment camps

House approves measure to preserve WWII internment camps
By David Whitney
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Congress completed action Tuesday on legislation to preserve and protect the remnants of one of the darkest chapters in American history: the internment camps and gathering centers that were used in the roundup and forced detention of Japanese American citizens during World War II.

The voice vote in the House of Representatives came two days short of the 65th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. That tragedy stirred such fear and anger in the United States that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 three months later, ordering the roundup. The Supreme Court later upheld the directive on the grounds of "pressing public necessity."

Congress issued a formal apology in 1988 and offered $20,000 apiece in compensation to the survivors of the camps, who lost their freedom and property without any formal legal proceedings. Lesser numbers of Alaska Natives, Germans and Italians also were ordered detained.

On the West Coast, the Japanese Americans drew a strong public reaction. They were removed from their homes with very few possessions, taken to processing centers and transported to the internment camps, in remote corners of seven states, where they lived behind barbed-wire fences for most of the war.

Ten relocation centers were built to house them, and two - Manzanar and Minidoka - have been turned over to the National Park Service. With money from the legislation, what remains of the others can be restored and operated by local sponsors to keep the memory of the camps alive. President Bush is expected to sign the bill. [....]

Taking time off for health problems

2006-12-03T23:13:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Dear readers, I have been a bit under the weather of late, hence the sparse blogging. I'm going to have to take a few weeks off to take care of some health problems, and I may be back or checking in from time to time during and after some surgery that I will need.

In the meantime, I have asked a dear friend to act as a guest/ghost blogger, and he will be putting up interesting science articles and other articles that I can find for him and have him do for me.

I'll try to be back on my feet as soon as I can. In the meantime, I leave you in capable hands, so don't stop visiting the blog -- I appreciate all my readers.

A sticky problem

2006-12-03T23:04:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

I didn't know that, according to this article, a generalized understanding of friction at the nanoscale has so far remained out of reach.

A sticky problem (December 2006) - News - PhysicsWeb

A sticky problem
Jon Cartwright

Physicists in the US have made a peculiar discovery about how a small object slides over a rapidly rotating lubricated disk. They have found that if the object is tilted so that it only touches the disk at its corner, then the friction is greater when the disk rotates in one direction rather than the other. However, the low-friction direction is not the one you might expect -- a counterintuitive finding that the researchers say is caused by the properties of a meniscus that forms around the object (Phys. Rev. Lett. 97 216104).

In simple systems, the atomic origin of friction is fairly well established. But in more complex systems, such as the movement of a computer's read/write head over a rapidly spinning hard disk, a generalized understanding of friction at the nanoscale has so far remained out of reach. The friction depends on numerous factors, including roughness, lubrication, contact geometry, speed and vibration.

Now a team of researchers at electronics giant Hitachi have looked at what happens when the corner of a tilted oblong slider moves over a rotating carbon disk coated with polymeric lubricant. In their experiments, the team spun the disk under the slider at speeds of up to 12 m/s and measured the amount of friction using a strain gauge mounted on the slider's suspending arm. Curiously, the team found that the friction opposing the spinning of the disk is greater when the disk moves "away" from the tilted slider rather than "towards" it [see illustration].

Most people would naturally assume friction to be greater in the latter case, thinking that the pointed edge of the slider would "dig" into the surface. In fact, the lubricant not only prevents this from happening, but it also adds its own friction where it builds up as a meniscus in front of the slider. When the disk is spinning towards the slider this preceding meniscus so small that it has just a negligible effect, but in the opposite direction it is large enough to significantly hinder the disk's rotation.

However, this counterintuitive friction could also manifest itself on surfaces where there is no applied lubricant. When the team reduced the amount of "mobile" molecules in the lubricant (in other words, the slipperiness of it) from 50% in the original experiment down to less than 10%, they discovered again that friction was still greater for the disk moving away from the slider. And this low mobility of lubricant, they say, would be comparable to the trace amounts that reside even on surfaces supposedly considered to be "dry".

Colourful calculations

2006-12-03T21:33:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

The author begins her second paragraph thus: Understanding how the universe works at the most fundamental scale is often likened to peeling away the layers of an onion. How handy a metaphor the onion is! Here are some onion quotations that I found:

The onion and its satin wrappings is among the most beautiful of vegetables and is the only one that represents the essence of things. It can be said to have a soul. (Charles Dudley Warner)

Why is it that the poet tells
So little of the sense of smell?
These are the odors I love well:
The smell of coffee freshly ground;
Or rich plum pudding, holly crowned;
Or onions fried and deeply browned. (Christopher Morley)

Mine eyes smell onions: I shall weep anon. (Shakespeare)

Colourful calculations (December 2006) - Physics World - PhysicsWeb

The formidable computational power of lattice QCD is finally allowing researchers to make solid predictions about the force that binds quarks inside protons and neutrons, describes Christine Davies.

Understanding how the universe works at the most fundamental scale is often likened to peeling away the layers of an onion. The outermost layer of the onion represents atoms, and we have known about these for a century or so. The next layer of structure, which was revealed by Rutherford in 1911, is the atomic nucleus – a much smaller object that contains almost all of the atomic mass. Some 20 years after that discovery, physicists realized that the nucleus is composed of more fundamental objects called protons and neutrons. However, peeling back the next layer of the onion has turned out to be much more of a challenge.

It is now universally accepted that protons and neutrons are made up of fractionally charged particles called quarks: two "up" quarks and a "down" quark in a proton, and two downs and an up in a neutron. There are six types of quarks in total, but none of them has ever been observed as a free particle. Smashing protons together at enormous energies in particle accelerators, for instance, reveals not single quarks but yet more particles made of quarks. Such particles are called hadrons, and there are hundreds of them: some are "baryons", which contain three quarks, while the rest are "mesons" made up of quark-antiquark pairs. It might therefore seem, as indeed it did to particle physicists in the 1960s, that the core of the onion is forever hidden.

The only way we can understand the properties of quarks is to compare experimental measurements of hadrons with calculations based on quantum chromodynamics or QCD: the theory of the "strong force" that binds quarks together. Despite being around for over 30 years, however, the equations of QCD have proved eye-wateringly difficult to solve. Indeed, to the immense frustration of particle physicists, it has been impossible to calculate properties of hadrons with an accuracy of better than 10%.

In the December issue of Physics World, Christine Davies shows how a the technique "lattice QCD" is allowing these equations to be solved much more accurately by representing space-time as a 4D lattice – which, she says, could reveal what the final layer of the onion looks like.

Protein Folding in a Curved Space

2006-12-03T16:38:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

The diagram shows the main stages of protein folding, and as a good introduction to help me understand the article posted below, I've added here the description that went with the diagram:

Protein folding is the transaction by which an unfolded polypeptide chain folds into a specific native and functional structure. After leaving the ribosome, the polypeptide chain goes through a number of steps, the folding pathway, ‘ in which the protein has to go through a sequence of intermediates to fold into the native structure’ (Arai M, Kuwajima K 2000). Recent studies (Arai M, Kuwajima et al, 2000) using data and propositions from both experimental (Ptitsyn 1995, Kuwajima 1992,1996, Baldwin 1995,1996,1999) and theoretical studies (the ‘energy landscape’ theory as proposed by Dill and Chan,1997 and Nyemeyer et al, 1998) have suggested that protein folding is divided into two stages.
The first stage involves the formation of the molten globule state from the unfolded polypeptide chain; a flexible intermediate where the protein forms its basic structural framework but with no specific side-chain packing. The second stage involves the formation of the native state from the molten globule state; specific tertiary structure is assembled with precise hydrophobic interactions and side-chain packing. This subsequent folding often requires specific molecules called molecular chaperones to help in the formation of the precise native state. More recent studies have however indicated that these two steps may not be as distinct from one another as previously thought, and some now feel that co-translational protein folding is a more accurate model.
Once individual proteins are folded correctly it is possible for multiprotein complexes to form, which may be an essential step in forming the protein’s quaternary structure. Multiprotein complex formation is an all-or-nothing process to insure that efficient functional complexes are formed without the hindrance that can be caused by incomplete assembly. Linkage plays an important role in insuring all-or-none assembly. If proteins misfold then systems to cope with this exist within the cell. The unfolded protein response deals with an accumulation of misfolded proteins in the ER, providing a route for misfolded proteins to retry folding. If the protein is irretrievable by this process then they are degraded by ubiquitin-dependent proteolytic degradation.

And we go merrily along, unaware of all this fabulous activity taking place at lightning speed inside us that keeps us alive!

Physics news Update 803

Protein Folding in a Curved Space

Physicists at the Università di Firenze, in Italy, have put a new slant on the protein folding problem. Proteins are special polymers made of amino acids. Generic polymers, when you cool them enough, will collapse in a ball. Proteins do something more interesting: they fold up into a particular compact form. If a protein fails to find this form it won't be able to carry out its designated function and disease can result. For instance, some nonfolding proteins will aggregate into long filaments, amyloid fibrils, and this has proven to be the basis for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

Finding the precise dynamics behind protein folding would be like Isaac Newton finding the laws of universal gravitation. We aren't at that point yet, but there are ways of investigating some of the steps proteins take to arrive at their proper form. One fruitful approach is to see the multi-step process as taking place in a series of energy transactions. At any moment the protein can be represented as a point moving around in an abstract space whose coordinates correspond to all possible configurations and the associated energy needed to have that structure, sort of like a ball rolling along on the inner surface of a bowl. The bowl might have some partitions, and the ball might be able to roll up out of one compartment and into a neighboring one if its energy is sufficient, or if the wall between compartments is low enough, or if some extra energy (maybe in the form of heat or a chemical reaction) is added.

Lapo Casetti (casetti@fi.infn.it) and Lorenzo Mazzoni have attempted to make the "energy landscape" method even more geometrical by characterizing the folding forces at work as being a form of curvature in the bowl-like well in which the protein is operating. This is analogous to what Albert Einstein did in characterizing gravity as the curvature of spacetime in which planets and stars move about. Mazzoni and Casetti seek to determine what it is about the curvature of the energy landscape that encourages proteins to fold and other polymers not to fold.

Warming Caused by Natural Cycle, Not Humans

2006-12-02T19:03:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Take this "inconvenient truth", Al Gore, and all your acolytes and minions!

NCPA: Warming Caused by Natural Cycle, Not Humans...

NCPA: Warming Caused by Natural Cycle, Not Humans; NCPA Adjunct Scholars Avery and Singer Outline Unstoppable Climate in New Book

DALLAS, Nov. 16 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Human activities have little to do with the Earth's current warming trend, according to a new book by Denis Avery and Fred Singer, adjunct scholars with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA). In fact, the book concludes that global warming and cooling seem to be part of a 1,500-year cycle of moderate temperature swings. Coming out as the leadership of Congress shifts, the book -- Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years -- builds on research the two previously outlined in an NCPA study, found here.

"The evidence supporting a 1,500- year cycle is too great to dismiss," said S. Fred Singer, co-author of the book, professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia and president of the Science and Environment Policy Project. "Evidence from every continent and ocean confirms the 1,500-year cycle," added Dennis Avery, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the book's other co-author.

According to Avery and Singer, within the 90,000-year Ice Age cycles, the Earth also experiences 1,500-year warming-cooling cycles. The current warming began about 1850 and will possibly continue for another 500 years. Their findings are drawn from physical evidence of past climate cycles that have been documented by researchers around the world from tree rings and ice cores, stalagmites and dust plumes, prehistoric villages and collapsed cultures, fossilized pollen and algae skeletons, titanium profiles and niobium ions, and other sources.

Considered collectively, the author's findings are clear and convincing evidence of a 1,500-year climate cycle. And if the current warming trend is part of a natural cycle, then actions to prevent further warming would be futile, could impose substantial costs upon the global economy and lessen the ability of the world's peoples to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

"Are human activities, including the burning of fossil fuel, the primary or even significant cause of the current warming trend? The scientifically appropriate answer -- cautious and conforming to the facts -- is probably not," the authors said.

The book is published by Rowman and Littlefield and is available through book sellers such as Amazon.com.

The NCPA is an internationally known nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute with offices in Dallas and Washington, D.C., that advocates private solutions to public policy problems. NCPA depends on the contributions of individuals, corporations and foundations that share its mission. The NCPA accepts no government grants.

Jihadis and whores

2006-12-02T18:04:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Spengler, in the middle of this article on the shocking exploitation of women in Iran and elsewhere, has this sentence: "Fatima" from Persia has become as familiar as "Natasha" from Belarus. In October I posted People-trafficking in Odessa -- a sea of tears, about sex-trafficking in Ukraine, and included a link to The Natashas, a blog for those interested in fighting the scourge of human trafficking of women and men, girls and boys, especially for purposes of sexual exploitation . Please read these articles -- this is a terrible problem, and getting worse.

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News - Jihadis and whores

Jihadis and whores
By Spengler

Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.

The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards in 1999. That helps explain why Ukraine has the world's fastest rate of population decline. On a smaller scale, trafficking in Iranian women explains Iran's predicament.

To understand Iranian politics, cherchez les femmes: the fate of Iranian women sheds light on the eccentricity of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. By Spengler's Universal Law of Gender Parity, the men and women of every place and every time deserve each other. A corollary to this universal law states that the battered Iranian whore is the alter ego of the swaggering Iranian jihadi.

In the interest of balanced reporting, I cite the history of Jewish prostitution before delving into the Persian example. The Jews have lived long enough to be defeated more often than any other people. After Spain expelled them in 1492, the Jews sold their women so widely that the character of the Jewish prostitute figured prominently in 16th-century literature, notably in one of the earliest novels, La Lozana Andaluza (1528), a story of refugee Spanish-Jewish whores in Rome. After Russian pogroms drove Jews out of the Pale of Settlement in the late 19th century, Jewish women became the raw material of the white-slave traffic, supplying Argentina as well as Western Europe. [1] Jewish prostitutes are almost unknown today, a measure of the revival of the Jewish nation.

These distasteful facts bear directly upon Iran's national decline, and the impulses that push the Iranian leadership toward strategic flight forward. Iran's plunging birth rate, I observed in essays past, will burden the country with an elderly population proportionately as large as Western Europe's within a generation, just at the point at which this impoverished country will have ceased to export oil. By 2030, Iranian society will collapse. [....]

What is it that persuades women to employ their bodies as an instrument of commerce, rather than as a way of achieving motherhood? It is not just poverty, for poor women bear children everywhere. In the case of Iran, deracination and cultural despair impel millions of individual women to eschew motherhood. Prostitution is a form of psychic suicide; writ large, it is a manifestation of the national death-wish, the hideous recognition that the world no longer requires Ukrainians or Moldovans. [....]

The proliferation of Iranian prostitutes in Western Europe as well as the Arab world helps explain the country's population trends. The European Commission's most comprehensive surveys of human trafficking found that Iranian women made up 10-15% of the prostitutes working in Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy. [2] "Fatima" from Persia has become as familiar as "Natasha" from Belarus. Iranian whores long have been a scandal in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which periodically round up and expel them.

It is hard to obtain reliable data on prostitution inside Iran itself, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it has increased since Ahmadinejad became president last year. Anti-regime sociologists claim that at least 300,000 women are whoring in Tehran alone. The ADNKronos website reported on April 25:
Prostitution is on the rise in Iran ... Sociologist Amanollah Gharaii Moghaddam told ADNKronos International (AKI) that he believes Iran's deteriorating economy and the high unemployment rate among youths to be the main causes of this worrying phenomenon. In Iran, 28% of young people between the ages of 15 and 29 are unemployed ... The age of prostitutes is increasingly younger, and girls as young as 12 are selling their bodies on Iran's streets. Overall, the number of prostitutes is also on the rise and there are an estimated 300,000 of them in Tehran alone ... Nevertheless, Gharaii Moghaddam says "the number isn't so high when compared [with] the 4 million unemployed only in Tehran and the 5 million drug addicts today in Iran".

The clerical regime vacillates between repressing prostitution and sanctioning it through "temporary marriages", an arrangement permitted under Shi'ite jurisprudence. In the latter case the Muslim clergy in effect become pimps, taking a fee for sanctioning several "temporary marriages" per women per day. [....]

The collapse of traditional society has brought about a collapse of birth rates across cultures. Cultures that fail to reproduce themselves by definition are failed cultures, for the simple reason that they will cease to exist before many generations have passed.

That is why the Islamists - Muslims who seek a new theocracy - display a sense of extreme urgency. They are not conservative Muslims, for they reject Muslim society as it exists as corrupt and decadent. They are revolutionaries who want to create a new kind of totalitarian theocracy that orders every detail of human life. [3]
Nothing is more threadbare than the claim of Islamists to defend Muslim womanhood. Islamist radicals (like the penny-a-marriage mullahs of Iran) are the world's most prolific pimps. The same networks that move female flesh across borders also provide illegal passage for jihadis, and the proceeds of human trafficking often support Islamist terrorists. From Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur to Sarajevo to Tirana, the criminals who trade in women overlap with jihadist networks. Prostitutes serve the terror network in a number of capacities, including suicide bombing. The going rate for a Muslim woman who can pass for a European to carry a suicide bomb currently is more than US$100,000. The Persian prostitute is the camp follower of the jihadi, joined to him in a pact of national suicide.

