WhirledView

Saturday Links

by CKR

As usual, I’ve come upon these links through Science magazine.

A World of Geologic Maps
OneGeology is a project, jut starting up, to consolidate data from geological maps around the world. I’ve always admired projects of this sort. Science is so big that it’s hard to get everyone together. Geologists have been particularly solitary sorts, as you would expect from people who want to make their life’s work going out into the boonies and talking to rocks, so you can find lots of geologic maps, even of an area as small as New Mexico, that don’t entirely fit together.

OneGeology proposes to bring them together around the world. This is one of the wonderful things that the internet has made possible. Another reason, besides personality, that this hasn’t been done before is that it takes an enormous amount of detail work to check one map against another. Sometimes just getting the maps is hard work. Making them available over the internet and being able to put them, virtually, side by side, allows the detail work to be done more easily.

Encyclopedia of the Earth
This is a wiki-ish enterprise, but with the qualification that its articles are written by experts in their fields. You must supply a curriculum vitae to be vetted before your article will be considered.

It’s relatively new and boasts 1000 articles. I searched some topics I’m interested in and found spotty coverage. Obviously they would benefit from my joining the project. When I have time…

Looking at the Ocean
If you’re a fan of Phila’s Friday nudibranch blogging, this is the site for you! They don’t have as many nudibranchs as Phila does (or I’m not searching well), but they have many, many other ocean animals in great photos, with popular and scientific information on them. The one above is the Atlantic spadefish, Chaetodipterus faber. Plus penguins, seals, and sharks, even a giant squid! There’s more, too, on conservation and expeditions, and The Plankton Forums, which you can join if you want to discuss marine life.

Finally, all of Charles Darwin’s works on line.

US passports delays to continue . . . Updated July 5, 2007

By PHK

Please see the WV Passport Tips Page for our most current information on ways to navigate the maze.

We will accept no additional comments on this post as of May 16, 2007 - but comments on the June 15 "Dealing With the Passport Mess" are welcome.

And don’t expect relief soon. The backlog at the US Passport Agency that began in January is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. Aside from applying far earlier than when an American citizen needs a valid passport to travel abroad* and letting the sluggish process take its course, there is something an applicant who expects to travel within the next few days and still does not have his or her valid passport in hand can do. That is – as a few of our earlier commenters have suggested - contact your US Congressional offices – Senate and/or House.

Such problems are usually being handled by Congressional District Offices rather than by representatives’ offices on Capitol Hill. The best place is to call is your Congressperson or Senator’s District Office located in the city nearest you. There should be a least one person on the staff who understands the problem and can help.

Here’s what that Congressional staffer needs to know: 1) the name of the applicant as it appears on the passport application; 2) the applicant’s date of birth; 3) the applicant’s social security number; 4) the applicant’s travel departure date; and 5) the tracking number for the passport application. With this information, the staffer can help expedite the process and rescue your travel plans. A major key is the tracking number and this can be a "Catch-22."

The tracking number is available from the State Department’s website, but only once it has been assigned. If the tracking number has not yet been assigned – or if it is impossible to search State’s website for that number because the page has crashed thanks to an overload of requests – then your Congressional staffer can still help rescue your planned trip abroad by helping to make an emergency (standby) appointment for you during the work week at the urgent passport agency office closest to you. These “urgent” passport agencies help people with trips scheduled within the coming 14 days or those that require foreign visas for travel.

With appropriate documentation the passport agency official can issue the passport on the spot. You will, however, need to write another check – but you should also be refunded your original application fee. If you need to go this route, you will need to bring with you:

Where US investigative journalism really is

By PHK

I never thought that The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, or The Nation would top my investigatory reporting reading list, but from what I’ve come across in the last several months or more, these three New York-based magazines seem to have figured out what too many of our other supposedly illustrious mass circulation newspapers and news magazines have yet to realize: today’s real political stories cannot be summed up in superficial 30 second, 25 word sound-bites – ignored or played down because of a too often too cozy relationship between reporters, editors and publishers from major news outlets accredited to cover the White House, State Department and the Pentagon and their government handlers.

In essence, these unlikely magazines – two of the three owned by Conde Nast - are printing the stories that once-upon-a-time were the life and livelihood of the now quirky Washington Post and the overly complacent New York Times – not to mention the so called “news” magazines for whom “the back of the book became the front of the book” like Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report, magazines that I used to subscribe to until they went MIA in the policy department.

Meanwhile, the once-upon-a-time literary, gossip or opinion journals are publishing some first rate political journalism. These in-depth articles are written by people who know their subjects and sources, have done the research, and put the information in context. Too many of these writers would still be relegated to the political fringes of the left behind without such unlikely media outlets that have apparently crossed-over into covering W administration foreign affairs crimes, misdemeanors and other follies to fill the information vacuum.

