MEMRI

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) is an indispensable source of information for Americans about the Middle East. They do something our lamestream media rarely does: they take the news reported by Middle Eastern mainstream media, translate it (if required) into English, and then post it raw and unedited. I don't know any other source that routinely provides a peek into the way Middle Easterners get their news. Their main site updates the stories they've processed each day, and their video site has the original Middle Eastern videos, with English transcripts of them. They even have a blog!

What provoked me to post about MEMRI was a transcript I read this morning. It is from the Saudi Iqra TV (a Saudi Arabian media outlet), and shows a man-in-the-street interview with various answers to a single question:

Interviewer: Would you, as a human being, be willing to shake hands with a Jew?

Interviewee 1: Of course I wouldn't be willing to shake hands with a Jew, for religious reasons and because of what is happening now in Palestine, and for many reasons that don't allow me to shake a Jew's hand.

Interviewee 2: No. Because the Jews are eternal enemies. The murderous Jews violate all agreements. I can't shake hands with someone who I know is full of hatred towards me.

Interviewee 3: No, the Jew is an enemy. How can I shake my enemy's hand?

Interviewer: Would you refuse to shake hands with a Jew?

Interviewee 4: Of course, so I wouldn't have to consider amputating my hand afterwards.

Interviewer: If a child asks you who "who are the Jews," what would you answer?

Interviewee 5: The enemies of Allah and His Prophet.

Interviewee 6: The Jew is the occupier of our lands.

Interviewee 1: The murderers of prophets. Our eternal enemies, of course.

Interviewee 2: The murderers of prophets, that's it.

Interviewer: If a child asks you who "who are the Jews," what would you answer?

Interviewee 8: Allah's wrath is upon them, as the Koran says. Allah's wrath is upon them and they all stray from the path of righteousness. They are the filthiest people on the face of this earth because they care only about themselves: Not the Christians, not the Muslims, nor any other religion.

The solution is clear, not only to me but to everyone. If only [the Muslims] declared Jihad, we would see who stays home. We have a few countries… there is one country with a population of over 60-70 million people. If we let them only march, with no weapons even, they would completely trample the Jews, they would turn them into rotten carcasses under their feet. There is another country that donated money, saying, "I am behind you, I'll support you with weapons, just wage [Jihad]."

But the cowardice inside us, deep within our hearts was instilled by the Arab leaders, may Allah forgive them. They breast-fed us with it from the day we were born to this very day it has grown with us.

In Saudi Arabia, as in many other despotic Middle Eastern regimes, decades of non-stop propaganda has produced a populace that apparently really believes this sort of rubbish. The regimes support the propaganda because it provides a target for their population's discontent -- a target other than themselves, that is.

I can't imagine how this sort of thing can be reversed other than by stopping the propaganda, letting real information flow freely, and letting a few decades go by. But so long as those regimes remain in power, the first two prerequisites just ain't gonna happen.

This is one of the main reasons for my support of the war in Iraq -- a democracy in the Middle East was (and remains) the best hope I can think of for addressing what I can only call the brainwashing of the Arab "street".

Now I think I"ll go take a shower; I feel unclean after reading that transcript...

Accelerated History

One of the accidental consequences of our incredibly rapid advances in science and technology is that certain things that happened within my own lifetime seem like ancient history. The ad at right (via GeekPress) is a great example of this -- it seems quite funny today that $12,000 for a mere 80MB would seem like a low price to anybody!

But... I purchased my first disk drive in about 1977. It was a used Memorex 630, with 5 MB of nonremovable storage and 5 MB of removable storage. I paid $10,000 for it -- used! Then I spent months figuring out how to attach it to my Z-80 microcomputer -- and when I got done, I thought I had the absolute hottest personal computer in the universe (and maybe, for about three seconds, I did!). Just a few short years later, I was manufacturing personal computers with 80MB "Winchester" disk drives that cost about $2,000 brand new. Today, a disk drive with 10,000 times that much storage sells for around $200!