What Islamic Science and Philosophy?

2006-12-02T14:43:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

This is the second of the two articles that American Thinker published yesterday about Islam and its attitude towards rationality and science (the first is posted right below). Here we learn that in its true heart Islam is anti-science and anti-rationality.

American Thinker: What Islamic Science and Philosophy?

December 01, 2006
What Islamic Science and Philosophy?
By Jonathan David Carson

We know that we are being lied to. Sometimes we just don't realize how much we are being lied to.

The more sordid the Islamic present seems, the more we are told of the glories of the Islamic past. And the most glorious of the glories of Islam, the most enlightened of its enlightenments, are the "Islamic science" and "Islamic philosophy" of the Golden Age.

So what does Islamic law say about this science and this philosophy? According to Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (d. 1368), they are unlawful, serious affronts to Islam, a form of apostasy. Apologists for Islam in the West brag about the "Islamic science" and "Islamic philosophy" that their accomplices in the Islamic world condemn. [....]

The importance of "occasionalism," the doctrine that events are brought about by the direct will of God, not by natural causes, for Islam and for the West's differences with it is emphasized in the following statement of Majid Fakhry:
In fact it is no exaggeration to say that a number of distinctively Islamic notions such as fatalism, utter resignation to God, the surrender of personal endeavour, belief in the unqualified transcendence of God, etc., cannot be fully understood except in the perspective of the occasionalist world-view.

This doctrine is at the heart of Islam. Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, and Aquinas warned us against it, but now university, scientific establishment, media, State Department, and even corporate America, elites of every sort, pretend that Avicenna and Averroes are the paragons of Islamic philosophy and Maimonides and Aquinas their best pupils and thus in debt to Islam. If we are going to escape humiliation, madness, and death, we are going to have to educate ourselves and fight for even the simplest and most obvious of truths. The establishment is certainly not going to do it for us.

Islam and the Problem of Rationality

2006-12-02T14:01:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Yesterday, American Thinker published two very interesting and insightful articles about Islam and its attitude towards rationality and science. In the first one, posted below, we learn of two concepts that Islam introduced, "volunteerism" and "occasionalism", both of which undermine the basis for what Westerners understand as natural law .

American Thinker: Islam and the Problem of Rationality

December 01, 2006
Islam and the Problem of Rationality
By Patrick Poole

In the run-up to Pope Benedict's current visit to Turkey, TIME Magazine opened its pages to Tariq Ramadan, Europe's favorite Islamist and perhaps the most influential Muslim figure in the West today. Ramadan chided the Pope and Europe for ignoring the positive contributions of Islam to the development of rational thought in the West.

Writing in response to Benedict's now-famous Regensburg speech (which prompted outrage in the Muslim world) and the Pope's first visit to a predominantly Muslim country, Ramadan's article, "And He's Still in the Dark", offers a back-handed compliment to Benedict's attempt at dialogue with Muslims, warning that the Pope's efforts actually threatens the West, and directs Muslims in the West to their point of apologetic attack:

As I have written before, this profoundly European Pope is inviting the people of his continent to become aware of the central, inescapable character of Christianity within their identity, or risk losing it. That may be a legitimate goal, but Benedict's narrow definition of European identity is deeply troubling and potentially dangerous. This is what Muslims must respond to: the tendency of Westerners to ignore the critical role that Muslims played in the development of Western thought. Those who "forget" the decisive contributions of rationalist Muslim thinkers like al-Farabi (10th century), Avicenna (11th century), Averroes (12th century), al-Ghazali (12th century), Ash-Shatibi (13th century) and Ibn Khaldun (14th century) are reconstructing a Europe that is not only an illusion but also self-deceptive about its past.

But in fact, it is Ramadan who is operating under an illusion and is self-deceived about Islam's supposed prominent role in shaping the rationalist tradition of Christendom. As an article ("The Pope and the Prophet" )by Robert Reilly in the current issue of Crisis Magazine ably notes, Western Christianity's rational tradition developed in the Medieval era precisely as a result of the outright rejection of the irrationalism inherent in Islamic philosophy, not the embracing of it. [....]

It was the work of the very Islamic philosophers that Ramadan cites that prompted Europe Christian thinkers to make a break with their Muslim counterparts. Historically, the views of the Ash'arite school were rooted in the theological dogma of "volunteerism", which holds that rather than created objects having inherent existence, Allah constantly recreates each atom anew at every moment according to his arbitrary will. This, of course, undermines the basis for what Westerners understand as natural laws.

From volunteerism sprung another irrational idea amongst Muslim thinkers - occasionalism - that further prevented the development of rationalism within the Islamic tradition. Occasionalism is the belief that in the natural world, what is perceived as cause and effect between objects is mere appearance, not reality. Instead, only Allah truly acts with real effect; all seemingly natural observances of causation are merely manifestations of Allah's habits, for Allah simultaneously creates both the cause and the effect according to his arbitrary will. [....]

If Tariq Ramadan is really serious about a dialogue between Islam and the West and cultivating Western values amongst Muslims (and there is some reason to believe that he isn't serious), it must not only be open, but honest as well. Relying on an invented and purely mythological Islamic history and ignoring the problems of Islamic philosophy are not the place for Muslims to initiate the dialogue. Pope Benedict's starting point is clearly much better.

Scotland and the ultimate reference book

2006-12-01T18:57:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

From today's scotsman.com's Fact of the Day: On this day in 1768 the first volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica was published. The volume was edited by 28-year old scholar William Smellie and published in Edinburgh. I didn't know anything about the Scottish connection, but the following article tells you all you need to know.
The illustration is described thus: The frontispiece of the 1788 Encyclopaedia Britannica was set out to convey the ideals and inspiration of the Scottish Enlightenment with arts, science and technology.

Scotsman.com Heritage & Culture - Ideas & Ingenuity - Scotland and the ultimate reference book

Scotland and the ultimate reference book
JENNIFER VEITCH

ANYONE browsing the web in search of "enlightenment" may well have come across the wealth of information now available at a site called britannica.com. The company that owns this online encyclopaedia is based in the US, but what is often forgotten is its world-famous product - the oldest continuously published reference work in the English language - has its roots in the enlightenment of Edinburgh.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica was first published in the Scottish capital in 1768. It was not the first encyclopaedia to make it into print, but its founders, bookseller and printer Colin Macfarquhar and engraver Andrew Bell, wanted to make sure it was the best - and that it would make a profit.

First the two gentlemen required an editor. They soon found their man - a self-taught scholar in 28-year-old William Smellie, the son of a stonemason who had blagged his way into classes at Edinburgh University. As an apprentice to the university's official printers, Smellie was an informal student but he put those on the official roll to shame, excelling in Latin, English and the natural sciences.

Messrs Bell and Macfarquhar offered their new employee the sum of £200 to produce an encyclopaedia in 100 parts, with the first appearing in December 1768, priced six pence. The instalments were not published weekly as had been advertised however, as Smellie complained: "The Editors, though fully sensible of the propriety of adopting the present plan, were not aware of the length of time necessary for the execution."

The end result proved to be worth waiting for and the first Britannica was not only a scholarly work, but packed with practical information. For example, readers were advised to cure toothache with "laxatives of manna or cassia dissolved in whey or asses' milk."

All 100 parts were completed in 1771, and it is estimated that 3,000 sets were sold. Smellie declined to be editor of the second edition, which began in 1776. He went on to translate works in natural sciences and co-founded the Newtonian Society and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland as well as becoming a master printer. He died in poverty and obscurity, although he is immortalised in the words of the poet Robert Burns, who described Smellie as having, "A head for thought profound and clear, unmatched/And, though his caustic wit was biting rude,/His heart was warm, benevolent and good."

Macfarquhar took over as editor of Britannica for the second and third editions, which was aided by James Tytler. After Macfarquhar died in 1793, Bell took control and appointed George Gleig, the future Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, as editor. The third edition saw Britannica's popularity cross the ocean to America. Thomas Dobson, a Philadelphia bookseller, imported each part as it was printed in Edinburgh and sold his sets to some famous customers - George Washington and Alexander Hamilton.

Bell died in 1809, and while a fourth edition, edited by James Millar, appeared shortly after his death, it was essentially a reprinting of the third. A pivotal point in Britannica's history would come when the company was bought in 1812 by the publisher Archibald Constable.

Constable produced brochures to advertise Britannica, and oversaw the fifth and sixth editions, which were edited by Macvey Napier, a lawyer and professor at Edinburgh University. A six-volume supplement was completed in 1824 and sold well in Britain and Philadelphia.

When Napier was hired to write the seventh edition however, Constable ran into debt, having himself lent money to booksellers who went bankrupt, and he died in 1827 with his grand plans for the wider distribution of Britannica unfulfilled. However, Constable had proven the potential for wider sales of this scholarly reference work.

An Edinburgh bookseller, Adam Black, bought the company, and retained Napier as editor. While the seventh edition was not completed until 1842, after much protracted argument between Black and Napier over the number of volumes, it was a critical success. Black was even offered a knighthood by Queen Victoria, which he turned down.

After Napier's death, Black turned to R. Thomas Stewart Traill, a professor of medical jurisprudence at Edinburgh University, to edit the eighth edition. Published in 1861, it was the first to have American contributors, including the president of Harvard, Edward Everett.

But the ninth edition would win Britannica even more readers. The first to be edited by a non-Scot, Thomas Spencer Baynes, the former editor of the Edinburgh Guardian, it reflected the radical thinking of Charles Darwin. This edition was also the first to be printed in the US - distributed by Charles Scribner and Little, Brown - and for the first time American sales outstripped those in Britain.

The poor sales in the UK caught the attention of advertising man Henry Haxton and US book promoter Horace Hooper. With investment from publisher Walter Montgomery Jackson, Hooper obtained the rights to print and sell 5,000 copies of the ninth edition.

Hooper struck a deal with The (London) Times to market Britannica at a cut price. It was a huge success and led Hooper and Jackson to acquire full ownership from the Blacks, effectively ending Britannica's association with Edinburgh.

After the 11th edition was produced in 1915, Hooper persuaded his friend Julius Rosenwald, the head of Chicago-based mail order firm Sears, Roebuck and Co, to promote and sell Britannica. America would prove to be the marketplace that would launch the encyclopaedia as the definitive work of reference. But its role in the education of millions wouldn't have been possible without the vision of two Edinburgh gentlemen, Andrew Bell and Colin Macfarquhar.

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! My tables, my tables,—meet it is I set it down! That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!

2006-11-27T20:23:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Thus Hamlet damns his uncle Claudius, but his condemnation seemed to me also appropriate for another arch-villain, Putin. Read the following article that shows in great detail the monstrous lengths that villains will go to to retain power.

OpinionJournal - Featured Article

Who Killed Litvinenko?
Try asking Vladimir Putin.
BY DAVID SATTER
Monday, November 27, 2006 12:01 a.m.

MOSCOW--Until a week ago, Alexander Litvinenko, a former colonel in the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, was virtually unknown outside the murky world of Russian intelligence. With his death in London from a massive dose of the radioactive element polonium 210, however, his fate may lead to a fundamentally different relationship between Russia and the West.

Beginning with the Yeltsin era, two U.S. administrations have muted their criticism of Russia. This was the case even in the face of a series of political murders in Russia. But if Litvinenko, a British subject, was murdered by Russian intelligence on British soil, self-censorship is no longer an option. Unless we want to give the Putin regime carte blanche to dispose of its enemies on our soil, we now have no choice but to react.

Russian television has given an explanation for the murder of Litvinenko as surrealistic as any offered by the Soviets during the Cold War. It attributed his death to intrigues in the entourage of the exiled Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky. An announcer on the evening news said Litvinenko was "a pawn in a game whose significance he did not understand."

Mr. Berezovsky, however, had no reason to kill Litvinenko, whose views he shared and whom he had helped since his arrival in the U.K. in 2000. In November 1998, Litvinenko revealed a plot to kill Mr. Berezovsky who, at the time, was the deputy head of the Russian security council. The evidence points instead to Litvinenko having been murdered by the FSB, which, together with the other "force ministries," has become the dominant political force in Russia today.

The FSB has always had a strong interest in Vladimir Putin's critics abroad. In December 2001, a Russian police official, in announcing a warrant for Mr. Berezovsky's arrest, said, "We know what he eats for breakfast, where he has lunch and where he buys his groceries." This was followed up in September 2003 with an unsuccessful attempt to kill Mr. Berezovsky with a needle camouflaged as a pen. The British reacted by granting Mr. Berezovsky political asylum. In 2004, a stranger threw a Molotov cocktail at Litvinenko and Akhmed Zakaev, the London representative of the separatist government of Chechnya, as they stood on the street near Litvinenko's residence. Besides a history of tracking Mr. Putin's opponents, the FSB could have been encouraged to kill Litvinenko because in June the Russian State Duma passed a law allowing the president to authorize attacks by the FSB on "terrorists" in foreign countries. In fact, the Russian intelligence services do not need a law to attack persons they regard as terrorists abroad. On Feb. 13, 2004, the former Chechen president, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, was killed and his 12-year-old son seriously injured when a bomb attached by Russian agents ripped apart their SUV. The new law, however, gives a seal of legitimacy to such operations and guarantees that those who carried them out will not be disowned or forgotten in the event of failure (or possibly even prosecuted in a post-Putin democratic dispensation).

In the last six years, the makeup of the ruling elite in Russia has undergone a dramatic change. Once in power, Mr. Putin filled the majority of important posts with veterans of the security services, many with ties to him dating back to his work in St. Petersburg. By 2003, the top ministers, half of the members of the Russian security council and 70% of all senior regional officials in Russia were former members of the security services. At the same time, many of these persons gained access to great wealth. Russia was already highly corrupt under Boris Yeltsin but, according to IDEM, an independent Russian think tank, with the rise in oil prices the level of corruption in Russia between 2002 and 2005 increased 900%.

The result of these developments was that Mr. Putin created an FSB ruling class. As this class became rooted, the victims of contract killers in Russia began to include some of the most prominent political figures in the country.

The most sensitive question in Russia is the provenance of the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buinaksk in which 300 persons died. As a result of the bombings, the second Chechen war was launched and, in his role as wartime leader, Mr. Putin, then the prime minister, achieved enough popularity to be elected president. There is widespread belief that the real authors of the bombings were the FSB. Two of the political figures murdered in Russia in recent years were trying to investigate the bombings.

The first victim was Sergei Yushenkov, a co-chairman of the Liberal Russia Party and member of the commission on the apartment bombings. He was shot on April 17, 2003. Mikhail Kodanev, the other leader of the Liberal Russia Party, was tried and sentenced to 20 years in prison for organizing the murder. Two years later, however, Igor Korolkov, a reporter for Moscow News, learned that a video camera near the building where Yushenkov was shot captured two persons running from the building immediately after the killing. The police collected the tape but it was never included in the case filed against Kodanev.

In July 2003, Duma deputy Yuri Shchekochikhin, another member of the commission on the 1999 bombings, died after contracting an unexplained illness. Shchekochikhin, who was also a reporter for Novaya Gazeta, had been investigating the "Three Whales" furniture stores that reportedly evaded millions of dollars in import duties. A co-founder of the stores was the father of Yuri Zaostrovtsev, then a deputy director of the FSB. Shchekochikhin's illness progressed catastrophically from peeling skin to "edemas of the respiratory system and brain" and death. When Novaya Gazeta tried to investigate whether he had been poisoned, they were told that all information was a "medical secret" that could not be disclosed even to family members.

Finally, Anna Politkovskaya, perhaps Russia's best-known journalist, was murdered last month. She traveled to Chechnya regularly despite the risk and was sought out by people from all over the North Caucasus in the hope that she would tell the world about their situation. It used to be said in Russia that no one is killed for politics. Politkovskaya, however, was clearly the victim of a political killing because she wrote only about politics.

Litvinenko resembles the others in this list in all respects except one. He lived in England. His book, "Blowing Up Russia," accused the FSB of the 1999 apartment bombings. He received visitors from Russia, was able to comment knowledgably on the actions of the FSB in Moscow, and refused to be intimidated.

In the wake of Litvinenko's death, the West must insist on cooperation from the FSB in finding his killers. If that is not forthcoming, it should be assumed that the murder of Litvinenko was ordered by the Russian regime.