Aegis Defence Services

Why is it that former CIA officer Robert Baer’s report on the tawdry life and times of Tim Spicer, the head of a company called Aegis Defence Services that “coordinates security for reconstruction projects, as well as support for other private military companies, in Iraq” thanks to a $293 million contract from the Pentagon appeared in the April edition of Vanity Fair – a magazine I used to read at the beauty parlor for fashion, not politics - and not in the New York Times Sunday Magazine?

SAIC – the brains not brawn contractor

Misuses of Science

by CKR

Decreasing sperm counts in developed countries have been a question for some time. The Los Angeles Times today contributes precisely nothing to an answer.

Men whose mothers ate a lot of beef during their pregnancy have a sperm count about 25% below normal and three times the normal risk of fertility problems, researchers reported Tuesday.

The article then goes on to say that one of the researchers said that hormones, pesticides, or "other environmental contaminants" may be the cause. The rest of the article follows up mostly on the hormonal connection.

It's hard to tell from the LA Times exactly what the study included or what it was intended to figure out. I'm guessing that it was one of those multivariate statistical studies that tried to correlate something to something else. Sometimes yet another something appears to be correlated to a fourth (fifth? sixth?) something. This kind of study is inherently unreliable, to say nothing of the unreliablity (cited by the Times) of mothers' recall of their diets during pregnancy. Were they asked just after birth? Three or four years on? When the men had fertility problems?

The common wisdom today is that stuff added to cattle feed is likely to be bad for the people who eat the meat. This is not entirely unreasonable, but it has swamped the consideration of other possibilities in this article. Is the real correlation with the amount of protein or fat pregnant women eat? Something else peculiar to beef? Something in how the beef is cooked or what is served with it, like potatoes? All of these three possibilities are likely to be larger effects than minute quantities of hormones or pesticides or whatever.

Children of women who have been treated with hormones during gestation have shown various abnormalities, but the levels of hormones they have been exposed to were orders of magnitude higher. However, the abnormalities were sex-related. We jump from there to hormones in beef as causation for low sperm levels.

The Times article could be spot-on. But most of us who do science would like to hear that the big effects have been controlled for. The most obvious of those, off the top of my head, are levels of protein ingested during pregnancy or perhaps fat. Fat is well known to be connected to estrogen production, which could have counteracted the fetus's necessary testosterone surge to go from default female to assertively male.

It's this procedural kind of thing that is important for the general public and reporters to understand about science. Schools frequently do a poor job of it. Clearly Thomas H. Maugh II's education didn't do a good job of it.

The Nuclear Fuel Race

by CKR

Andreas Persbo, of Vertic, has a newish blog on verification of nuclear issues that we’ve included on the WhirledView blogroll. That may not sound very exciting, but Andreas keeps things moving. Verification may not be much discussed, but it is an essential part of arms control.

One of his posts this week provides some information that helps make sense of the Department of Energy’s Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP, pronounced by the cognoscenti gee-nep).

In January 2006, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced an initiative to develop a Global Nuclear Power Infrastructure (GNPI) capable of providing secured and nondiscriminatory (equal) access to the benefits of nuclear energy to all interested countries in strict compliance with non-proliferation requirements.

So say S. V. Ruchkin and V. Y. Loginov in an article in the September 2006 IAEA Bulletin.

George Bush announced GNEP in what seemed to be a hurried manner in February 2006.

At a recent public meeting, the GNEP director, Peter Lisowski, assured me that talks are under way with other countries to develop participation in the program and that reactions are very favorable. But it appears that the Russians are ahead in gaining international participation in their GNPI.

Lisowski also allowed as how GNEP’s rollout could have been done better. “We’re still recovering from that.”

So it appears that the Bushies felt that they had to respond to the Russian GNPI initiative, which they did just in time to make it look to the Indians that President Bush’s March visit would be to limit India’s nuclear options. I’m speculating, but it looks like they had the Argonne National Laboratory’s UREX+ initiative in hand and decided to build around that, with words and not much else.

I guess it’s better to compete for the internationalization of the fuel cycle than in numbers of nuclear weapons, but it would be better still to develop a fully collaborative program. That would go a long way toward addressing the big issue that Persbo brings up: confidence for nations forgoing a nuclear fuel cycle that their nuclear fuel supply would be assured.

Tuesday Madeleine Blogging

by CKR

The juniper pollen count seems to be going down, judging from my symptoms and thanks to some lovely rain the end of last week, so I'll be getting out soon for some yard blogging, not to mention cheatgrass removal.

In the meanwhile...

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?

I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing it magic.

I've looked for sardines for a very long time that taste like the sardines of my childhood. Many were delicious, some far too elaborated with sauces, but none transported me in the manner of Proust. Until yesterday.

