Thursday, April 28, 2005
At right you can see my rain guage, showing the tiny amount of rain we got last Friday evening, and the almost 3/4" of rain we got today. We all thought the rainy season was over, and I'm partway through the annual post-rainy season mowing, brush-cutting, and weed-whacking...
Looks like I'll be starting over on that job...
Today's Wall Street Journal has a commentary piece that starts off this way:
We scoured the papers and searched the Internet but couldn't find many references yesterday to the fact that Condoleezza Rice was in Chile leading the U.S. delegation to the fledgling Community of Democracies. Perhaps that's because this story doesn't fit with the prevailing diplomatic narrative of a cowboy America that refuses to play nicely with other nations.
We'll even go out on a limb with this prediction: While most of the 120 or so countries represented in Santiago may not envisage it yet, this Community could one day overshadow Kofi Annan's dictator-friendly talk shop on New York's East River.
The United Nations was conceived as a place where tyrannies and democracies could and should sit together on equal terms. That may have made sense in the aftermath of World War II, when free countries were in the clear minority. But nowadays that increasingly outdated premise results in such spectacles as Libya chairing the U.N. Human Rights Commission. It's also a problem that Mr. Annan's proposed reforms — which feature enlargement of the Security Council — do little to address.
Now, all of this was a big surprise to me — I've never heard of the Community of Democracies, much less know about Condi's visit. A little googling led to this news story, but the WSJ is generally correct: there is very little coverage of this most interesting organization. I suspect their hopes are mostly fantasy just now, but...sometimes fantasies become reality. And I share their view of the attractiveness of this type of organization, with membership available only for democracies. As an American, I'd much rather see my tax dollars headed that way than to Kofi's U.N...
At first blush (and maybe at second blush as well) this idea seems like a really bad combination of useless and silly. But maybe I render judgment too quickly?
Almost 50 years after Saint's flight, Pavel Trivailo and a team of engineers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia are exploring the same basic principles to devise a more sophisticated air delivery system. They are working on an automated device that will allow them to pick up and put down loads - including people - with hardly a jolt. If their system is successful, it could speed up rescues at sea, make cargo or aid delivery far easier and help collect injured people from otherwise inaccessible regions of jungle or mountain.
You can read all about it at the New Scientist's site...
Without much fanfare from the popular press, the Cassini probe is quietly continuing its remarkable scientific mission. The latest photographic tour de force is this photo of the moon Epimetheus, described below:
Epimetheus is irregularly shaped and dotted with soft-edged craters. The many large, softened craters on Epimetheus indicate a surface that is several billion years old. The moon shares an orbit with another of Saturn's small moons, Janus. The two dance in a planetary tango as they move in almost identical orbits, exchanging orbits every four years, instead of colliding. Both play a role in creating intricate waves in Saturn¿s rings; both have densities significantly lower than that of solid ice, suggesting they may be "rubble piles" held together by gravity. At 116 kilometers (72 miles) across, Epimetheus is slightly smaller than Janus at 181 kilometers (113 miles) across. Spectra of Epimetheus from the Cassini visual infrared mapping spectrometer indicate that the moon is mostly water ice.
Much more information at the official Cassini site. Click on the image for a full-sized view...
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The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker hasn't been confirmably sighted for over 60 years, though questionable reports of sightings have trickled in all along. But now an organized expedition has sighted, filmed, documented and confirmed that the magnificent woodpecker is still with us. This is a rare piece of good news in the contemporary situation of species preservation. Hooray! A couple of news stories:
UPDATE:
GrrlScientist is all over this, with lots of great pointers including to a video sequence.
One of the factors exacerbating the terrorism problem is that the majority of Muslims (or at least their organizations) refuse to condemn in any substantive way the actions of the terrorists — the vast majority of whom use Islam as the justification for their actions. This is complicity, plain and simple. And it isn't helping.
One could imagine a much different situation, in which Muslim leaders around the world roundly condemned terrorism in any form (including that employed against Israel). They could urge their flocks to work against terrorism by informing on the terrorists, by refraining from contributing, etc.
Instead we have a situation where the Islamic organizations are actively engaged — directly or indirectly — in the promotion of terrorism. And very, very few Islamic or Arabic voices are raised against terrorism
All of this context makes Sandmonkey's rantings all the more to be cherished:
Stop repeating that Islam is a word that comes from peace, and that the only problem Islam has is the misconceptions of the ignorant west. You know it’s not true. Islam means submission, and while the west has its wrong misconceptions about it, it still has its share of problems, whether in the sharia, the people practicing it or in the Islamic culture as it is known today. It’s time to stop pointing fingers, stop making excuses, or point to other religions and cultures and say “They do it too!” or “Look at the problems they are having, is that any better?” The fact that there are other people doing wrong things doesn’t excuse the wrong things you do. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is. Break Time is over people. We have serious problems and we need serious people to solve them in the Islamic world. And yes, I am talking to you!
Right on, Sandmonkey!
Read the whole thing, and leave him a nice comment, won't you?
Astronomy Picture of the Day does it again!
Follow the handle of the Big Dipper away from the dipper's bowl, until you get to the handle's last bright star. Then, just slide your telescope a little south and west and you might find this stunning pair of interacting galaxies, the 51st entry in Charles Messier's famous catalog. Perhaps the original spiral nebula, the large galaxy with well defined spiral structure is also cataloged as NGC 5194. Its spiral arms and dust lanes clearly sweep in front of its companion galaxy (right), NGC 5195. The pair are about 31 million light-years distant and officially lie within the boundaries of the small constellation Canes Venatici. Though M51 looks faint and fuzzy in small, earthbound telescopes, this sharpest ever picture of M51 was made in January 2005 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on board the Hubble Space Telescope.
—Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
John Kenneth Galbraith