Under those circumstances, not only should Russia be expelled from the G-8 but the whole structure of mutual consultation and cooperation would need to be re-evaluated. This is not just a matter of refusing to trivialize a murder. It is also a vital political obligation. Russians of all types are watching to see whether the West will simply swallow this crime or finally react to the rampant criminalization of Russian society. There are forces in Russia that want the country to be part of the West. But to back them, we need to demonstrate that we have moral values that we defend. To do less would be to abandon Russia to the forces of nihilism and obscurantism.

Mr. Satter is affiliated with the Hoover Institution, the Hudson Institute and Johns Hopkins. His most recent book is "Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State" (Yale, 2003).

Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Was former KGB agent murdered over false-flag terrorism within Russia?

2006-11-26T17:16:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Look at these two photos -- one of a man in his prime, with a serious, thoughtful expression on his face -- the other of this same man in agonizing pain, struck down by the devil himself. This terrible incident bears witness to the truth of the old adage: He who sups with the devil should use a long spoon.

The Raw Story | Was former KGB agent murdered over false-flag terrorism within Russia?

Was former KGB agent murdered over false-flag terrorism within Russia?
Larisa Alexandrovna
Published: Sunday November 26, 2006

Were a Russian journalist and an ex-KGB officer murdered over an investigation of the Beslan terrorist attack?

Former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who passed away late last week from what many intelligence officials have indicated they believe to be a state-sponsored assassination, was likely the victim of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki (SVR), well-placed sources tell RAW STORY.

Specifically, two former Cold War CIA officers, who still on occasion provide consulting work for the CIA, point to the S Directorate of SVR, which is in charge of black operations and other allegedly highly illegal transnational activities. They believe that the murders are closely tied to terrorist activities within Russia, and likely do involve Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Litvinenko died of radiation poisoning from a rare and highly concentrated isotope, polonium-210. It is alleged that prior to the poisoning he had been in receipt of documents that were also in the possession of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya when she was found dead of multiple gunshot wounds in her Moscow apartment building in October of this year.

"They put a contract out on her," said one former high-ranking CIA officer with expertise in the region, "and there was already a failed poisoning attempt."

"They had her shot," that source explains, "in order to send a message to other Russian journalists to back off reporting on the Russian bombings."

Although none of the sources interviewed for this article were able to say too much regarding what is an ongoing investigation into the two murders, several former intelligence sources pointed to alleged false-flag bombings that were carried out in Russia starting in 1999.

A false-flag operation is one in which an attack is carried out by one government or entity and made to seem the work of another. In modern times, the term has become synonymous with Operation Gladio, a series of false-flag bombings inflicted on Italy by certain far right members of elements in the government and military, the aim of which was to frame opposition parties in order to discredit them, as well as to force that nation as a whole to move politically right of center. This method was known as the Strategy of Tension.

The Russian bombings bear all the hallmarks of such operations, including the most well-known of these bombings, in which a car bomb was detonated in front of an apartment building in the city of Buynaksk that served as military housing for Russian soldiers, killing more than sixty residents. The attack was blamed on Chechen separatists and was used to justify attacks on suspected Chechen sympathizers and alleged co-conspirators, as well as on Chechnya itself. Other bombings soon followed, leading to then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declaring war on the separatist region, which had gained de facto independence following the breakup of the Soviet Union.

But it was not until the failed Rayzan bombing attempt that the suspected role of the Russian government in the bombings began to be alleged publicly. In mid-1999, a group of agents of the Russian Federal Security Service, or Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB), were found placing explosives at an apartment complex in the city of Rayzan. The FSB is the Russian equivalent of the FBI, and it and the SVR are the two arms of what used to be known as the KGB. The materials used in this incident were similar to those found at the other bombings committed throughout 1999, but th FSB denied any involvement in the previous terrorist attacks and described the Rayzan bombing plot as a domestic counter-terrorism exercise.

The Russian Duma -- the lower house of the Federal Assembly -- attempted to investigate the bombings, but the Kremlin would not cooperate or provide requested documentation.

At the time of the alleged attempt to poison Anna Politkovskaya, the reporter was en route to the city of Beslan, the site of an infamous elementary school hostage crisis of September 2004, a three day stand-off between alleged Chechen terrorists and Russian domestic security forces that left 344 people dead, more than half of them children.

A source in one of the Western European intelligence organizations suggests that "Annas heart never left Beslan," and that up until the moment of her death the journalist was pursuing evidence that might prove "embarrassing to the Kremlin."

RAW STORY has not been able to obtain additional confirmation of this particular allegation, or greater clarity on what the Kremlin might view as embarrassing with regard to Beslan. There have, however, been allegations of censorship of information and stalling by the Kremlin to avoid investigating the massacre, including outright claims of criminal incompetence.

Whatever it was that Politkovskaya was working on eventually landed in the lap of Alex Litvinenko -- or at least was supposed to on the day he was poisoned.

One of the CIA officers RAW STORY spoke with for this article suggested that whoever carried out the Litvinenko murder would have required the backing of a state sponsor, because only a government would have access to something as rare and difficult to obtain as polonium-210. The highly powerful and radioactive isotope has a half-life of fewer than 140 days.

Another former CIA officer (who sometimes currently serves as a CIA consultant) alleged that whoever carried out the attack must actually have been doing it on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin and was either an agent of or working directly for the S Directorate of SVR.

"They never thought anyone would identify the poison," said this source. "but the Brits were very good."

Reports have Litvinenko meeting with several individuals on November 1 -- the day on which he became ill -- including a meeting that afternoon at a sushi bar with Mario Scaramella, his contact regarding the Politkovskaya murder. Some have indicated that they believe that a meeting at a London hotel with two Russian friends that same morning may have been where he was poisoned.

There is also an allegation that the murder may have taken place when Litvinenko had tea at the apartment of a friend prior to proceeding to the sushi restaurant. According to the BBC, Oleg Gordievsky -- who is a former KGB colleague of Litvinenko, like him a defector to the UK, and the author of a book blaming FSB agents for the 1999 bombings -- pointed to a Russian friend with whom Litvinenko had a meeting earlier in the day. "He told the BBC he believed Mr. Litvinenko was poisoned when he drank a cup of tea at the flat of an old Russian friend -- before the lunchtime meeting at the sushi restaurant."

However, one British intelligence officer, who wished to remain anonymous given that the investigation is still ongoing, suggested a different possibility. "You should start," says this source, "with the Italian." The Italian in question is Mario Scaramella, the contact whom Litvinenko met at the sushi bar to discuss the case of Anna Politkovskaya.

Scaramella, an expert on the former Soviet Union, does indeed appear to have both a relationship with the Russian FSB and some knowledge of radioactive materials. According to an account by BBC International Monitoring, originally from an Italian source, in 2004 Scaramella brought to the attention of Italian police an attempt to smuggle highly enriched uranium into Italy:

"During the month of September 2004 I was approached by a Ukrainian national, whom I know by the name of Sasha, who wanted to sell me a briefcase containing radioactive material, and, more precisely, uranium for military use." There is enough testimony by Giovanni Guidi, a Rimini businessman, and by other defendants - Giorgio Gregoretti, Elmo Olivieri and Giuseppe Genghini - to fuel a spy story [preceding two words published in English] worthy of a novel by Le Carre. Involved is a briefcase containing five kilos of highly enriched uranium, half of which would be enough to build an atomic device, which remained for months in a Rimini garage. A briefcase, however, which eluded investigators, and which managed to get back into the hands of the Ukrainian national, who perhaps is still in Italy. Together with another briefcase having a similar content, and a third believed to conceal a tracking system. The entire kit geared to the assembly of a small tactical atomic bomb.

A mystery story fuelled by information supplied the Rimini police department by a consultant of the Mitrokhin committee, Mario Scaramella, who, acting on behalf of the agency presided over by Paolo Guzzanti, was trying to track illegal funds from the former USSR that had transited through [the Republic of] San Marino.
Scaramella is also said to have connections to the deputy chief of the FSB, Viktor Komogorov, who is alleged by Chechen sources to have been conducting an internal FSB investigation of Litvinenko..

One CIA officer also suggested an outsourcing to non-Russian agents, indicating that, "this would give Putin plausible denial," in the event the plot was uncovered,. "Perhaps," the source joked, "Gladio has not been dismantled, but simply privatized."

Primer on Islamic imperialism

2006-11-26T16:46:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

A long, sobering, and important article -- a must-read -- on the true nature of our enemy. Be sure to read it all!

American Thinker: Primer on Islamic imperialism

Primer on Islamic imperialism
By Greg Richards

One of the alleged sins held against the West by Islamic radicalism - which has declared war on us through Osama bin Laden's fatwa issued in 1998 in London - is imperialism: the imperialism of the Dutch, the British and the French from the 17th to the 20th centuries. (For some reason, Russian imperialism in Central Asia gets a pass - so far.) Israel is allegedly an outpost of European imperialism.

The original western imperial enterprise in the radical Islamic narrative was the Crusades. The First Crusade began in 1095. The Crusades were undertaken to reclaim the Holy Land for Christendom. Reclaim it from whom? From the Muslims.

But Mohammed died in Medina in 632 as ruler of the Hijaz, the northwest section of Arabia along the Red Sea which includes the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. But if they controlled the Hijaz in 632, what were the Muslims doing in Jerusalem in 1100?

Of course, they were there by conquest! They were they by virtue of Islamic imperialism - the extension of the Land of Islam (Dar al-Islam) by holy war: jihad (notwithstanding the other meanings of this term).

Let's review. Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was a warrior and ruler who conquered Mecca and the Hijaz from his base in Medina. Following The Prophet's death in 632, Islam was spread by Arab and Muslim conquest. There are Muslims who are not Arabs, but the first phase of expansion was Arab expansion. The ruler of the Muslim world, the successor to Muhammad, was the Caliph - "the shadow of God on earth."

The Caliph was both the religious and political head of the Muslim world which, unlike the Christian world, draws no distinction between the two. In North Africa and the Middle East, the lands that the Arab Muslim world expanded into were controlled by the Byzantine Empire, the successor to the Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople. These were Christian lands. To the East, between the Middle East and India, was the Persian Empire with a different religious tradition.

At the death of Muhammad in 632, the realm of Islam consisted of northwest Arabia. To the north and west is Christian Byzantium, to the east is Persia. Neither of these are Arab; neither of them are Muslim. But within 100 years, the territory from Persia to Spain is controlled by Muslim Arabs. How did this happen? Egypt, for instance, was not in 632 an Arab country. It was of a different ethnic stock and had been in existence for 3600 years!

What happened was conquest, one of the most impressive in history. [....]

The philosopher and economist Thomas Sowell instructs us to ask "as compared to what?" when evaluating and criticizing human enterprise. It is pointless to compare human enterprise to some abstract ideal that has never existed. As Sowell points out, if the standard is set high enough, anything will fail.

Was the British Empire - the archetype of Western imperialism - a bad thing? As compared to what? As compared to the Muslim Empires? As compared to them, the British Empire was a model of enlightenment. The Muslims pride themselves on their tolerance of minorities. But that tolerance came at the cost of dhimmitude - second-class citizenship and payment of tributes. The British Empire was, yes, established by force, but it was not sustained only by force. It was also sustained by consent. And it left behind a number of the freest, richest, most liberal countries on earth. As compared to the Muslims, the British look pretty good.

But it is not the point of this paper that Arab/Muslim imperialism was an evil, or at least was not a unique evil. It was a human enterprise with its strengths and weaknesses. Muslim culture at its highest was high indeed. The Muslims preserved and passed on the Greeks. The Arabs developed Arabic numerals, and invented the number zero (or the next best thing, recognized the significance of the Indians having done so), the basis of modern mathematics. Algebra is an Arabic word: al-gebera. Muslim letters, science, medicine and architecture were at the highest level of achievement.

But so are our own. We can't have a double standard here - being impressed by the achievements and conquests of Arab/Muslim civilization but at the same time embarrassed by the even more impressive achievements and conquests of the West. If conquest is something to be embarrassed by, if it is a moral disqualification, then the Arab/Muslims are at the head of the line; Europe is well back on the list! And whatever the achievements of medieval Muslim culture, and they were many, they are in the past. There are few achievements today, and none to compare with those of the West.

Yes, one can certainly ask about spiritual achievement. If the Muslims wish to live in the 8th century, nobody is stopping them. Just as nobody stops the Amish from living in the 18th century. But if the standard is living in the 21st century, then it is clear that the West is a superior culture in all respects for that - in comfort of living, in science, in medicine, in human rights, in the rights of women to name just a few.

We are in a fight for our lives against Islamic radicalism. We cannot unilaterally disarm ourselves morally because of some imagined slights offered to Muslim culture by the West. Yes, we are the stronger, but that was not always so. When Muslims were the stronger, they prided themselves on their conquests and their cultural and political dominance, which still shape the world we live in.

Ukraine marks anniversary of forced Soviet-era famine

2006-11-26T15:48:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

This is the description of the photograph on the top: Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko (centre) with his wife Kateryna (left) and members of his family plant a bush and string its branches with ribbons during a commemoration ceremony for victims of the Great Famine of 1932-33 in Kiev.

Gulfnews: Ukraine marks anniversary of forced Soviet-era famine

Kiev: Ukraine began solemn commemorations yesterday to mark the 73rd anniversary of a man-made Soviet-era famine that killed one-third of the country's population, a tragedy that Ukraine's president wants recognised as an act of genocide.

During the height of the 1932-33 famine, 33,000 people died of hunger every day, devastating entire villages. Cases of cannibalism were widespread as desperation deepened.

Black ribbons were hung yesterday on the blue-and-yellow national flag, and in cities across the country, officials laid flowers at monuments to the estimated 10 million victims.

President Viktor Yushchenko and Parliament Speaker Oleksandr Moroz unveiled the cornerstone of a planned memorial complex in the capital. A procession was taken out later and thousands of candles were lit on a centuries-old Kiev square.

"I would like for us never to tolerate the shame of having to hold discussions about what to call this," Yushchenko said at the ceremony.

"This is one of the most horrible pages of our history, and for a long time now, it has had only one name."

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin provoked the famine in a campaign to force peasants to give up their private farms and join collectives.

Authorities collectivised agriculture throughout the Soviet Union, but farmers in Ukraine - known as the breadbasket of the USSR - fiercely resisted and bore the brunt of the man-made disaster.

Yushchenko has asked parliament to recognise the famine, known here as Holodomor, or Death by Hunger, to be recognised as genocide - but some lawmakers have resisted, and Moscow has warned Kiev against using that term.

Russia argues that the orchestrated famine did not specifically target Ukrainians but also other peoples in the Soviet agricultural belt, including Russians and Kazakhs, and this month said the issue should not be "politicised".

Holding Islam to Account

2006-11-25T22:09:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Another in an important series of articles by my dear friend, Amil Imani.

American Thinker: Holding Islam to Account

November 24, 2006
Holding Islam to Account
By Amil Imani

Islam has spawned many sects that are master practitioners of the art of double standards. As far as Muslims are concerned what is good for Muslims is not good for the non-Muslims; and, what is bad for Muslims is good for non-Muslims.

What complicates matters is that there is no way of knowing which of the dozens of at-each-other’s-throat sects is the legitimate Islam. As sooner as Muhammad died his religion of peace became a house of internal war: jockeying for power and leadership started, sects formed and splintered into sub-sects, and bloodletting began in earnest.

The internal infighting in Islam is presently playing in full color—in red—most dramatically, in the Iraqi theater. Shiite raid Sunni civilians, slaughter them like sheep, and toss their bodies like trash in the streets or the rivers. The Sunnis return the favor with just as much viciousness and savagery.

Question: if this is the way these Muslims treat each other, how would they deal with the infidels, when they have the chance?

Answer: these devoted followers of Muhammad would deal with the infidels exactly the way Muhammad did: behead the non-believers, take them as slave to hold or sell, or make them pay back-breaking jazyyeh—poll taxes.

Some may objects that writings like this are little more than hatemongering and fanning the fire that rages between Islam and the non-Islamic world. They may further flash the Islamic apologists’ few well-worn-out propaganda cards as evidence for their contention that Islam is not what its detractors claim.

Here are the few favorite cards:

* There is no compulsion in religion says the Quran—the full context is never shown.

* “Islam,” means “Peace,” so Islam is religion of peace.

* “For you, your religion, and for me, my religion,” Muhammad reportedly has said.

The Muslims and their apologists quickly run out of their few cards and the rest of the Islamic deck is all about intolerance, hatred, and violence toward the infidels and all others who are not true Muslims, even toward those who consider themselves as Muslims. Shiites, for instance, judge the Sunnis as traitors to Islam and Sunnis condemn the Shiites as heretics. Each side deems the other worthy of death and hellfire.

This internecine Islamic war of the religion of peace is not confined to the Shiite-Sunni divide. There are so many internal divisions within each side that listing and describing them comprehensively would be encyclopedic.

