Physics Exam

One of these is a real question, from the Nelson Thornes AQA GCSE Science textbook endorsed by the AQA board. Can you guess which?

Notes to the candidate: no mathematics are necessary for this exam. Try as hard as you can to get the answers correct. You will be marked on effort.

1. The wave equation is v = ƒ λ

a) How does that make you feel?
b) What do you think of the effect of Greek culture on physics?

2. Timothy fires a pretty heavy cannonball at a low angle.

a) where will the cannonball land?
b) What do you think are Timothy's motives for firing cannonballs?

3) Imagine a taxi firm uses an ambulance radio channel by mistake. Write a short story about a mix-up that happens when the taxi firm uses the ambulance radio channel.

4) A debate is occurring at the local university between two scientists, one who thinks the Earth is at the centre of the solar system and the other who thinks the Sun is at the centre.

a) List the points in favour of both of their arguments.
b) Which scientist has the more common sense view?
c) Suggest a way the scientists could compromise.

5) A diagram of the stars has been provided on the following page.

a) Draw in your own constellations by connecting the dots.
b) Write a pretend 'history' of one of these constellations.

Answer can be found here.

Neanderthal genome

Exciting news:

Researchers studying Neanderthal DNA say it should be possible to construct a complete genome of the ancient hominid despite the degradation of the DNA over time.

There is also hope for reconstructing the genome of the mammoth and cave bear, according to a research team led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The relationship between Neanderthals and modern man might now be clarified. Will this make any difference to creationists? Nope. As someone or other once said, you can't reason someone out of an opinion they didn't reason into. But for the reality-based community, there are some interesting times ahead.

Inequality in education

There have been a couple of interesting posts (here and here) from Chris Dillow, suggesting among other things that:

Perhaps [we] should follow the examples of Texas, and equalize exam results across schools, thus ensuring no-one suffers from going to a bad school.

This doesn't seem an accurate summary of the Texan system, which rather seems to guarantee college places to the top 10% of high school graduates from every school in addition to other forms of qualification. It also carries the following rider:

After a student is admitted, the university may review the student's high school records to determine if the student is prepared for college-level work. A student who needs additional preparation may be required to take a developmental, enrichment, or orientation course during the semester prior to the first semester of college.

Admission to a university does not guarantee acceptance into a particular college of study or department, however.

It is not clear whether success in the development course, if required, is a condition of subsequent entry but it would be reasonable if it were. It also ensures that good colleges are not forced at gunpoint to lower their standards.

Richard Feynman observed that the purpose of education is to increase the differences between children. If two children enter the educational process, one with a natural aptitude for maths and one with an aptitude for languages, they would start with this small but undeveloped difference. An effective system would enhance their natural aptitudes, finding and developing the things they can do best at as individuals. They would therefore leave the education with their natural aptitudes developed and trained, and with greater differences between them than had initially existed.

This is desirable. Differences between people are good and should be developed, and admired. Educational systems should try to equip every child with basic tools, and help them find and develop areas in which they can excel.

Ways to try to open the possibilities of excellence to people in an unequal society are obvious, and indeed we had an educational system which did just that until the 1970s in England, and still does in N Ireland. In other words, a system based on excellence can always find ways to promote equality.

Systems based on equality seem in practice to be unable to obtain excellence, partly because they don't aim for it. Here's an example, from Chris' second post:

Equalizing grades across schools would help reduce differences between schools.[1] Under the current system, parents have every incentive to seek out good schools. Under my system, this incentive is greatly blunted.[2]

1. Not true, the differences between schools would be the same. The consequences of these differences would be changed. The question of excellence simply doesn't enter into this thinking, and this creates a simple logical error.

Moreover, what incentive would bad schools then have to improve? Well, still some, because in practice any attempt to subvert the market itself becomes subverted. But survival for bad schools would be easier and they would continue to fail their pupils.

2. Trying to reduce parents' incentives to help with the education of their children - by making the parents powerless - is an awful ambition. What happens to us when we become powerless to affect outcomes? We become de-motivated, time-serving, disinterested. The logical end point for Chris' idea is a society in which everybody is forbidden from trying to improve anything at all, because different people will do so with differing results.

Nowhere in Chris' argument is the idea that the absolute quality of attainment is important. So long as every child is equally illiterate, illiteracy is fine. Parents must not be able to affect this equality of squalor.

Trying to increase equality without reference to any other factors will always just worsen a system for everyone who uses it. Equally, trying to increase excellence and giving parents choice improves things for everyone.

We will get fooled again

It's interesting to watch smoke curling from chimneys in late June, and to hear of people relighting their Agas, and to see pedestrians in their fleeces pass the window, as Radio 4 finally gets round, yesterday (no link available), to blaming the recent unseasonally cold weather on global warming.

Browsing the climate statistics at NOAA, set against a baseline of the 1971 to 2000 average (against which you'd expect current statistic to show "unusually warm"), it is very clear that the warming of the 1980s and early 1990s has plateaued, though not yet begun to fall back. Perhaps it will start rising significantly again.

But what if (when?) it does become obvious that the temperature trend has started to fall? What will be the reaction? Will heads explode?

Nope. The reaction will be as follows:

1. The non-scientific journalists who have been ululating about "consensus" and insisting that "the science is in" will start making "scientists, eh? Can't trust 'em" pieces.*

2. The milleniarists will move seamlessly onto the next reason why we're all doomed unless we let them take control of every detail of our lives, as they have every time their predictions have failed to materialise, which is what has happened every time they have made predictions.