Another personal story... In the mid-'70s, microcomputer hobbyists (and I was one, even back then) had very few sources for parts -- and even fewer for complete systems. A good friend (Mike Blier) and I built several microcomputers from scratch, designing the circuits ourselves and wire-wrapping the actual circuitry. One of the basic subsystems was random access memory (RAM), and our earliest efforts had very small amounts of it -- just a few hundred bytes (compared with billions of bytes in even a cheap PC today). During this period, we were in the U.S. Navy, and our ship was being overhauled in Bremerton, Washington. From one of the hobbyist magazines (TCH) we learned that a retail computer store had opened in Seattle, just across the bay from where we were. Back then, this was an astonishing development -- until that point, our only sources were mail order houses (remember, there was no Internet!), and easily three quarters of those were complete flakes. So Mike and I took every bit of cash we had (not much, as enlisted guys), and rode the ferry over to Seattle. A couple of hours later, we were walking down the street, whooping and hollering over our amazing purchases. Mike bought a used 5.25 inch floppy disk drive with a whopping 60kb capacity for $250 -- and was so excited about that he could hardly stand it. My purchase was a RAM board with more capacity than I believed existed: 2 entire kilobytes! And it was static RAM (the only reliable kind back then, nearly totally obsolete today), to boot! And best of all (wait for it) ... it was only $2,000! Wow! Just one measly dollar for each byte! Today RAM prices are less than 0.00001 cents per byte...

And yes, I remember vinyl records. Actually, I remember the old 78 RPM records made from a brittle material based on shellac. I even owned a wind-up, all-mechanical Victrola at one point, purchased from a yard sale for next to nothing (and now it would be a valuable antique, had I kept it).

Duck Bay

Spirit and Opportunity (the two NASA rovers on Mars) are still operating, delivering more science products on a bad day than the space station delivers in a good month. They landed over three years ago, and were designed to last just 90 days -- but the plucky little guys are still going strong.

Opportunity is still in very good condition (Spirit has a lame wheel and some power challenges). For several months it has been exploring the rim of Victoria Crater (at right), about four miles from where it landed. This meteorite crater exposes layers of interesting rocks that the geologists are learning a great deal from. Now they've decided to "take the plunge" into the crater itself, because they believe there's even more interesting stuff to learn from within the crater.

To date, the missions have been very careful to avoid risky circumstances. This time, however, they are deliberately taking a calculated risk -- the rough terrain and sand dunes could entrap the rover, and there's a real chance that Opportunity might not be able to drive out of the crater once it's in. But the chance for some good science has convinced the folks at NASA that it's a chance worth taking...

After much careful study, they've selected "Duck Bay" as the most likely entry point into the crater. You can read about this new adventure here. Wikipedia has an entry on Victoria Crater here.

Good fortune and smooth sailing, Opportunity!

The Straight Dope

In a conversation with a friend yesterday, I discovered that he didn't even know about The Straight Dope, by Cecil Adams. I thought everybody knew about The Straight Dope! Just in case one of my readers (mom?) doesn't know about it, here's an introduction from today's edition of the emailed version (it's also a web site and a series of books)...

Did you ever wonder why the buttons on the drive-up ATM machines have Braille bumps on them? One of Cecil's readers did, and here's the beginning of The Straight Dope's answer:

Congratulations, Vox, you are the one millionth person to ask this question! Please send us your address so we can burn down your house.

Hey, just kidding! Although if you ask ever why we park on the driveway and drive on the parkway, you won't get lucky twice.

Anyway, you asked a question, and by God you are going to get an answer. Drive-up ATM buttons are marked with braille because federal regulations require it. To be specific, section 4.34.4 of the ADA Accessibility Guidelines for Buildings and Facilities (Appendix to Part 1191, 36 CFR Chapter XI, issued pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990) says, "Instructions and all information for use [of an automated teller machine] shall be made accessible to and independently usable by persons with vision impairments." Drive-up ATMs, unlike the walk-up variety, don't need to be wheelchair accessible, but the rules make no exception regarding accessibility by the blind.

And he goes on from here (the full answer is not quite as ridiculous as it sounds at first blush).

The subtitle of The Straight Dope web site and books is "Fighting Ignorance Since 1973 (it's taking longer than we thought)". The answers are both informative and entertaining; I look forward to reading every email I get from them. You can subscribe (it's free!) at the home page.

American of the Day

Grab a box of kleenex and go watch this video. Then you'll understand this quote from the American artist Kaziah Hancock:

There's nothing I'll ever paint that will be more appreciated.

I'm certain she's right.

There's a gallery of her special work here, and her home page is here. A news story about one of her paintings is here.

Damn, ran out of kleenexes...