So, who is right? What are the facts about Islam and how does Islam impact the ever-shrinking village earth and its inhabitants? Admittedly, this is a huge question and cannot be answered satisfactorily in one article. However, some facts can be presented to help the reader decide.

There is no need to belabor the point that Islam is not and has never been a religion of peace. The word “Islam,” is derived from “taslim,” which means “submission,” while the term for “peace,” is “Solh.” Another derivation of the word “taslim,” is “salamat” which means “good health,” and so on.

Irrespective of what the term “Islam” may mean, the facts on the ground conclusively demonstrate Islam’s violent nature from its very inception. No need to go back to the time of Muhammad and examine the historical records. Just a few from contemporary events should make the point.

Here is a partial list: the savage Shiites-Sunnis bloodletting in Iraq; the barbarism of the resurging Taliban in Afghanistan; the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur; the Somalis killings; the Iranian mullahs murder of their own people and support of mischief abroad; the cross-border attack on Israel by Lebanese Hizbollah; the incessant terrorist acts of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatwa of the Palestinians against Israel; the bombing of Shiites mosques in Pakistan and the Shiites retaliation against easy innocent civilian targets.

Clearly, there is no place on the planet where Muslims reside that is in peace from the religion of peace. Spain, France, Holland, England Thailand, and Indonesia, have already been attacked while others such as Belgium have been threatened and sanctioned.

Stretching the benefit of the doubt beyond limits, one may believe that all these acts of horrors are committed by a small minority of thugs and radicals who happened to be Muslims.

Fine, let us ignore all those “fringes” for now: those who are giving Islam a bad reputation. And never mind Saudi Arabia, the cradle of barbarism fixed in formaldehyde since Islam’s inception. Also, let us overlook the dastardly Shiite fanatics presently ruling (ruining) a great nation of Iran. Iran Shiite Hitlerists are hell-bent on wiping Israel off the face of the planet while viciously devastating Iran’s own largest minority—the Baha’is; the people universally-recognized as law-abiding and peaceful.

Would someone account for what is happening in the “civilized” Islamic country of Egypt? The world owes Egypt a debt of gratitude for giving it the Muslims Brotherhood—the lead promoter of Sunni hatred toward the infidels with chapters and front organizations in much of the world. With typical Islamic hypocrisy, the Egyptian government claims that the Muslims Brotherhood is outlawed, when in actuality the Brotherhood holds twenty-five percent of the seats in the Egyptian parliament. The same country that gave the world vicious American killers like Al Zawahiri is the recipient of huge largess from the American taxpayer.

And the latest shameful action of the Egyptian government is the issuance of identity cards that requires listing of one’s religion. In order to be issued an ID card which is essential for just about any and all exercises of the rights of citizenship, the individual must list his religion as one of the three sanctioned faith: Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. No one is allowed to leave the religious affiliation blank or list any other religion. Buddhists, Hindus, Baha’is or agnostics and atheists have to either lie and fake a religious affiliation or run the serious risk of having to survive as non-entities in the “crown jewel” of modern and moderate Islamic society.

These are the conditions on the ground wherever Islam rules. Violence of all forms is endemic to Islam and is not confined to any fringes. Islam itself is the fringe. A fringe that is oppressive, hateful of others and violent to the core.

The world must confront Islam and demand that it mends its ways in conformity with the Bill of Rights, where every man, woman, and child is fully entitled to equal treatment under the law, irrespective of any and all considerations.

Amil Imani is an Iranian-born American citizen and pro-democracy activist residing in the United States of America. He maintains a website.

Andrew Carnegie, 1836-1919

2006-11-25T21:18:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Scotsman.com's Fact of the Day column informs me that Andrew Carnegie, once the richest man in the world, was born this day in 1836 -- Scotsmans.com also published the short biography that I have posted below.

Scotsman.com Heritage & Culture - Great Scots - A to Z - Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie
IAIN LUNDY

THE RISE to fame of Andrew Carnegie is the classic rags-to-riches success story. Born in Dunfermline the son of a humble handloom weaver, he grew into one of the best-known industrialists in the world, dominating the burgeoning American steel industry in the 19th century.

Carnegie retired as the world’s richest man, then proceeded to become the world’s greatest philanthropist, giving the bulk of his vast fortune to charitable trusts and adopting as his motto "the man who dies rich dies disgraced".

It was a far cry from his early years in Dunfermline. His father, William, was an active Chartist and marched for the rights of the working man. The arrival of the power loom and a general economic downturn impoverished his family and in 1848, when Andrew was 12, the family left Scotland for America and joined a Scottish colony in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh. His first job was as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory; then, at 14, a messenger in a telegraph office. His willingness to work hard and his shrewd business brain were evident even then and he quickly moved into a senior management post with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.

In 1865, Carnegie, already wealthy - having invested wisely in the up-and-coming oil industry and other thriving businesses - established his own business enterprises. He foresaw the worldwide demand for iron and steel and by the 1870s the Carnegie Steel Company operated dozens of steel mills in and around Pittsburgh, introduced efficient working practices like the Bessemer process and led the enormous expansion of steel making in the United States.

Carnegie consolidated his business empire by buying the coke fields and iron-ore deposits that furnished the raw materials for steel making as well as ships and railroads for transporting supplies to the mills. The low point in his career was the trade union strike at the company’s Homestead works in 1892. Local managers brought in armed guards from the Pinkerton detective agency to break the strike and in the shootout that followed three guards and nine workers were killed. In 1901 he sold his business to industrialist JP Morgan of the US Steel Corporation for $480m.

One of Carnegie’s lifelong interests was the establishment of free public libraries and in his 1889 book The Gospel of Wealth, he wrote of his belief in philanthropy and asserted that that all personal wealth beyond that required to supply the needs of one's family should be regarded as a trust fund to be administered for the benefit of the community. He enthusiastically set about his philanthropic endeavours, providing money for over 2,500 libraries throughout the English-speaking world and more than 7,600 pipe organs for churches. He established a variety of trust funds and foundations which still operate to this day. By the time of his death he had given away $350m to good causes.

Carnegie had the magnificent Skibo Castle in Sutherland built for him and his wife Louise and after his retirement the couple divided their time between the castle, their home in New York City and their summer house, Shadowlands, In Lenox, Massachusetts, where Carnegie died in August 1919.

First Direct Evidence of Turbulence in Space

2006-11-24T00:12:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

From Wikipedia's article I learned that turbulence is an impenetrably difficult problem in physics -- which doesn't stop physicists from joking about it: Like the three-body problem in gravitation, turbulence remains one of the unsolved problems in physics. According to an apocryphal story Werner Heisenberg was asked what he would ask God, given the opportunity. His reply was: "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." A similar witticism has been attributed to Horace Lamb (who had published a noted text book on Hydrodynamics)—his choice being quantum mechanics (instead of relativity) and turbulence. Lamb was quoted as saying in a speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, "I am an old man now, and when I die and go to heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather optimistic."

(For the Wikipedia articles on the three-body problem in gravitation and the unsolved problems in physics, see here and here.)

(And here is the description of the illustration: Turbulence in space has been directly measured by a suite of 4 satellite detectors, called Cluster, which are positioned just outside the bow shock ahead of Earth’s magnetosphere. Cluster measures rapid variations in the magnetic field as solar wind particles arrive in Earth’s vicinity.)

Physics news Update 802

First Direct Evidence of Turbulence in Space

If you think chaos is complicated in the case of simple objects (such as our inability to predict the longterm velocities and positions of planets owing to their nonlinear interactions with the sun and other planets) it's far worse for systems with essentially an infinite number of degrees of freedom such as fluids or plasmas under the stress of nonlinear forces. Then the word turbulence is fully justified.

Turbulence can be studied on Earth easily by mapping such things as the density or velocity of fluids in a tank. In space, however, where we expect turbulence to occur in such settings as solar wind, interstellar space, and the accretion disks around black holes, it's not so easy to measure fluids in time and space. Now, a suite of four plasma-watching satellites, referred to as Cluster, has provided the first definitive study of turbulence in space.

The fluid in question is the wind of particles streaming toward the Earth from the sun, while the location in question is the region just upstream of Earth's bow shock, the place where the solar wind gets disturbed and passes by the Earth's magnetosphere (see figure at Physics News Graphics). The waves in the shock-upstream plasma, pushed around by complex magnetic fields, are observed to behave a lot like fluid turbulence on Earth.

One of the Cluster researchers, Yasuhito Narita (y.narita@tu-bs.de) of the Institute of Geophysics and Extraterrestrial Physics in Braunschweig, Germany, says that the data is primarily in accord with the leading theory of fluid turbulence, the so called Kolmogorov's model.

Thomas James Henderson, 1798-1844

2006-11-23T21:15:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Today's Scotsman.com Fact of the Day has this brief note:

Astronomer Thomas Henderson died on this day in 1844. The Dundonian scientist was the first person to measure the distance to a star (Alpha Centauri) from the Earth using parallax and was appointed the first Astronomer Royal for Scotland in 1834.

What follows is the Wikipedia article about him (in which we learn that he should have been a little bolder in letting the world know of his achievement: Henderson published his results in 1839, but was relegated to second place because of his lack of confidence).

Thomas James Henderson (December 28, 1798 – November 23, 1844) was an astronomer noted for being the first person to measure the distance to Alpha Centauri, the major component of the nearest stellar system to Earth, and for being the first Astronomer Royal for Scotland.

Born in Dundee, Scotland, he was educated at Dundee Grammar School, after which he trained as a lawyer, working his way up through the profession as an assistant to a variety of nobles. However, his major hobbies were astronomy and mathematics, and after coming up with a new method for using lunar occultation to measure longitude he came to the attention of Thomas Young, superintendent of the British Navy's "Nautical Almanac". Young helped Henderson enter the larger world of astronomical science, and on his death a posthumous letter recommended to the Admiralty that Henderson take his place.

Henderson was passed over for that position, but the recommendation was enough to get him a position as the British observatory at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. There he made a considerable number of stellar observations between April 1832 and May 1833, including those for which he is remembered today. It was pointed out to him that the bright southern star Alpha Centauri had a large proper motion, and Henderson concluded that it might be a close star.

The 1830s version of the "space race" was to be the first person to measure the distance to a star using parallax, a task which is easier the closer the star. Henderson was thus in a good position to be this person. After retiring back to the United Kingdom due to bad health, he began analyzing his measurements and eventually came to the conclusion that Alpha Centauri was just slightly less that one parsec away, 3.25 light years. This figure is reasonably accurate, being 33.7% too small.

Doubts about the accuracy of his instruments kept him from publishing, however (there had been previous, discredited attempts to claim a measurement of stellar parallax), and eventually he was beaten to the punch by Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, who published a parallax of 10.4 light years (9.6% too small) for 61 Cygni in 1838. Henderson published his results in 1839, but was relegated to second place because of his lack of confidence.

In the meantime, his measurement work at the Cape had led him to be appointed the first Astronomer Royal for Scotland in 1834. The private observatory on Calton Hill in Edinburgh — where he had made his first observations as an astronomer — was sold to the University of Edinburgh and the vacant chair of astronomy there given to him on the advice of Prime Minister Lord Melbourne.

Welcome to American Thinker readers

2006-11-21T19:22:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Many thanks to Thomas Lifson for his generous link to my articles on the Ukrainian Holodomor and upcoming commemorations in Ukraine on November 25th and for his eloquent words. Welcome to new readers. Look around, there are articles on a variety of subjects on Ultima Thule.

DAY OF MEMORY: SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 25

2006-11-21T09:20:00.000-05:00

For the Victims of the Holodomor 1932-1933 [Induced Starvation,
Death for Millions, Genocide] and other Political Repressions
Against the People of Ukraine

Famines In Ukraine: Induced Starvation, Death For Millions, Genocide

2006-11-21T09:15:00.001-05:00

By Roman Serbyn, Professor Emeritus
Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Canada

Action Ukraine Report (AUR), #791, Article 1
Kyiv, Ukraine, Sunday, November 19, 2006

During the 70 years of communist rule in Ukraine, this Soviet republic
suffered a number of severe famines, the most destructive of which was
the terrible Holodomor of 1932-1933.

The term "holodomor" was coined from the Ukrainian noun "holod" (hunger,
starvation, famine) and verb "moryty" (to cause to be wasted, to kill).

Since it is now known that all the famines were preventable, many Ukrainians
apply the term to the other Ukrainian famines as well.

Recent studies, based on documentation released since the fall of communism
and the breakup of the Soviet Union show clearly, that throughout the whole
period, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic produced enough foodstuffs to be able
to feed all of its inhabitants.

The famines were the result of Moscow's diverting of Ukrainian resources to
purposes other than the satisfaction of Ukrainian population's hunger.

FAMINE OF 1921-1923
The first widespread famine began in the summer of 1921 and lasted for two
years. It affected the grain rich southern half of the republic, where two
consecutive years of drought completely destroyed the harvest.

Approximately one million people died, mostly in the villages but the urban
centres were also affected.

Had Ukraine been truly an independent country with a government which
put the vital interests of the Ukrainian population at the centre of its
preoccupations, this famine could have been avoided.

Ukraine had not yet been completely despoiled by the German occupation of
1918, or by the part of the Russian civil war fought on Ukrainian soil, or
by the White and the Red Russian wars of reconquest of the Ukrainian "bread
basket". The harvest in the northern half of the republic were adequate and
even in the southern part there were still some, if insufficient, reserves.

An truly independent Ukrainian government would have arranged to have
foodstuffs transferred from the north to the south, and no human lives
needed to have been lost.

But Kharkiv, now the capital of an officially sovereign and independent
Ukrainian SSR was in fact an administrative centre taking direct orders from
Moscow. And Moscow had other priorities than to safeguard the lives of
rebellious Ukrainians.

Drought had also devastated the Volga valley and the Northern Caucasus
regions in the RSFSR and affected several times more people than in
Ukraine. Famine casualties there were also much higher than in Ukraine.

Moscow decided to come to the rescue of the starving population of the
RSFSR. All taxation in the famine regions were suspended while they were
twinned with regions that had a regular harvest, and the latter were ordered
to provide famine relief.

At the same time, Moscow ignored the famine in Ukraine and ordered the
Ukrainian republic, designated as a single unit, to help the starving
population along the Volga . Moscow also appealed to the West for foreign
aid for Russia, keeping silent about the famine in Ukraine.

In fact, when in November 1921, a fact-finding mission of the American
Relief Administration enquired about conditions in Ukraine, it was told by
Moscow that there is no reason to go to Ukraine because that Republic was
providing famine relief to Russia.

What the Russian authorities failed to mention was that Ukraine was doing
this at Moscow's orders and at the expense of it's own population's
starvation and death.

Ukraine was eventually opened to famine relief, due to the perseverance of
the ARA-JDC effort to bring aid to the starving Jewish population of
southern Ukraine.

Since the 1921-1923 famine was a regional scourge, decimating the urban as
well as the rural dwellers, the Jewish population of southern Ukraine also
suffered greatly and alarmed their relatives and friends in Western Europe
and North America. The American Joint Distribution Committee was already
a participant in the ARA relief effort in the RSFSR.

Together with the ARA it prevailed upon Moscow to allow a fact-finding
mission to go to Ukraine and eventually American aid, paid for the most part
by the JDC, was allowed to come to Ukraine. ARA soup kitchens were opened
in Ukraine in April 1922, eight months after their appearance in Russia.

Other charitable organizations were also allowed to set up famine relief in
Ukraine in 1922. In October 1922, the Kremlin declared the famine vanquished
and Moscow began exporting grain from Odessa, to the disgust of
international charitable organizations, which continued to provide famine
relief for another year.

GREAT FAMINE OF 1932-1933
The great famine of 1932-1933 differed from the one in 1921-23 in which
there were important adverse climatic conditions, the harvests in 1932-1933
were adequate.

All serious scholars agree that in spite of the upheavals due to
dekulakization and collectivization, and even grain export, there was enough
cereal grain reserves to feed all the population of the Soviet Union.

The 1930s famine also differed in that its target was the whole rural
population of Ukraine, while the urban centres received survival rations.
The people who died from starvation in the urban centres were mostly
peasants who had come to seek food.

Unlike the 1921-23 famine, the 1932-33 catastrophe affected primarily
Ukraine and the Kuban' region of Northern Caucasus, while the food
shortages in the regions of the RSFSR contiguous to Ukraine were much
less severe.

As a result of the famine the Ukrainian SSR lost, according to various
estimates, from four to ten million people, overwhelmingly ethnic
Ukrainians, since they made up 90 % of the republic's agriculturalists.

Perhaps as many as one million farmers died in the RSFSR, but we do
not have a clear idea of their ethnic composition.

One of the most heavily devastated areas was the Northern Caucasus
Territory, where 2/3 of the population of the Kuban region was Ukrainian;
other affected regions were inhabited by Germans, Tatars and other ethnic
minorities.