I've eaten sprats that come in wide round cans, about a centimeter tall and several across, with black and brass labels, in Estonia and Russia and Kazakhstan. There seem to be several brands that all display the same sort of label, in Russian, English, and Estonian. But everything tastes different in other places.

Last week I found a small Russian grocery store in Albuquerque. Red Square, Красная Площадъ, it calls itself. They had those lovely brassy tins, Riga brand, English labels, so I bought two. The sprats are arranged in two delicate chevroned layers.

And they taste like the sardines I recall. A bit smoky, cooked enough that the bones aren't obtrusive.

But, as Proust noted, the memory is fragile. By the time I've eaten the second layer in that can, I'll mostly have dissociated the flavor from my mother's kitchen and reestablished it with this house and my travels.

And, btw, my aloe has decided to do it again. I think the flower stalk is lovelier in this stage than when it's flowering. But it's impressive when it's almost as tall as I am.

I haven't posted a long post in some time. I've been using up my long writing on a book I'm working on with some other folks. But this week is not too scheduled, and I've got some longer stuff I've been working on...

Update (later on Tuesday): Another Madeleine who should be mentioned is a lovely Maine coon kitten, whose owner, Four Legs Good, sends us many, many photos of her. For those of us who are cat-deprived, Plush Life is a nice change from the politics. Some long time ago, my Maine coon was Tommy, whose markings were shaped like Madeleine's, but he was entirely black and gray. Maybe a little brownish around the nose.

Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: A Book Review Essay

By PHK

Who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures." - The Swedish Academy, The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006 is awarded to Orhan Pamuk.

Last October, Orhan Pamuk received the Nobel Prize for Literature the first such prize awarded to a Turkish writer. His Nobel acceptance speech is found here. The prize was well deserved: Kudos too to Maureen Freely, the translator of Istanbul: Memories of the City and Snow and former Robert College classmate, a writer, journalist and academic in her own right as well as his earlier translator Erdag Goknar who together have made Pamuk's works accessible to the English speaking world.

I had previously read Pamuk's two best known works of fiction published in English: My Name is Red and Snow. My Name is Red takes place in 16th century Istanbul and centers on a group of miniaturists who painstakingly embellish books for the Sultan. Snow, in contrast, occurs in the present. It is a late 20th century tale set mostly in Kars, an all but forgotten town in Eastern Turkey near the Russian border. In both books, Pamuk relentlessly drives the action forward in his centuries apart tales of murder and troubled love as if commandeering a troika of high spirited horses across the wintery Russian steppe. In My Name is Red, Pamuk himself appears most obviously in the character Black, the nickname for the second husband of Shekure, a beautiful woman this miniaturist had loved and craved since childhood, and as Orhan, her youngest son by her first marriage.

This became clear to me only while reading Pamuk's autobiographical Istanbul: Memories and the City (New York: Alfred Knopf) which was translated into English by Maureen Freely and published in English 2006.

Pamuk's plots are compelling and his books are beautifully written. You don't have to be a literature professor or literary critic to figure them out. That's the good news.

Yet his works are so rich in Ottoman and/or Turkish history - as intricate and entangled as any archeological dig in the Mediterranean or as complex as the designs on the ceramic tiles in Topkapi's Seraglio - that at least basic knowledge of Turkish and Ottoman history, culture and society vastly enriches their contents. Maps of Istanbul's neighborhoods are almost equally important to the understanding and pleasure of reading Pamuk.

In Istanbul: Memories and the City, Pamuk, born in 1952, entwines his own life and that of his troubled family's with the city's history. Clearly, he still copes with the demons of his less than idyllic home to which he remains tethered but he also chronicles the multiple demons that plagued this politically dwarfed and economically diminished - albeit spectacularly situated city - which until 1923 had been the capital of two successive great empires, the Byzantine and the Ottoman, beginning in the 4th century AD.

The fact that Pamuk illustrated Istanbul with black and white photos and drawings that portray the city of his early life (and before) in stark, colorless terms, also says much about the tenor of the times in which he grew up as well as how the Ottoman Empire's cavalcade of defeats in the 19th and early 20th centuries turned one of the world's richest, proudest and most vibrant capitals into a dulled, impoverished image of its former self.

Today's Istanbul has come a long way since the city of Pamuk's childhood as Ray Suarez commented about his visit there last week on the "PBS Newshour" on March 23. I agree. But this does not make Pamuk's depiction of the city during his childhood any less wrong.

Even so - and I last spent several days in Istanbul in September 2006 today's shinier and wealthier Istanbul still has a distance to travel before it becomes even as economically vibrant a city as nearby Athens, the capital of modern Greece. Istanbul - for starters - could usefully engage in the same kind of pre-Olympic Game make-over that spruced up Athens before the 2004 Olympics.

