Una verdad simulada

In this interesting and beautiful article about a photograph of moon taken from the International Space Station, the Bad Astronomer concludes:

Knowing more about [an amazing shot] doesn’t detract from its beauty and its wonder; it enhances them.

I really love that about science. It’s easy to be awed when you don’t know how something works, but when you get a glimpse into the machinery behind it, get an idea of how it really works, what you see becomes that much more beautiful.

Hop on over there to see the picture and Phil’s description.

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A televangelist “proves” Jesus is god with a supreme logic: people say “Jesus Christ” when they hurt themselves because he ‘believes that when people get hurt or angry, they wanna blame god’. Watch the video here:

A commenter on Boing-Boing uses the same logic to prove
“The Holy Trinity: The Motherfucker, The Son of a Bitch and the Holy Shit”

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Via Sulllivan, comes this article by Jonathan Rauch describing the Republican party as the zombie party.

Conservatives in the 2000s seemed bereft of answers to newer challenges–climate change, health care, non-state enemies–and often appeared uncomfortable discussing them.

We know what happens when movements or parties continue to stagger forward after running out of ideas: They become zombies. Zombie parties are a recurrent feature of electoral democracies. Unable to articulate any coherent or workable governing philosophy, they mindlessly jab at cultural hot buttons, mechanically repeat hardwired tropes (”cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes”), nurse tribal resentments, ostracize independent thinkers. Above all, they feel positively proud of their doggedness.

[…] To get a new brain, zombie parties usually need to spend years out of power or wait until a new generation rises to leadership.

[…] There are smart, modern people in the Republican Party and the conservative movement. But the movement is in no mood to listen to them.

This is exactly what happened to BJP after the election loss of 2004. It quelled the fiscal conservative voices and increased the social conservative ones. They have still not come to terms with that loss, and even more Hindutva seems to be the only mantra they have. Unfortunately, the next generation does not instill hope in me. Unlike Vajpayee and Advani and Mahajan, the new folks are prominent in the party not because of what they did or what they stand for, but because of who (rather, whose children) they are.

I hope for the sake of having a credible, national opposition to Congress, BJP does not sink.

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Daniel Larison, once again, has a well reasoned post on the Iranian issue. I quote only the final paragraph here:

The “coup” argument is a consensus view that fits a lot of existing prejudices, allows us to reaffirm pleasant myths about the virtues of popular government (which we are supposed to believe would have yielded a good result, were it not for those meddling fraudsters), and provides an excuse for moralistic posturing in which we get to flaunt our enthusiasm for democracy mostly for our own satisfaction. I am increasingly skeptical that it describes the events of the last few days.

I wonder if including Iran in the axis of evil was even bigger blunder than invading Iraq. At least there is no Saddam, and although the quagmire is worse now, it wasn’t a given when US initially invaded Iraq. Larison is absolutely right when he says that actions based on insufficient information have have been detrimental to US interest (and Middle East peace); that should be the reason to be even more careful in analyzing the current situation in Iran.

We have been hearing from the educated, internet savvy minority; do the majority Iranians, especially from rural and semi-urban parts, feel differently?

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India crashed out of T20 World Cup yesterday. Dhoni’s decision to play Jadeja and promote him up the order would have been hailed as a masterstroke had it clicked. Still, in a team consisting of several good batsmen, I think that decision was a mistake.

Likewise, I have heard Dhoni say that his strategy is to keep wickets intact for a late onslaught. The Indian and Chennai teams have often left too much for the end. Especially when one realises that the weakest link in the bowling side bowls during the middle overs.

A good thing about this result is that I get back my three hours per day to spend more fruitfully.

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The incumbent President Ahmadinejad won a landslide victory in the recent Iranian elections that saw a very high turnout, the country is experiencing a lot of protests — met with an iron fist of the government. The NYT has a slide-show on the Iranian unrest. This picture of a “rioter” rescuing a riot policeman tells a lot about the current situation in Iran. While there is a possibility that the rural and conservative Iranians favoured the hardliner Ahmadinejad, several people in the west including expat Iranians feel that the election results were possibly rigged. Andrew Sullivan has been blogging about developing situation in Iran for the last couple of days.

Except for the most generic statements condemning violence and urging peaceful resolution to the crisis, Washington should say nothing, and I mean nothing. After all, whose interests do we serve by having our government speak up? The casual assumption is that condemning foreign election fraud, of which there was probably a great deal in Iran, is both some kind of moral imperative and a strategically wise thing to do in order to aid Mousavi, which in turn is based on another questionable belief that Westerners are somehow obliged to aid him and his supporters. The first part of this is very dubious, and the second is clearly wrong.

Western policing of other nations’ elections, like our annual lectures to other states about the state of their human rights record, is getting very old. We readily assume not only that their elections are in some way our business, but we also usually identify with one side as being somehow more valid, genuine or representative of that country’s people.
(read the rest too)

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For all physics geeks: A Unified Quantum Theory of the Sexual Interaction (via Bad Astronomy). The entire post is worth quoting; nonetheless, here is a small snippet.

[A]ll allowed forms of two-body coupling are identified with the conventional gender states, “Male” and “Female” denoted |M> and |F< in the Dirac bra-ket notation. Interactions between |M> and |F> states are assumed to be attractive while those between |M> and |M> or |F> and |F> are supposed either to be repulsive or, in some theories, entirely forbidden.

Observational evidence, however, strongly suggests that two-body interactions involving either F-F or M-M coupling, though suppressed in many situations, are by no means ruled out […]

In our theory the “correct” eigenstates for sexual behaviour are not the conventional |M> and |F> gender states but linear combinations of the form

|M>=cosθ|S> + sinθ|G>

|F>=-sinθ|G>+cosθ|S>

[….]
In this theory each |M> or |F> state is regarded as a linear combination of heterosexual (straight, S) and homosexual (gay, G) states represented by a rotation of the basis by an angle θ.

Read the entire thing.

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