The great famine came in the wake of the so-called Stalin's revolution from
above. Having outmaneuvered his competitors for Lenin's mantle, Stalin
could finally undertake the transformation of the backward Soviet empire
into a modern industrial and military superpower.

Most of the capital for this endeavor would have to come from agriculture,
which would also have to sustain the growing industrial population with
food.

Tsarist agriculture had shown Stalin that the best providers of marketable
grain were the large estates of rich landowners, while the more recent
Bolshevik experience taught him that door to door confiscation of peasants
produce was a very inefficient method of procurement.

Since most of the arable land was now in the hands of the middle and poor
peasants, most of the food produce was now consumed by the farmers and
little was left for the State procurement.

COLLECTIVIZATION
Collectivization would recreate large agricultural exploitations over which
the State would have a direct control and could squeeze out of them as much
as it wished. Collectivization would also correspond to Marxist ideology and
the satisfy the Party's quest for better control over the peasant
population.

Stalin and the party hierarchy was well aware that collectivization would be
strongly opposed by the peasantry, especially in Ukraine, the Kuban, and
other regions that did not have the Russian tradition of peasant obshchina
(sort of commune).

They also knew that forceful imposition of collectivization would have very
disruptive consequences for Soviet agriculture and that total production
would undoubtedly decline.

Finally, Stalin and his henchmen could not fail to realize that in Ukraine,
the opposition to the destruction of the peasants' traditional way of life
would assume national overtones.

In fact, recent documents such as Stalin's correspondence with Kaganovich
and Stalin-inspired decisions of the Politburo reveal that the "peasant"
and "national" questions became intertwined in Kremlin's policies during the
early 1930s.

DEKULAKIZATION OF THE VILLAGES
Collectivization was adopted as part of the first Five Year Plan in December
1927 but was not strongly implemented until 1929. In December of that year,
the Politburo ordered the dekulakization of the villages.

Kulaks were rich peasants or those deemed to have a kulak mentality.
Theoretically numbering about 5 % of the peasant population they were
divided into three categories and dealt with accordingly.

The first category, the richest and most ferocious adversaries of the State,
were exiled into special settlements outside Ukraine, after some of the
heads of families were executed.

The second category was exiled to other regions of Ukraine and third
category was allowed to stay in the same village. In both cases they were
prevented from joining collective farms and were allotted poorer lands for
their own use.

In this way several hundred thousand of Ukraine's most dynamic and
productive agriculturalists were destroyed or marginalized from the
Ukrainian society.

The property confiscated from the "kulaks" was turned over to the
collective farms in order to draw to them the poor peasants.

Dekoulakization thus fulfilled several goals for the regime: it brought
class struggle into the village, it provided property for the new collective
farms, it provided cheap labor in remote desolate regions of Russia, and
it removed the natural leaders of the Ukrainian peasant opposition.

Dekulakization weakened but did not prevent active peasant opposition to
collectivization. This opposition manifested itself in various ways, from
armed resistance to the so-called "babs'ki bunty" (women's revolts).

Dekulakization was over by 1931, and most of Ukrainian peasants had been
forced to join the kolkhozes by the fall of 1932 when the great famine
began. Throughout the dekulakization, collectivization and the famine
itself, USSR exported huge quantities of grain: 1930 - 5.8 million tons;
1931 - 4.7 m.t.; 1932 - 1.6 m.t.; 1933 - 2.1 m.t.

One million tons was sufficient to feed five million people for one year. It
should also be noted that even with the exports, the State's grain reserves
never dipped below 1.5 m.t., i.e., enough to save the starving population
from untimely suffering and death.

The first wave of induced famine hit Ukraine in the winter-spring 1932 when
half a million died; the second wave commenced in the fall of that year and
peaked sometime in the early spring days of 1933.

FAMINE CAUSED BY HIGH PROCUREMENT QUOTAS
The direct cause of famine were high procurement quotas which most of the
kolkhozes and remaining individual peasants were unable to meet and which
Stalin refused to lower to a manageable level.

Stalin knew very well the situation in Ukrainian villages. He was
continually informed by his envoys to Ukraine Molotov, Kaganovich, Kosior
and Postyshev. He received complaints and requests for lowering of
procurement quotas from the Ukrainian leaders Petrovsky, Chubar, Terekhov.

The OGPU sent periodic reports showing the catastrophic situation in the
Ukrainian villages. Stalin's response was always the same: there is grain in
Ukraine, saboteurs are hiding it, the grain must be found and the saboteurs
be punished.

During the worst months of the famine, party faithfuls, helped by workers
sent to Ukraine from Russian industrial centres and by local peasant
activists went from house to house, seeking hidden grain and other
foodstuffs, confiscating the last pieces of edibles from the peasant tables.

Kolkhozes and individual farmers were put on "balck boards" (black lists),
forbidden to buy the basic necessities of life: matches, kerosene, and other
manufactured goods.

EXTERMINATION POLICY DIRECTED SPECIFICALLY
AGAINST UKRAINIANS
Two documents which have recently come to light reveal that Stalin's
extermination policy was directed specifically against the Ukrainian people.

On 14 December 1932 a joint resolution of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party and the Council of Peoples Commissars of the USSR
condemned the process of Ukrainization which had been carried out in
Ukraine and Northern Caucasus (especially Kuban) for the problems in
State procurement in these regions.

Ukrainization had allowed, according to the document, Petliurites, Ukrainian
bourgeois nationalists to infiltrate local administrations, educational
establishments and the mass media outlets, create counterrevolutionary cells
and pursue a policy of sabotage and destabilization.

The solution ordered by the Party/State hierarchy was put Ukrainization in
Ukraine on its original track: to integrate the Ukrainian people into the
Soviet system. Petliurites and Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist were to be
removed from Soviet institutions in Ukraine and punished.

The punishment of the 8 million Ukrainians in the RSFSR amounted to
complete annihilation of their ethnic identity: Ukrainian bourgeois
nationalists were to be removed from all public institutions in RSFSR,
the Russian language was to replace Ukrainian in all sectors of social life
where Ukrainian was used: local administration, newspapers and journals.

All Ukrainian schools were to be Russified. In addition, the inhabitants of
many of the Ukrainian stanytsias, settled by descendants of the Ukrainian
Zaporozhian cossacks were to be deported to the north and resettled with
loyal Russian peasants from infertile lands.

The second document, which shows Stalin's intent to exterminate a part of
the Ukrainian nation, is his directive cosigned by Molotov, and sent on 22
January 1933 to the republican authorities in Ukraine and Belarus, and five
Russian regional administrations along the Ukrainian borders.

The order blames the OGPU for allowing the previous year peasants from
Ukraine and the Kuban to go north, allegedly in search of food, but in fact
to spread propaganda against the kolkhoz system. These Petliurites and
agents of Pilsudski must not be allowed to do the same this year.

A mass movement has already started once more in Ukraine and the Kuban,
and it must be nipped in the bud. The addressed authorities must warn their
peasants against leaving their villages and take all the necessary means to
prevent a peasant exodus. The Railways are forbidden to sell tickets to
peasants in those regions.

The OGPU is ordered to arrest all peasants who do not heed the warning
and try to cross the Ukrainian border. As a result of this directive, in the
ensuing six weeks, the OGPU arrested some 220,000 people, sent about
190,000 back to their starving villages and dealt otherwise with the rest.

STALIN-MADE-FAMINE OF 1932-1933, A GENOCIDE
These two documents provide convincing evidence that the Stalin-made famine
of 1932-1933 meets the requirements of genocide as defined by the United
Nations Convention on the Prevention of Genocide, adopted by the General
Assembly on 9 December 1948.

The crucial element of the definition, the question of intent to destroy in
whole or in part, is demonstrated by Stalin's decision to close internal
Soviet borders thus isolating peasants of Ukraine and the Kuban to prevent
them from seeking refuge in the more benign conditions of Russia and
Belarus.

The second element of the definition, that the target group be identified as
national or ethnic is also met. The segregated peasants made up a national
group (in the civic sense of the term) as citizens of Ukraine, while at the
same time 90 % of them were ethnic Ukrainians.

Some three quarters of the Kuban peasants and Cossacks were of Ukrainian
ethnic background and thus compose an ethnic group. The nexus between
the two targeted groups was their Ukrainianness.

THIRD FAMINE BEGAN IN THE FALL OF 1946
The third famine began in the fall of 1946 and reached its peak in the
spring of 1947. The main causes of the famine were similar to those of the
previous famines: exorbitant procurement quotas for grain and other
agricultural produce, which drained the country side of vital resources, and
Stalin's unwillingness to aid the starving population in those regions that
suffered from drought and a poor harvests.

During the famine period, the Soviet Union shipped cereals to its new
satellites: Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and
even Finland and France. Some 2.5 m.t. of grain was exported.

The famine touched particularly the newly annexed Izmailivs'ka and
Chernivets'ka oblasts, where collectivization of agriculture had dire
consequences for the agrarian population. Other regions of Central and
Eastern Ukraine were also affected by food shortages.

To escape the famine, peasants fled to Western Ukraine, where the climatic
conditions had been more benign and the harvest more plentiful. To prevent
this peasant movement, the authorities posted guards along the main routes
to turn the refugees back.

In Western Ukraine, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and
the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) tried to impede the export of Ukrainian
grain to the West. Soviet authorities provided famine relief only to those
who worked in the fields, where soup kitchens were set up during working
days.

In all, about one million Ukrainians, mostly peasants, perished from
starvation during the famine of 1946-1947.

In conclusion, all three famines, 1921-1923, 1932-1933, and
1946-1947 were the result of Moscow's deliberate diverting of
Ukrainian resources to purposes other than the satisfaction of
Ukrainian population's hunger.

Night - A Memoir of The Great Famine of 1933

2006-11-21T09:15:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

My mother lived through this famine as a 13-year-old girl, and the memories are indelibly etched in her mind. I published this memoir last November, but I'm reprinting it today because I have many new readers. This eloquent and understated testament to growing up under the tyranny of Soviet rule was published in Ukrainian in a Ukrainian-American magazine. This is my own translation of her moving memories.

Ultima Thule: Night - A Memoir of The Great Famine of 1933

Night - A Memoir of The Great Famine of 1933
By Maria D.

Night -- and sleep has vanished into the darkness. A light rain falls softly through the leaves of the tree outside my window, gathers in a stream in the gutters, and falls in heavy drops to the ground. I try counting them, but sleep will not come. My thoughts are a tangle of memories, long lost dreams and disappointments.

Suddenly, out of the distant and forgotten past a spark of memory flashes across my mind and I fly back through the years to my earliest childhood. But even here I am lost. Where to begin?

As my mother described it, I was born in March of 1920, "on the first day of Lent" as she liked to put it, in the village of R. in the Kharkiv region of Eastern Ukraine. My father was still away at war. Our village, plundered by the frequent waves of "Reds", "Whites" and other roving and warring factions, was left impoverished and half-starved.

In the village I had two grandfathers, Vasyl and Mykhailo, but no grandmother. Both my grandmothers had gone to an early grave, claimed by the heavy work and toil that was a woman's lot.

My grandfather, Vasyl, had four more children in addition to my father, and probably for this reason he married again, to give the children, if not a mother, then at least a stepmother. No household could survive without the capable and hard working hands of a woman.

My mother always told me that even as a very young child I was fond of singing. While singing I liked to parade back and forth along a bench that sat by the kitchen table.

And one day it happened that during such a "recital" I fell off the bench and landed on the floor under the table. I probably banged my head, but most importantly I smudged my brand new kerchief, that had only just been given to me by my aunt. There were lots of tears and grief, and later, whenever anyone would ask me to sing, I would always reply, "Oh, sure! And fall off that bench again!" And here my brilliant singing career came to an end.

After a few years our family (there were now three of us children) moved to town and we only visited the village during the summer.

Later, during the years of the NEP, the so-called New Economic Policy that led to a loosening of restrictions on private trade and labor, conditions eased and food and goods became almost plentiful.

I remember our village in those later years. The village had bloomed -- had prospered -- had burst into song in the midst of flowering cherry orchards. There were times at night, while lying in the hayloft in my grandfather's barn, that I lay awake and strained to hear the magical sounds of the night as the villagers gathered after their day's labor in the fields to join their voices in glorious ancient folksongs.

The night was so beautiful, starry and bright, with a full moon – and the nightingale added his ecstatic song – to my childish heart it was paradise -- and nothing less!

How desperately I wanted then to hurry and grow up to be able to join in this glorious singing -- I think I never again experienced such a night.

But it did not remain this way for long. In the fearful conversations of my elders, more and more frightening and foreign words began to intrude -- commune, kurkul (kulack), Siberia -- and we became afraid. Our visits to the village came to an end.

Soon, the terrible, black specter of the Stalin created Famine-Genocide of l932-33 spread throughout the land. And even though I was still quite young, I remember that frightening apparition of the famine very well. Images that are seared in my memory forever -- hundreds -- thousands of people, their limbs and bellies grotesquely swollen from starvation -- the walking dead, the half-dead and the dead -- orphaned children wandering homeless and begging for food in the streets -- or simply dying in the gutters.

In school during class a small boy suddenly pitched forward onto his desk and died -- I shall never forget the sound of his head hitting the desk -- and he wasn't the only one. And the textbooks, newspapers and so-called "artistic literature" all around us overflowed with the slogan: "We are grateful to Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood!" What obscene and monstrous mockery!

I remember my mother gathered all our relatives from the village where all the food had been confiscated, even from private homes. They lay about on the floors, many too weak to move as my mother stirred a weak "soup" in large kettles on the stove -- a broth so thin that one little grain of cooked wheat was barely in any danger of knocking into another. And even though we ourselves were hungry, at least my father as a civil servant received a small allotment, and we shared it with those closest to us who had nothing. I will never forget the image of my little brother coming home from school and opening the doors of the little cupboard where once we had stored bread. With tears in his eyes he searched the empty shelves, and then wetting his tiny finger he traced it over the naked boards, picking up the few crumbs left over from bread that had once been there. This memory still burns in my soul.

Many difficult and heavy years had passed since I had seen my native village. It was not until I had finished high school in town and at the suggestion of my classmate who was also from that same village, that I set out to again visit my relatives -- to see my grandfather whom I loved so very much. That journey was about 25 kilometers on foot. And now I too, a grown young woman, would definitely have the chance to go into the streets at night to sing as I had once dreamed of doing. My friend, though, was strangely silent.

As we walked along, I found myself entranced by the flowing fields of grain as the wind bent and lifted them in undulating waves, a lark sang high in the heavens, and with increasing anticipation and impatience I looked for the towering poplars that marked my grandfather’s garden as we approached the village. But in vain -- there were no more poplars, there was no more village so happy and full of song that I had so long treasured in my heart's memory. The village was dark and silent and numb.

I opened the door to my grandfather's house. I saw him, gray and stooped, and greeted him warmly, noticing that he did not recognize me. And it occurred to me to have a little fun with him and not tell him who I was.

I asked him for some water to drink and to wash my hands after my long journey. My grandfather took a bucket and I followed him out into the yard where he drew cold, fresh water from the well. He poured the water over my hands as he regarded my face with interest. He handed me a clean towel and in a hesitant and unsure voice asked: "Well
then, tell me now, after all -- whose child might you be?"

"Grandfather, it's me, Marika, your first grandchild. Don't you know me?" My poor old grandfather began to tremble, clutched me desperately to his breast, and a cascade of bitter tears rolled down his cheeks into his white beard.

"Oh, most merciful Heaven, what has the world come to when one doesn’t even recognize one's very own flesh and blood!”

My grandfather wept, and I wept too, out of pity for him and also out of shame for myself, that I had behaved so thoughtlessly.

I went to sleep again in that same barn where once in my childhood I had listened so fervently to the music of the night. But it was in vain. Long ago now -- very long ago the village had become mute. The young girls, exhausted from their hard labors on the collective farms, no longer sang. Only now and then somewhere in the distance a dog barked, and then again -- silence -- until dawn, when again the people were called to work in the new serfdom.

The memory of this night will stay with me forever.
This night, I will also never forget.

Russia: No Reasons To Regard 1932-1933 Famine In Ukraine As Ethnic Genocide

2006-11-21T09:05:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Itar-Tass, Moscow, Russia, Monday, November 13, 2006

MOSCOW -- However tragic the 1932-1933 events in Ukraine were,
there are no reasons to regard them as genocide under ethnic principle,
says the commentary of the Russian Foreign Ministry on Monday in
connection with the discussion in the press of the 1932-1933 famine in
Ukraine.

It is quite often stated that famine in that period "was deliberately
provoked by the leadership of the USSR and aimed precisely against the
Ukrainian people," the ministry noted. "The existing archive materials
indicate that the massive famine of the early 30s indeed largely stemmed
from the policy of the Soviet Union's leadership," the foreign ministry
said.