To make life truly livable again Istanbul needs to divorce itself from the polluting cheap coal and gasoline residue that still fills the air and coats buildings with dank soot once the temperature drops. Turkey also needs to come to terms with the darker corners of late Ottoman history now chronicled in the writings of today's Turkish intellectuals, writers and journalists including Pamuk, Elif Shafak, and the late Hrant Dink who was murdered in late January on an Istanbul street by a 16 year old religiously provoked Muslim youth from the Black Sea city of Trabzon. He is now under arrest - turned in by a sorrowful father.

Neither task will be easy. Threats from these darker corners also explain why Pamuk currently teaches at Columbia University in New York and Elif Shafak at Arizona State University. Both Pamuk and Shafak are part of the secular, modernizing Turkish intellectual tradition upon which the ultra-nationalist, anti-EU cadres of this country have declared war - first in the courts and now worse, on the street.

Istanbul in black and white . . .

My first visit to Istanbul was a short one in late January 1979 en route back to Moscow after visiting friends in Nairobi. Istanbul was then cold, rainy, and polluted. Turkey was in the thralls of an unstable left-wing government which did not know how to govern. Coffee was non-existent, gasoline rationed, the Turkish lira was depreciating rapidly and besides, the lira was a non-convertible currency so anyone who could, kept money in a hard currency account in Switzerland.

It Was Ernie Who Thought of It First

by CKR

I've seen two reviews of Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop, one in the March Scientific American, and the other - well, somewhere, probably on the Web, but maybe the New Yorker. Both mention in glowing terms his experiment in electronic reflexivity: turning a video camera on the monitor showing its output. The result is an infinite series of contained monitors. Anyone can do it now, with the availability of video.

But long ago, in the dawn of television, someone else thought that very same thing. His name was Ernie Kovacs, and he had an idiosyncratic (as we Ernie fans and he said, insane) morning television show on New York channel 5, WABD. He enjoyed tormenting his camera crew. He would lean on the monitor, which forced them to picture Ernie leaning on the monitor with a picture of Ernie leaning on the monitor with a picture of Ernie...you get the idea.

I'm sure that Hofstadter thought of the idea himself. It's not unusual for multiple brilliant minds to come up with the same idea. But Ernie pioneered so many things we now see: the surreal ads, Saturday Night Live (some of his writers ended up there), and I suspect he would have loved Jon Stewart.

But Ernie died young, and most of his art wasn't recorded, so few people have heard of him. There are a couple of websites devoted to him (here and here), and a couple of biographies. I've noted what seem to me to be errors in all of them, although they could be a long-ago, not-completely-understood memory.

And I still have my EEFMS membership card.

He's Not a General!

by CKR

This morning I heard Sharon Eubanks, the woman who is accusing the Justice Department of improprieties in the tobacco lawsuits, refer to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as "General Gonzales."

Wrong!

I've heard this usage before, with regard to John Ashcroft, and have seen a small amount of commentary on it.

Andrew Bacevich warns us in his book, The New American Militarism, that we are militarizing our society. This usage is one of the most egregious examples of that militarization.

The title "Attorney General" consists of a noun and an adjective, in that order. Once this sort of usage was not uncommon in English, but it seems to be becoming lost in America, with only these vestigial titles to remind us. And yes, it's the way the French use adjectives. Maybe that is part of the problem.

So Alberto Gonzales is (for the moment, at the pleasure of the President) the General Attorney for the United States. Perhaps we should change the archaic name. It might help to remind the holders of that office of their duties.

The military use of the title "General" seems also to have retained the adjective at the expense of the noun. Those officeholders are general officers, brigadiers, lieutenants, and majors general in that archaic usage.

But that decay happened long ago, and the title "General" has a heavily military connotation. So let's not spread the misconception.

What to Say and When to Say It

by CKR

As Alberto Gonzales squirmed under the weight of what was said and not said to Congress about the dismissal of those eight US attorneys, John and Elizabeth Edwards spoke of her recurrence of cancer, making her doctor available to answer questions.

It’s not easy to decide what to say and when to say it; the rules are changing, and dangers lurk for those who say or don’t say, or say at the wrong time.

The societal trend has been toward transparency. The internet provides a tête-à-tête between you and your computer screen that, by the way, opens out to the rest of the world; before that, we’ve had confessional television and “let it all hang out” phenomena dating back to the sixties. In the political world, the voters’ preference for transparency goes back to the serial lies of Richard Nixon and the missed expectations of Lyndon Johnson.

But there are dangers. People are still uncomfortable with the once-unspeakable cancer, and it can affect your job when they presume that you will be dead in a short time.