"It is quite clear, however, that the policy was not based on nationalities
principle." "We all should take a more balanced attitude to such complicated
and sensitive matters of our common history, and not to allow for their
politicisation," the ministry said. [....]

Ukrainian President Writes Letter To George Bush Thanking Him For Signing Law To Give Ukraine A Place In Washington To Build A Holodomor Monument

2006-11-21T09:00:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Press Office of the President of Ukraine
Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, November 10, 2006

KYIV - Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko has written a letter to U.S.
President George Bush to thank him for signing a law to give Ukraine's
government a plot of land in Washington on which to erect a Holodomor
monument [1932-1933 Holodomor - induced starvation, death for millions,
genocide, in Soviet Ukraine, (Action Ukraine Report - AUR)]

"I thank you for honoring millions of innocent people whose lives were put
on the dreadful altar of the totalitarian Soviet regime. A monument in the
heart of the free world, Washington, will remind us that freedom and
democracy can guarantee that this terrible tragedy will never happen again,"
he wrote.

The President also sent letters to U.S. Senator Carl Levin [Democrat-
Michigan] and U.S. Representative Sandy Levin [Democrat - Michigan]
to thank them for helping pass the bill in the Senate and the House.

Putin strikes again!

2006-11-21T08:45:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Today's Washington Post has the following excellent editorial about the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, an outspoken critic of Putin. Shades of Ancient Rome and all the poisonings that went on there -- remember I, Claudius?

Political Poison - washingtonpost.com

Political Poison
Is it just a coincidence that enemies of Vladimir Putin keep ingesting toxic substances?
Tuesday, November 21, 2006; Page A26

FOR THE PAST 15 years it has been commonly assumed that Russian leaders gave up the Soviet practice of murdering political dissidents, inside and outside of the country. Maybe not. British authorities say they are investigating the apparent poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is fighting for his life in a London hospital after ingesting highly toxic thallium. A former agent of the KGB secret service and its successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB), who sought asylum in Britain six years ago, Mr. Litvinenko had alleged that the agency maintained a secret poisons laboratory. Along with many others, he also charged that the Kremlin was behind the 2004 poisoning of Ukraine's pro-Western president, Viktor Yushchenko.

There's no concrete evidence as yet that the FSB or Mr. Putin is behind the poison attacks -- but there is plenty of reason for suspicion. Mr. Litvinenko was investigating the recent murder of the country's best known opposition journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in her apartment building on Oct. 7. She, too, was hospitalized in 2004 and said she believed she had been poisoned. Ms. Politkovskaya's editor at the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Yuri Shchekochikhin, died after a suspected poisoning three years ago. No one has been arrested in these murders, but Mr. Putin publicly disparaged Ms. Politkovskaya while implausibly charging that his political enemies were somehow behind her death.

Former colleagues of Mr. Putin in the KGB don't doubt who is responsible. One, Oleg Kalugin, pointed out that the president pushed the Russian parliament to authorize the secret service to take action against "terrorists" outside the country. Another, Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB chief in Britain, told the Times of London that he believed the attack was "state-sponsored" and was carried out by another former Russian agent. We trust that the British authorities will vigorously investigate the attack on Mr. Litvinenko -- who is now a British citizen -- and that Prime Minister Tony Blair will take seriously the possibility that a colleague in the Group of Eight sanctioned a political murder attempt in London.

While Mr. Litvinenko's story was emerging over the weekend, President Bush was pictured exchanging jollities with his "friend Vladimir" at a summit in Vietnam. Does Mr. Bush regret having given so much support to a leader who has dismantled his country's nascent democracy and whose opponents keep turning up in hospitals and morgues? If so, he's keeping his own secret.

Hi-tech walking stick

2006-11-19T22:55:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Sounds like a great idea! (The illustration is a photo of Charles Dickens's walking stick.)

Ananova - Hi-tech walking stick

German scientists have developed an intelligent walking stick that calls an ambulance if the owner falls over.

Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Development in Kaiserslautern invented the 'i-Stick'.

It's part of an ongoing Assisted Living project to use technology to help elderly people.

If a sensor in the i-Stick registers that it is in a horizontal position, for example if its elderly owner has fallen over, it sends a signal to a control unit which plays a message telling the owner to pick it up.

If the stick remains on the floor the control box is programmed to call either an ambulance directly or a chosen relative.

I-Sticks have yet to hit stores but the scientists are currently looking for a distributor.

Dark energy dates back nine billion years

2006-11-19T18:10:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

So you've decided that you're not interested in this topic? Well, just read this quote from the article -- The data suggest that the effect of dark energy was rather weak until about five to six billion years ago when it defeated gravity in a “cosmic tug of war” and the rate of expansion began to increase -- and then tell me that your attention wasn't seized by defeated gravity in a "cosmic tug of war", and you don't want to read more!
To that purpose I've assembled some relevant sources: Wikipedia's article on dark energy, then PhysicsWeb articles New light on dark energy , Dark energy, Quintessence (what a poetic name!), and finally, since there are always dissenting voices even in science, Theorists claim dark energy does not exist.

Dark energy dates back nine billion years (November 2006) - News - PhysicsWeb

Dark energy dates back nine billion years
Hamish Johnston
17 November 2006

The mysterious substance known as dark energy has been fuelling the expansion of the universe for at least nine billion years, according to astronomers in the US. Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues made the discovery by using the Hubble Space Telescope to study ancient exploding stars. They have also concluded that dark energy appears to be related to the "cosmological constant" first proposed – and then retracted -- by Albert Einstein.

In 1998 the astronomical community was astounded when data from Hubble and other telescopes established that the rate of expansion of the universe was increasing – something that physicists are still struggling to explain. Astronomers had long known that the universe is expanding, but the rate of expansion was expected to slow as the finite energy of expansion is depleted by the gravitational attraction that holds the universe together.

Physicists have tried to explain the acceleration in terms of “dark energy”, which boosts the expansion of the universe by counteracting the effects of gravity. To be effective, dark energy must account for about 70% of all energy in the universe -- but it has yet to be detected and physicists don’t really know if its behaviour remains constant or if it changes over time.

The most popular explanation for dark energy draws on the “cosmological constant” first proposed by Einstein. A consequence of the constant is that energy density of empty space is the same regardless of whether the universe was expanding. Therefore when one cubic centimetre of the universe expanded to ten cubic centimetres it would somehow end up with ten times more energy.

Now Hubble has shed more light on this mysterious energy. Riess and colleagues used the space telescope study light from 24 type-1a supernovae that exploded 8-10 billion years ago. Such supernovae are considered “standard candles” because they all have a similar brightness and this can be exploited by astronomers to reveal when a supernova occurred and how the universe has expanded in the intervening years.

The observations reveal that dark energy was around nine billion years ago and has been acting in a consistent way ever since. The data suggest that the effect of dark energy was rather weak until about five to six billion years ago when it defeated gravity in a “cosmic tug of war” and the rate of expansion began to increase.

The observations also confirm that the cosmological constant is currently the best explanation for dark energy, casting doubt over alternative theories such as quintessence.

Einstein proposed the cosmological constant in 1917 in order to reconcile his general theory of relatively with the contemporary notion that the universe was not expanding. This changed in 1929 when the US astronomer Edwin Hubble established that expansion was indeed occurring and Einstein retracted the cosmological constant. Now, data from the telescope named after Hubble has resurrected a concept that Einstein called his “biggest blunder”.

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork

2006-11-18T15:25:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

These beautiful and powerful words are from the beginning of Psalm 19 -- I was reminded of them when I saw these stunning photographs. That's our Sun, the giver of life and all the sweetness and pain that life can hold.
And then I thought of the brilliance and talent of the scientists who thought this science into existence, and was reminded of another beautiful passage:

What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
or the son of man, that thou visitest him?
Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honor.

Now to the illustrations: the top one is described this way: Mercury and the Sun, the view through Hinode's X-ray Telescope. The arrow points to Mercury. The bottom one is described this way: When the transit began, that is, when Mercury moved directly in front of the sun's surface, Hinode zoomed in using another of its telescopes, the SOT (Solar Optical Telescope). The images reveal Mercury as no mere speck but a full-fledged planetary disk.

NASA - X-ray Transit of Mercury

To appreciate the majesty and power of a typical G-type star, you need only glance at this photo [the top photo]: The tiny black speck is Mercury. The star looming in the background is our own sun.

The Japanese Space Agency's new orbiting solar observatory, Hinode (formerly known as Solar B), took the picture on Nov. 8th just as Mercury was about to begin a rare solar transit. Thousands of people on Earth saw and photographed the event, but Hinode's photo is like no other because it shows the view through an X-ray telescope.

"Hinode's X-ray telescope, the XRT, is the best solar X-ray telescope ever flown," says John Davis, NASA's Hinode project scientist at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "The XRT has arc-second resolution and can take pictures as rapidly as once every second."

X-rays interest solar physicists because they reveal the hottest gases in the sun's atmosphere. The bright flourish just above Mercury, for instance, is a gigantic mass of million-degree plasma trapped in the magnetic field of a sunspot. Viewed through an ordinary white light telescope, that hot mass would be almost completely invisible.

Truly, "these are unique images," says Davis.

When the transit began, that is, when Mercury moved directly in front of the sun's surface, Hinode zoomed in using another of its telescopes, the SOT (Solar Optical Telescope). The images reveal Mercury as no mere speck but a full-fledged planetary disk.

Viewing the movie [this refers to another link in this article], Davis points out "the motions in the background." The sun's surface boils like water atop a hot stove. Each of the bubbling "granules" is about the size of a terrestrial continent.

Hinode, just launched in September, is still in the shake-down phase of its mission. Ground controllers are testing Hinode's telescopes and other systems and don't expect to begin routine science operations until next month. The transit of Mercury is just a hint of what's to come.

Loving thine enemy

2006-11-17T23:58:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

In the end, if we have the stomach for it, we are going to have to isolate, contain and control Islam with the threat of nuclear annihilation if they attack us. We are also going to have to figure out how to deal with the uncomfortable fact that we have an enemy living in our midst. While there are peaceful Muslims -- who are, in reality, Muslims in name only -- any that are true Muslims are devoted to the takeover and destruction of this country and everything it stands for. If we truly want to survive, unpleasant things are going to have to be done. We may have to outlaw Islam and deport all Muslims and forbid them to immigrate. We must isolate these people in their own lands so we know where they are and where we can reach them with our superior military advantage, including nuclear. Instead, we are building mosques at Quantico, holding Ramadan dinners in the White House, and consorting with known terrorists from CAIR.

Loving thine enemy

Loving thine enemy
The more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily around the room
Mark Steyn
National Post
Thursday, November 16, 2006

After September 11, the first reaction of just about every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, so did the Prince of Wales, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, the prime minister of Canada and many more. And, when the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died away, you couldn't help feeling that this would strike almost any previous society as, well, bizarre. Pearl Harbor's been attacked? Quick, order some sushi and get me into a matinee of Madam Butterfly! [....]

From America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, by Mark Steyn. Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Copyright (Copyright) 2006 by Mark Steyn.

Democracy’s Problems with Islam

2006-11-17T23:17:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Based on his own experiences, Amil Imani once again warns the West of the dangers of encroaching Islam.

Family Security Matters

Democracy’s Problems with Islam
Amil Imani
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: November 17, 2006

A relatively recent demographic change—significant increase in Muslim population—poses a serious challenge to the American system of governance—democracy.

Historically, people from all over the world came to this land-of-take-all and made it their home. In becoming American, each new aspirant had to meet specific provisions and take the “Pledge of Allegiance” as sworn affirmation of his highest loyalty to his new homeland. After a couple of generations, all hyphenated Americans saw themselves as Americans with a special affection for their ancestral heritage. An Irish-American, for instance, considered himself every bit as American as a German-American, or a Chinese-American.

Traditionally, America did not homogenize its diverse people. The notion of the “melting pot,” is inaccurate. Instead, America did one better. As it welcomed its diverse people, America united them around a set of core values such as respect for human rights, democratic governance, and the rule of law.

The large number of Muslims arrival of recent years is posing a serious problem to this nation of all nations. Bluntly speaking, no one can be a Muslim and an American at the same time. Here are some of the reasons.

* A Muslim is, first and foremost, an Ummehist—a citizen of international Islam. So, when a Muslim takes the Pledge of Allegiance, he is either ignorant of the implication of his pledge or is lying willfully. Ignorance is never a valid reason in the court of law, and lying in the process of becoming citizen is a ground for denying the application and even deporting the violator. Sadly enough, tagyyeh—lying, or dissimulation—is not only condoned, it is recommended to the Muslims in their scripture. Hence, a Muslim can and would lie without any compunctions, whenever it is expedient.

* Muslims, by belief and practice, are the most blatant violators of human rights. We hardly need to detail here Muslims’ systemic cruel treatment of the unbelievers, women of all persuasions, and any and all minorities across the board. To Muslims, human rights have a different meaning, and it protective provisions are reserved strictly for Muslims—primarily for Muslim men. Just a couple of examples should suffice for now.

Oppression of women, for one, is so systemic in Islam that to this day women are, at best, second class citizens under Islamic law. Saudi Arabia, the custodian of Islamdom, denies women the right to drive, vote or hold elective offices—the most basic rights of citizens in democratic societies.

For another, no non-Islamic literature are allowed in Saudi Arabia. A visiting Christian, for instance, is denied to enter the Kingdom with a Bible. Further, severe punishment is meted out to anyone daring to disagree with Islam or espouse a different religion. Iran’s resurgent Shiism often vies with Saudi Arabia in its mistreatment of religious and non-religious minorities. To the fanatical ruling gang in Iran, it is their brand of Islam or disenfranchisement of rights of citizenship and even death for the “sin” of apostasy. And of course, there is no point at all in talking about the savage Islamic Taliban.

* Respect for the rule of law, as it is understood and practiced by civilized people, is an instrument of convenience to be used to advantage and to be violated when it is not, for the Muslim. A Muslim believes in a different law—the Shariah: a set of stone-age rules. Violation of the non-Muslim laws, therefore, is no violation at all to a Muslim.

What is incredible is the gall and audacity of Muslims in demanding that Western and other democracies legalize Shariah in their societies. Large populations of Muslims, mostly recent arrivals, in countries such as Canada, Great Britain, and Sweden are experiencing the insistent demands by Muslims to have Shariah rule their Islamic communities. This is just the beginning and it may seem relatively harmless to the simpletons in our midst. Yet, once Shariah is recognized to any extent, it will reach out to rule not only on matters that concern Muslims, but also those that may involve a Muslim and non-Muslim. Under Shariah, a Muslim man married to a non-Muslim woman is able to divorce the woman at will, automatically have custody of the children, and literally toss the wife out of “his” home with just about no compensations.

* As for democracy, the rule of the people, Muslims have no use at all. Muslims believe that Allah’s rule must govern the world in the form of Caliphate—a theocracy. Making mockery of democracy, subverting its working, and ignoring its provisions is a Muslim’s way of falsifying what he already believes to be a sinful and false system of governance invented by the infidels.

To Muslims, Ummeh-ism—international Islamism—is the legitimate form of government. Ummeh-ism is another form of despotism such as Communism and Fascism, with the added feature of enjoying “divine” authority.

The world has good samples of Ummeh-ism in practice to scrutinize in Islamic autocracies. Khamenei of Iran is not called “Caliph.” He is called the “Supreme Guide.” The Saudi King is just another Caliph vessel of the “divine.” These Islamic despots are every bit as vile as the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Pol Pots, and the Mussolinis. The government these Islamic autocrats head is infested to the core with the Islamic disease of oppression, corruption and the absence of accountability to the people.

Democracies believe that government must be of the people, by the people, and for the people. Ummeh-ism is anathema to this sacrosanct fundamental democratic ideal.

As more and more Muslims arrive in non-Islamic lands, as they reproduce with great fecundity, as they convert the disenchanted and minorities, and as petrodollar-flush Muslims and Muslim treasuries supply generous funds, Muslims gather more power to undermine the democratic rule. A consortium composed of pandering politicians, blinded with short-term self-interest and egoism; attention and fund-seeking self-proclaimed prima donna professors; and, bastions of useful idiot liberals, universities, is the witting or unwitting promoter of Ummeh-ism.

It is human nature to be concerned, first and foremost, with his personal well-being. Some people evolve to a higher level of humanness and place the welfare of the general public above their own. Yet, many remain fixated at the constricted stage of “self first, self, last.” Even if you belong to this latter group, your self-interest demands that you do all you can to make sure that the disease of Islamofascism does not devour democracy. Democracy is both fragile and corruptible. It takes vigilant citizenry to protect its integrity.

We fully agree with Churchill’s observation, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest.” Yet, as imperfect as it is, democracy is still humanity’s best system of self-rule. We, one and all, must defend it with our all.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Amil Imani is an Iranian-born American citizen and pro-democracy activist residing in the United States of America. Imani is a columnist, literary translator, novelist and an essayist who has been writing and speaking out for the struggling people of his native land, Iran. He maintains a website at http://amilimani.com

Return of the Leonids

2006-11-17T15:10:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

ATTENTION ALL YOU STAR GAZERS! They're back! Be sure to get ready to gaze heaven-wards this Sunday for the Return of the Leonids. (The photo shows a Leonid meteor streaking past the Orion Nebula in 2001. Photo Credit: Mark Brown of Alabama)

NASA - Return of the Leonids

On Sunday, Nov. 19th, Earth will pass through a stream of debris from comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. The result: a shower of Leonid meteors.

"We expect an outburst of more than 100 Leonids per hour," says Bill Cooke, the head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL. This pales in comparison to the Leonid storms of 2001 and 2002, when sky watchers saw thousands of meteors. Even so, a hundred per hour would make the Leonids one of the best showers of 2006.

The problem is, you have to be in the right place at the right time to see them.

Earth's encounter with the comet dust is going to be brief—"possibly no more than a few hours long," says Cooke. Forecasters differ on when the outburst will occur. Estimates range from 0445 UT to 0630 UT on Nov. 19th (11:45 p.m. on Nov. 18th to 1:30 am EST on Nov. 19th). The timing favors western Europe, Africa, Brazil and eastern parts of North America: map.

Cooke urges observers to find the darkest possible skies. "These Leonids are going to be faint." Why? "The stream contains very small grains of comet dust. Small grains make faint meteors--it's as simple as that."

The mid-November region of Earth's orbit is littered with debris from Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Every time the comet visits the inner solar system (once every 33 years), it lays down a new stream of dust, pebbles and rock. This creates a sort of "minefield" for Earth to navigate every November.

Not all of these debris streams are alike. For example: "A Leonid stream we hit in 1998 was full of rock-sized debris. They made brilliant fireballs when they hit the atmosphere," recalls Cooke. "The stream we're hitting this year is just the opposite. It's mostly fine dust."

Debris streams are segregated—dusty vs. rocky—by the force of sunlight. Consider the stream directly ahead of us: "It was ejected from the comet in 1933," says Cooke. "At first, the debris was a mixture of many sizes." But as years passed, the smaller particles diverged from the larger ones. Radiation pressure—the delicate pressure of sunlight itself—pushed the light dust onto a collision course with Earth. Heavier rock-sized fragments resisted the pressure and lagged behind.

Perhaps in some future year we'll encounter the larger debris from 1933 and receive an overdue display of fireballs. How would they get here? "Nudged by Jupiter," suggests Cooke. Jupiter's gravity is strong enough to alter the course of heavier fragments. Indeed, by guiding debris toward us, Jupiter is indirectly responsible for many bright Leonid displays in the past.

But this is 2006. So prepare for an outburst of faint Leonids.

Extra: Don't believe everything you read. While meteor forecasters have done a splendid job predicting Leonid outbursts in recent years—sometimes "nailing the peak within minutes"—they could be wrong in 2006. The outburst might happen at an unexpected time or it might be better than expected. Cooke urges enthusiasts everywhere to keep an eye out for Leonid meteors the nights of Nov. 17th – 19th. "The best time to look," he says, "is just before local dawn when the constellation Leo is high in the sky."

Stonehenge 'No Place for the Dead', Says Expert

2006-11-17T00:00:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Stonehenge has also been seen as an observatory. The author hedges his bet in the final sentence: Stonehenge is a very powerful and positive place of pilgrimage, although whether the monument’s healing power actually worked is a matter for further discussion,” he concludes.

Stonehenge 'No Place for the Dead', Says Expert

Professor Timothy Darvill, Head of the Archaeology Group at Bournemouth University, has breathed new life into the controversy surrounding the origins of Stonehenge by publishing a theory which suggests that the ancient monument was a source and centre for healing and not a place for the dead as believed by many previous scholars.

After publication of his new book on the subject - Stonehenge: The Biography of a Landscape (Tempus Publishing) - Professor Darvill also makes a case for revellers who travel to be near the ancient monument for the summer solstice in June to reconsider. Instead, Professor Darvill believes that those seeking to tap into the monument’s powers at its most potent time of the year should do so in December during the winter solstice when our ancestors believed that the henge was ‘occupied’ by a prehistoric god - the equivalent of the Roman and Greek god of healing, Apollo – who ‘chose’ to reside in winter with the Hyborians, long believed to be the ancient Britons.

The basis for Professor Darvill’s findings lies in the Preseli Mountains in west Wales where he and colleague Professor Geoffrey Wainwright have located an exact origin for the bluestones used in the construction of Stonehenge some 250 km away.

“The questions most people ask when they consider Stonehenge is ‘why was it built?’ and ‘how was it was used?’” says Professor Darvill. “Our work has taken us to the Preseli Mountains to provide a robust context for the source of the bluestones and to explore various ideas about why those mountains were so special to prehistoric people”.

“We have several strands of evidence to consider. First, there have folklore in the form of accounts written in the 14th century which refer to a magician bringing the stones from the west of the British Isles to what we know as Salisbury Plain,” he continues. “It was believed that these particular stones had many healing properties because in Preseli, there are many sacred springs that are considered to have health-giving qualities; the water comes out of the rocks used to build Stonehenge and it’s well established that as recently as the late 18th century, people went to Stonehenge to break off bits of rock as talismans.

“Also, around the Stonehenge landscape, there are many burials, some of which have been excavated and amongst these there are a good proportion of people who show sings of being unwell – some would have walked with a limp or had broken bones – just the sort of thing that in modern times pressurises people to seek help from the Almighty.

“In the case of Stonehenge, I suggest that the presiding deity was a prehistoric equivalent of the Greek and Roman god of healing, Apollo. Although his main sanctuary was at Delphi in Greece, it is widely believed that he left Greece in the winter months to reside in the land of the Hyborians – usually taken to be Britain.

“Altogether, and with the incorporation of the stones from Wales, Stonehenge is a very powerful and positive place of pilgrimage, although whether the monument’s healing power actually worked is a matter for further discussion,” he concludes.

Dad Inspired 'Jurassic Park,' Son Inspires 'Jurassic Poop'

2006-11-16T22:23:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

The illustration is of a dinosaur coprolite. No way to measure its dimensions, but it must be pretty massive. And probably pretty smelly at the time!

Dad Inspired 'Jurassic Park,' Son Inspires 'Jurassic Poop'

by Staff Writers
Hamilton, Canada (SPX) Nov 16, 2006

Twenty-five years ago American entomologist George Poinar's work on ancient insects in amber inspired Michael Crichton's futuristic thriller Jurassic Park. Now son Hendrik Poinar's groundbreaking work has inspired the world's first book on the science of fossil faeces, Jurassic Poop.

The new children's book by Canadian science writer Jacob Berkowitz reveals that America not only has the world's largest heap of ancient human leavings but that the study of coprolites, or fossil feces, is literally re-writing American history, including who attended the first Thanksgiving.

Developed completely from original scientific sources, Jurassic Poop is the first comprehensive book on coprolites, full of facts and stories that are intriguing to readers five to 100.

"When I saw my first coprolite ten years ago, I thought no way, how could something as soft as poop fossilize?," says Berkowitz. "But coprolites are found on every continent and from every geological time period. There's literally tons of fossil poop out there, and it's now recognized as priceless for helping scientists piece together the puzzle of ancient life."

Jurassic Poop profiles the work of Hendrik Poinar, a professor at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Canada. He was the first ever to extract DNA from ancient feces.

While his father's work in teasing DNA from insects in amber benefited from the revolutionary genetic technological advances of the 1980s -- particularly the invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to duplicate and thereby identify DNA fragments -- Hendrik's benefited from medical advances. The technique used to extract DNA from coprolites uses a chemical developed for the treatment of diabetes-related complications.

"After being pooh-poohed by scientists for decades, coprolites have now been shown to be the best source of ancient DNA, better than bones and teeth," says Berkowitz. Hendrik Poinar is now able to identify not only a pooper's gender, but also critical genetic information that will help to uncover the very origins of modern humans.

Berkowitz says coprolites even have something to say about one of the seminal stories in American history, the arrival of the Mayflower.

The official Mayflower record says that the only animals on board were two dogs. But in the mid-1990s an archaeological excavation of a 17th century Boston privy revealed another story. The Mayflower was infested with at least 20 types of Old World beetles, stow-aways who quickly called America home -- and do to this day.

Jurassic Poop also reveals that more than 1000 human coprolites have been collected from Hinds Cave in the Chihuahuan desert in southwest Texas, making the site the largest human coprolite cache ever found.

The fossilized specimens were deposited by ancient Americans over the course of about 8000 years. The book notes that these human remains are about 95-per cent fibre. That's about 15 times the amount of fibre the average American eats today. Hendrik Poinar is now collaborating with Vaughn Bryant of Texas A&M University to extract genetic information from the Hinds Cave coprolites.

Sharpest cut from nanotube sword

2006-11-16T21:00:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

The mystery of the famous Damascus sword may have been solved. Since this is a very interesting topic, I've collected three Wikipedia references: carbon nanotubes, Damascus steel, and Wootz steel.

news @ nature.com - Sharpest cut from nanotube sword - Carbon nanotech may have given swords of Damascus their edge.

Sharpest cut from nanotube sword
Carbon nanotech may have given swords of Damascus their edge.
Katharine Sanderson

Think carbon nanotubes are new-fangled? Think again. The Crusaders felt the might of the tube when they fought against the Muslims and their distinctive, patterned Damascus blades.

Sabres from Damascus, now in Syria, date back as far as 900 AD. Strong and sharp, they are made from a type of steel called wootz.

Their blades bear a banded pattern thought to have been created as the sword was annealed and forged. But the secret of the swords' manufacture was lost in the eighteenth century.

Materials researcher Peter Paufler and his colleagues at Dresden University, Germany, have taken electron-microscope pictures of the swords and found that wootz has a microstructure of nano-metre-sized tubes, just like carbon nanotubes used in modern technologies for their lightweight strength.

The tubes were only revealed after a piece of sword was dissolved in hydrochloric acid to remove another microstructure in the swords: nanowires of the mineral cementite.

Wootz's ingredients include iron ores from India that contain transition-metal impurities. It was thought that these impurities helped cementite wires to form, but it wasn't clear how. Paufler thinks carbon nanotubes could be the missing piece of the puzzle.

At high temperatures, the impurities in the Indian ores could have catalysed the growth of nanotubes from carbon in the burning wood and leaves used to make the wootz, Paufler suggests. These tubes could then have filled with cementite to produce the wires in the patterned blades, he says.

But his suggestion isn't necessarily rock solid. Steel expert John Verhoeven, of Iowa State University in Ames, suggests Paufler is seeing something else. Cementite can itself exist as rods, he notes, so there might not be any carbon nanotubes in the rod-like structure.

Another potential problem is that TEM equipment sometimes contains nanotubes, says physicist Alex Zettl of the University of California, Berkeley. Paufler admits it is difficult to exclude the problem but says that, having studied the swords with a range of different equipment, he is convinced that the tubes he sees are from the swords.

If Paufler is right, nanotube researchers do not mind being pre-empted by Indian steel-makers. "The important fact is that nanotubes were serving some very useful purpose even before they were discovered," says chemist Andrei Khlobystov of the University of Nottingham, UK. "This should inspire us to look for new practical applications of these remarkable nanostructures."

The next step, says Paufler, will be to take the latest carbon nanotube knowledge and work with bladesmiths to try and recreate the lost process.

.

Sore Throats and Horseshoe Crabs

2006-11-16T19:25:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

We just finished learning about what chili peppers and tarantula spiders have in common -- now we learn that the ancient horseshoe crab can help diagnose human illness.
The further we look, the more connections we find. What does it all mean? Perhaps we should take Shakespeare's advice:
Do not infest your mind with beating on
The strangeness of this business.

NASA - Sore Throats and Horseshoe Crabs

Soon, astronauts onboard the ISS will test a high-tech medical device that uses primitive enzymes from horseshoe crabs to diagnose human illness.

Picture this: You're on a mission to Mars, halfway there from Earth, and you're not feeling well. Your throat hurts when you swallow, your forehead is hot. You don't want to get sick or infect your crewmates. Should you take an antibiotic? If so, which kind?

With a new biological laboratory on a chip being developed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, in partnership with outside researchers, you may be able to get the answer in as little as five minutes.

The mini-lab goes by the maxi-acronym LOCAD-PTS, which stands for Lab-On-a-Chip Application Development–Portable Test System. The latest version is a handheld device slated for launch this December aboard shuttle mission STS-116 for testing on the International Space Station. [....]

The high-tech device relies on four enzymes extracted from the blood cells of one of Earth's most ancient living creatures: the horseshoe crab. "The horseshoe crab, a species that has survived some 300 million years, has a very primitive but sensitive immune system," Wainwright continues. A single bacterium can be enough to trigger enzymes in the crab's immune system, which clot the blood to seal off a wound.

The enzymes' extraordinary sensitivity and rapid response makes them widely useful in medical research to test the effectiveness of drugs and devices. (Withdrawing a bit of blood annually from horseshoe crabs, which are then returned to the wild, does not injure the creatures, and so far there is no acceptable synthetic substitute.)

It is these horseshoe crab enzymes that allow LOCAD-PTS to be so small, sensitive, and fast. First, a tiny amount of enzyme is inserted into tube-like channels and dried. Introducing any liquid sample to be tested into the channels rehydrates the enzymes. If the sample includes bacteria, their toxins trigger the enzymes, which change the liquid's color—the degree of color change depending on the number of germs. [....]

Spiders spin a web filled with lessons

2006-11-16T19:00:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

What do chili peppers and tarantula spiders have in common? Sounds like a silly question, but be sure to read this interesting article concerning disparate organisms evolving similar solutions to a common problem to find the surprising answer.

Spiders spin a web filled with lessons | csmonitor.com

Spiders spin a web filled with lessons
By Robert C. Cowen

Next time you eat a chili pepper, think tarantula. The creepy spider and the fiery vegetable use a similar chemical tactic to discourage attackers. This latest discovery of disparate organisms evolving similar solutions to a common problem illustrates the treasure trove of information on the development of earthly life that spiders represent. Scientists are sifting through that treasure molecule by molecule.

Organisms don't necessarily evolve a similar response to a common need. For example, we use our forelimbs to lift objects. Elephants use their noses.

But sometimes the response is good enough for it to develop in organisms as unrelated as plants and animals. Jan Siemans at the University of California in San Francisco and colleagues saw this in action when they took a good look at how venom from a West Indian tarantula works. In last week's issue of Nature, they reported that they found three peptide molecules "that target the capsaicin receptor" in an animal's nervous system.

Wait a minute. Capsaicin is the stuff that gives chili peppers their bite. It stimulates that receptor to evoke a sensation of pain. The entirely separate evolution of chilies and tarantulas produced a way to use the capsaicin receptor to scare off predators, or, in the case of chilies, enhance the world's cuisines.

Apparent cases of such parallel evolution are not always what they seem to be. For example, scientists had believed the iconic orb web design of two different spider groups had evolved independently. Then Jessica Garb at the University of California in Riverside and colleagues traced the evolutionary history recorded in the spiders' DNA. Their research, reported in the June issue of Science, shows that instead of having evolved separately in each spider group, the orb web originated in a common ancestor that lived at least 136 million years ago. "A lot of people had said over the years that the orb web was a pinnacle of adaptive design. Our work confirms that not only is this web type very old, it was also lost in certain lineages of spiders," Dr. Garb explains. Evolution can discard an adaptation as well as create it.

Perhaps the gem of spider evolution is the super-strong insoluble silk on which spiders swing and with which they weave their webs. Industrial and academic engineers are going after spider silk, hoping to learn how to make artificial materials as good as, or better than, the spiders' product. One of the latest insights comes from Gareth McKinley's laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, the group describes physical processes it has discovered that turn a watery protein solution into the tough fiber produced by the golden-silk orb-weaving spider.

"The amazing thing nature has found is how to spin a material out of an aqueous solution and produce a fiber that doesn't redissolve," Professor McKinley commented in a press release.

Research engineers like McKinley look forward to using spider know-how to design tougher plastics, better body armor, stronger parachutes, and other novel materials. Research on tarantula venom points the way to uncovering subtle effects of other plant or animal toxins on nervous systems. Either way, we can learn a lot from spiders.

Alien Safari

2006-11-16T18:27:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

You're probably wondering how a photo of the obnoxious co-worker who inhabits the cubicle across from you -- or perhaps a photo of your least favorite relative -- got onto my blog. Actually, it's a photo of a methane ice worm, described below in no. 6, "Strangest habitat".
This short article, which enumerates six kinds of extreme organisms, should be read along with the article, The Hidden Biospheres Of Planet Earth, right below this one. And be sure to click on the link to see pictures of the other "extreme organisms".

Planet Quest: Alien Safari

Welcome to Alien Safari! Explore the "life zones" below to find some of the extreme organisms on our planet.

1. Hottest

Name: Archaea Strain 121
Location: Hot springs at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Description: This microbe belongs to a class called "hyperthermophiles," which live in extremely hot or acidic water. Some species can survive temperatures over 235 degrees Fahrenheit -- hot enough to boil an egg in minutes.
What this means for life in the universe: The discovery of organisms that thrive within a broad range of temperatures opens up new prospects for finding microbial life elsewhere in the universe.

2. Deepest Underground

Name: Bacillus infernus
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
Description: New species of bacteria have been discovered in caves and gold mines as deep as 2 miles underground. These species are known as thermophiles, or heat lovers, because they thrive in high-temperature environments.
What this means for life in the universe: The study of habitable environments deep below the Earth's surface may hold important clues to finding life on other planets. Many scientists believe that if there is life on Mars it will be found underground.

3. Most Acidic

Name: Acidophiles
Location: Lechuguilla Cave, Carlsbad, New Mexico
Description: These hardy organisms have been found living in a number of caves under conditions of pH of 0.0 -about as acidic as battery acid!
What this means for life in the universe: Some scientists speculate that the clouds of Venus could be a plausible habitat for microbial life. The clouds are highly acidic, but that wouldn't be a problem for acidophiles.

4. Highest Radiation Dose

Name: D. radiodurans
Location: Hanford nuclear waste storage site, Washington state
Description: D. radiodurans has been humorously dubbed "Conan the Bacterium." It's the most radiation-resistant organism known. These guys can withstand 1.5 million rads (units of radiation) - a thousand times more than any other life form on Earth.
What this means for life in the universe: D. radiodurans species beats most of the constraints for survival of life on Mars, including radiation, cold, vacuum and dormancy.

5. Living without Sunlight

Name: Hydrothermal vent communities
Location: First discovered on the Galapagos Rift off the coast of Ecuador
Description: In 1977, scientists first discovered entire communities of organisms flourishing miles below the surface of the ocean, around openings in the ocean floor out of which hot, mineral-rich water erupts. The openingshost a variety of strange and amazing organisms that have adapted to immense pressure, total darkness, and proximity to super-heated water that reaches 662 degrees F.
What this means for life in the universe: There is strong evidence that a liquid ocean exists below the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. If this ocean contains hydrothermal vents as well, scientists speculate, they could be wellsprings of alien life.

6. Strangest Habitat

Name: Methane Ice Worms
Location: Gulf of Mexico, 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana
Description: In 1997, vast colonies of strange, rosy-pink worms 1-2 inches in length were found burrowing in mounds of methane-rich ice erupting from the sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico.
What this means for life in the universe: The discovery of these previously unknown life forms, living in frigid ocean depths far beyond the reach of sunlight, extend our definition of what constitutes a habitable environment. The discovery provides further evidence that life is tough in the extreme.

The Hidden Biospheres Of Planet Earth

2006-11-15T12:10:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

A very interesting article about the existence of parallel biological communities on Earth.

The Hidden Biospheres Of Planet Earth

The Hidden Biospheres Of Planet Earth
by Staff Writers
Moffett Field CA (SPX) Nov 14, 2006

Two recent discoveries in astrobiology challenge many of our assumptions about an integrated biological community on Earth. At the microbial level, it seems that there may be previously hidden biospheres that exist on Earth alongside our more familiar neighbors. One such community has been found deeply buried underground, while the other lives in the sea alongside more familiar life forms.
Potentially among the most important recent discoveries in astrobiology is the finding of deeply buried life forms that appear to thrive independent of the familiar surface biosphere, which is powered by sunlight. These microbes, discovered in hot groundwater 2.8 km deep in a South African gold mine, ultimately draw their energy from chemical compounds hydrogen and sulfates -- produced by the slow decay of radioactive elements in the rocks. The existence of a deep subsurface microbial community on Earth suggests that similar isolated biospheres could persist on other planets, such as Mars, in spite of hostile conditions on their surfaces.

A large international research team, led by scientists from Princeton and Indiana Universities and supported in part by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, announced their discovery in a paper published in the 20 October 2006 issue of Science. The first author of the paper is Li-Hing Lin, now of National Taiwan University, who started this work as a Princeton graduate student. The scientists took advantage of a water-filled fracture that was intersected during drilling in a deep gold mine near Johannesburg. They began to collect water samples within a few days of initial flow in order to ensure minimum contamination, and continued to draw new samples over several months.

Using modern genetic analysis tools, the team was able to compare the microbes with other anaerobic microbial communities that derive their energy from sulfate reduction. A detailed study of the water chemistry indicates that there is sufficient naturally occurring sulfate and hydrogen to sustain life indefinitely. The base of the food chain is a sulfate reducer belonging to the phylum called Firmicutes, and other microbes in the community may subsist on products from this primary producer. The water itself was dated at tens of millions of years, during which time it has had no physical or chemical contact with the familiar world far above.

In recent years, scientists have discovered many communities of microbes living under conditions formerly thought impossible for life. These extremophiles can thrive under conditions of high and low temperature, acid or alkaline chemistry, or high salinity that would kill more familiar surface microbes. Some of these extremophiles live in communities at hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean or within the rock, hundreds of meters below the surface. Until now, however, the deep biosphere appeared to require at least some indirect contact with the atmosphere. This discovery, from a much deeper and more isolated environment, represents a major breakthrough, revealing an alien form of life within the Earth.

This discovery may yield key insights for the habitability of Mars and other planets with hostile surfaces but warm water in their interiors. NASA missions have revealed that Mars once had a surface environment more suitable for life, with liquid water and sunlight, circumstances under which life may have formed and thrived billions of years ago. Perhaps the remnant of that life persists below the surface, in environments like this sunless sea on Earth.

The second exciting discovery is of a previously unknown rare biosphere that co-exists with more familiar life forms in the deep ocean. The discoverers are a team of scientists from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, under the leadership of Mitch Sogin, who is also the PI for the MBL team in the NAI. These scientists used new genetic analysis tools to look past the dominant microbial populations to sample the much rarer microbes that have previously gone undetected, using samples collected from both normal cold sea water and the hot water associated with hydrothermal vents. Their work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for 8 August 2006.

This new analysis reveals enormous diversity within this rare biosphere. The techniques used do not permit individual organisms to be isolated for study, but they allow statistical estimates of the population. Although the numbers of such microbes are small, there is at least 100 times greater species diversity than had been expected.

What are all these diverse organisms doing? In a sense, they are not very successful, since they are far outnumbered by more familiar species. Yet they persist in small numbers. Perhaps they represent a kind of natural back-up system or reserve force that can swing into action if environmental conditions change in ways that threaten the dominant ecosystem. They could be part of lifes strategy to survive even catastrophic environmental changes. The next challenge is to estimate the global patterns in this rare biosphere and to begin to characterize its individual species.

Birdblog: Henry Morton Stanley

2006-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Along with my post about David Livingstone (scroll down to last Friday's "Doctor Livingstone, I presume?"), you should also read Tim Birdnow's excellent article about Livingstone's "discoverer", Stanley, that I have linked to below. I have posted only the first two paragraphs, but the whole article is long and very exciting to read, as well as being very well written, so I urge you to read the whole thing.!

Birdblog: Henry Morton Stanley

Friday was the anniversary of the 1871 meeting between Henry Morton Stanley and Dr. David Livingstone, and Aussiegirl has a piece over at Ultima Thule about the legendary African explorer and missionary whom newsman Stanley was so presumptuous toward.

Livingstone went to Africa to explore and win souls for Christ, but Stanley went for more Earthly reasons, and he, more than anyone, opened the Dark Continent to eventual European colonization. He helped Belgian Emperor Leopold establish a personal kingdom in what is now Zaire (the Belgian government was not interested in colonizing Africa, so their king sent Stanley to claim it for his personal estate) and he discovered the great falls which form the ultimate end of the Congo river (Stanley Falls). Stanley was the last of the great explorers. [....]

Climbing plants get wrapped up

2006-11-15T00:02:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Ever wonder how high a vine could entwine itself around a pole? Well, some mathematicians, with too much time on their hands, have solved the problem.

The illustration is of "blue bindweed", a typical climbing plant, and depicts the end length of the tendril (a to b) that creates tension in the stem, thus supporting itself on the cane. (Image taken from The Textbook of Botany, Morphological and Physiological by Julius von Sachs, 1875.)

Climbing plants get wrapped up (November 2006) - News - PhysicsWeb

Climbing plants get wrapped up
author, Jon Cartwright
14 November 2006

Why can climbing plants twine around thin canes, but not around trees? This question has been playing on the minds of mathematicians in the US and France, who now claim to be able to predict the "critical radius" of the pole that a plant can climb (Phys. Rev. Lett. 97 184302).

Climbing plants have developed many different techniques for growing vertically upwards without being able to support themselves. Garden peas, for example, grow by wrapping themselves in a spiral around an appropriate upright support. Alain Goriely from the University of Arizona and Sébastien Neukirch from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie have now modelled this process by assuming that a plant's tendril is akin to an elastic rod wrapped around a cylindrical pole. The two researchers were then able to calculate the positions of the tendril where the tension in the stem is balanced by the resultant force from the support.

They discovered that the tendril's natural curvature plays a crucial role in determining the radius of the pole that it can climb. For relatively thin poles, the tip curls closely around the surface – in other words, the angle between the tip of the tendril and the tangent of the pole is almost zero. For a slightly thicker pole, the tip must curl into the pole's surface to maintain its grip, so the angle increases. When the radius of the pole is more than 3.3 times the tendril's natural curvature, the angle increases so much that the tip curls back on itself, leaving the tendril unable to climb at all.

Goriely and Neukirch went on to study how important friction was for climbing. Unsurprisingly, friction helps tendrils to climb by preventing the tendril from sliding back. In fact, they reckoned that if the friction is high enough, plants could climb poles up to eight times the tendril's radius.

Florida's Martinez tapped for RNC chief

2006-11-14T17:02:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

The Republican party as we once knew it is dead. The party that Reagan built has been destroyed and razed by the Bush family and Karl Rove. We unknowingly elected a Manchurian Candidate of sorts, a globalist elitist who has more in common with the Democratic party than with the Republican party. The Republican party is now the personal plaything of the Bushes for as far as the eye can see. They control the pursestrings, they control the power -- just like Hillary does in the Democrat party. That's why the two families are so chummy. They have more in common with each other than they do with the likes of you or me. It is time we finished with this Bushican party and created a party of Constitutional Conservatives that will answer to the people of this country, because God knows, neither party is now paying the slightest bit of attention. The article makes it clear that Bush is pleased with the democrat win because now he can push through his beloved amnesty bill.
Although there is perhaps the meerest glimmer of hope that the state chairs will vote for Steele rather than Martinez, I wouldn't count on it. The state reps usually act as a rubber stamp for the White House choice, and they will be strong-armed and intimidated just as Steele has been. This is now the party of illegal immigration and wholesale amnesty and a brotherly North American Union.

Florida's Martinez tapped for RNC chief -- The Washington Times

Florida's Martinez tapped for RNC chief
By Ralph Z. Hallow
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published November 14, 2006

Florida Sen. Mel Martinez, co-author of a bill to grant amnesty to illegal aliens, has been picked by White House strategist Karl Rove to be general chairman of the Republican National Committee, RNC officials confirmed yesterday.
Some RNC members greeted the news as another example of White House cronyism, reminiscent of President Bush's attempt to name his personal friend and general counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, a nomination withdrawn in response to outrage from the party's conservative supporters.
While the chairman is elected by the 165-member RNC -- which next meets in Washington in January -- the committee traditionally acts as a rubber stamp for a Republican president when the party controls the White House.
The surprise Martinez appointment, leaked yesterday to selected TV outlets and wire services, cut off a move by conservative Republicans to have Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele take over the national party chairmanship. Current Chairman Ken Mehlman announced last week he would step down at the January meeting. [....]
Some RNC members, already dismayed by last week's election that swept Republicans from control of Congress, expressed anger at the way Mr. Rove leaked his choice of Mr. Martinez immediately after a conference call in which the Florida senator's name was floated for the first time. [....]
The move was seen as a signal that the White House intends to push through Congress the "comprehensive" immigration bill -- which Mr. Martinez and Mr. Hagel backed in the Senate -- that was blocked by conservative Republicans in the House.
"Clearly, Martinez is going to lead the fight for amnesty that Bush couldn't win when Republicans controlled the Congress," the RNC member said.
While campaigning for the Senate in Maryland, Mr. Steele was an outspoken critic of the Hagel-Martinez measure -- which would have created a guest-worker program and allowed most illegal aliens to become citizens -- blaming "the partisan gamesmanship of Washington insiders" for the failure to deal with the problem.
"Until we see Congress take some real and immediate steps to secure our borders, we can hardly expect Americans to seriously consider proposals for dealing with those illegal immigrants already in our country and those employers who fail to adequately report them," Mr. Steele told the Baltimore Sun in August.
Aides to the lieutenant governor confided that Mr. Steele was "furious over his treatment by Bush operatives," who they said accused him of "not being a team player" because he had spoken to The Washington Times last week after his name was first proposed for the RNC post. Steele aides said White House officials threatened to withhold from Mr. Steele a Cabinet appointment he had been promised in lieu of the RNC chairmanship. [....]
Some RNC members yesterday saw the naming of Mr. Martinez as a continuing tendency of the Bush administration to manipulate the national party.

Sen. Mel Martinez to Replace Mehlman as RNC Chairman

2006-11-13T22:25:00.000-05:00

By Aussiegirl

Another Bush crony and team player. The Bushes intend to run the Republican party ad infinitum just like Hillary runs the Democratic party. No wonder they are all so chummy. So what was all the fuss about floating Steele's name out there? It now looks like a public slap in the face to a wonderful new face for the Republican party -- and a black man. So, are they going to stick him in HUD? I'd turn it down, if I were he. It's an insult. More Karl Rove genius. I'm through with this Republican party -- it's now the party of the Bush family.
You know, I've had this thought ever since the Bushes got so chummy with the Clintons, but I pushed it to the back of my mind as being preposterous. Now I'm not so sure. The Bushes are elitists -- and so are the Clintons. They both believe that the people know nothing and that the world is better ruled by enlightened people of the higher economic strata who understand issues that go beyond parochial national interests. They are globalists. As such, and with both families running the Republican and the Democrat parties, they will share the presidency back and forth for the foreseeable future. The Bushes will hand off to Hillary for 8 years, and then run either Jeb, or the first Hispanic president -- Jeb's son. We have the equivalent of two dynastic families set to rule politics in this country for the foreseeable future. Sure, I'm trying to push these thoughts to the back of my mind, but why else is Bush single-handedly destroying the Republican party? We need a Constitutional Conservative party.

FOXNews.com - Sen. Mel Martinez to Replace Mehlman as RNC Chairman - Politics | Republican Party | Democratic Party | Political Spectrum

Sen. Mel Martinez to Replace Mehlman as RNC Chairman
Monday , November 13, 2006

WASHINGTON — Sen. Mel Martinez, the first-term lawmaker who previously served in President Bush's Cabinet, will assume the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, GOP officials said Monday.

Martinez, 60, will replace current chairman Ken Mehlman, who will leave the post in January at the end of his two-year term, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting a formal announcement.

Martinez will remain in the Senate. Mike Duncan, the RNC's current general counsel and a former party treasurer, will run the day-to-day operations at the party's Capitol Hill headquarters.

Martinez was tapped in 2001 as President Bush's secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He resigned in 2003 to run for the open Senate seat created when incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Graham decided not to seek another term. Martinez was elected with 49 percent of the vote — a slim margin that was credited to Bush's win in that state.

Martinez started slowly in the Senate where he was embarrassed by a one-page unsigned memo that originated in his office. Written by a Martinez aide and disavowed by Senate Republicans, the memo laid out the political benefits to getting involved in the fate of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman whose end-of-life battle became a rallying cry for conservatives.

"This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue," said the memo. Its author resigned.

Martinez fled Cuba in 1962 as a 15-year-old. His parents remained on the communist island, hoping one day to join him. He eventually was placed with a foster family in Orlando, studied English and worked odd jobs that helped him buy his father a used car when his parents arrived in the United States four years later.

He put himself through college and earned a law degree, made millions as a trial lawyer and served as president of the Orlando Utilities Commission from 1994 to 1997. He was elected as the Orange County, Fla., chairman, serving from 1998 to 2001.