And millions of people will buy it.




* Ever noticed how news items are prefaced "Scientists say..."? Scientists say sugar is good for you. Scientists say sugar is bad for you. Scientists, eh? Can't they make their minds up?

The same journalists never begin any pieces with "Politicians say...". Politicians say higher taxes are good. Politicians say higher taxes are bad. Politicians, eh?

If it were more widely understood that scientists disagree with each other, that knowledge is incomplete and that different research projects can under these circumstances be expected to point to different conclusions sometimes, indeed that apparently contradictory conclusions can all be correct in a state of incomplete knowledge, then we would have had to put up with a lot less bullshit in recent years.

Iranian spontaneity

While on the one hand, massive demonstrations have been taking place against the introduction of petrol rationing in Iran, on the other hand the Governor of Garmsar Province, where President Ahmamadbastard was born, has just been sacked for failing to organise a sufficiently large spontaneous demonstration to welcome said President on a recent visit.

Despite Decency, HP bloggers still bigots

During the 1970s, if you listened carefully, you would occasionally hear references in the media to the "scandal of black members of Working Men's Clubs". The scandal was that there weren't any - a colour bar operated almost as effectively in the North of England as in Country Clubs in the American South two decades earlier.

I'd give you links to references to this, but there aren't any that I could find. As I have mentioned before, left wing academics have carefully avoided references to anything that might cast the Labour movement in anything but a saintly light, and in an age increasingly restricted to online reference material, this represents the sort of re-writing of history that Winston Smith did as a day job in that most telling of warnings against the excesses of the political left, 1984.

The bedrock of the Labour Party, the white working class, has been happy to vote for anti-racist campaigners, and Marxists who have translated their ideas of oppressed classes into those of oppressed minorities, so long as this has also meant voting themselves larger portions of other people's money than have been offered by any other party. But the racism is still there, and this means that if the "other people's money" bit seems to be wavering, they are perfectly happy to switch to the BNP.

Enter David T with a post at Harry's Place, entitled: "Despite Cameron, Tory MPs Still Bigots", in which he quotes a poll that suggests Tory MPs have less enlightened views towards... Well, here's the wording:

just 46 per cent of Tory MPs agree that gay couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples, with 54 per cent disagreeing. For comparison, 83 per cent of Labour MPs and 92 per cent of Lib Dems agree.

Similarly, there is a 52 to 48 per cent split among Tories on whether “the diverse mix of races, cultures and religions now found in our society has improved Britain”. By contrast, 92 per cent of Labour MPs agree, as do all Lib Dems surveyed. And while Labour MPs are virtually unanimous (94 per cent) in agreeing that “one of the things that would most improve life in Britain today is people being more tolerant of different ethnic groups and cultures”, that is the view of only 67 per cent of Tory MPs.

He draws this out as follows:

Most Tories I know are social liberals to the core. They are not, however, representative of the views of the base of the party. Instead, they reflect the attitudes of the floating voters, who the Tories must capture in order to win the next election.

The problem which Cameron therefore faces is a familiar one. Play to the swing voters: but not so much that your grass roots stay home on Election Day, and not so little that your target voters think you're a phoney.

Indeed, both problems are familiar - to the Labour Party, whose MPs are no more representative of their voters than are the "liberal to the core" Tories he cites.

Attitudes towards race and homosexuality do not easily sort along party lines. Libertarian Conservative Party members in the Lords fought some of the earliest battles for gay rights. There is no deeper pool of hatred towards gays than among the Labour voting white working class, and not every coal miner ends up with tears of happiness in his eyes if his son turns out to be a ballet-dancing gay.

It isn't just competition for housing that worries the white working class. I'd be willing to bet I've spent more years living on Council Estates than David T, and I can report that racial hatred is absolutely normal, ubiquitous and overt among those who would never consider voting for any party other than Labour.

I admire David T's work on the whole, but it is depressing how routinely he slips into partisanship and tribalism. Is the Catholic Church the "Nasty Church" for its attitudes towards abortion and gay rights? Is Trevor Phillips the "Nasty antiracism campaigner", for his comments about multiculturalism (which is what the above questions actually relate to, not racism)? In the context of Islamism, David is perfectly ready to draw out some of the problems that large scale Muslim immigration has caused us. He isn't willing to concede that others are allowed to do the same if, and only if, they are Tory MPs.

That's bigotry.

And, as if to prove the point, the first comment relates to a website, "Hate My Tory", that has been puffed at Harry's Place before, despite being one of the most revolting pieces of political malice I've ever seen - and one that passes as humour in the eyes of many Labour supporters. The comment linking to it reads: "Remember children, the only good Tory is a lavatory."

When John Prescott says he is most comfortable fighting politics on the grounds of class, what he means is that he is most comfortable fighting people - hating people - because of the circumstances of their birth. This malevolent hatred courses through the Labour Party. No other political party defines itself through hatred of other people. I have never met a Tory who hated the working class. I have met dozens of Labour Party voters and members who hate with the venom and energy of a Northern Irish sectarian.

Now you bring it up, David, which party really deserves the title of "Nasty"?

Random equality

Googling for "return to grammar schools" (with quotation marks) produces 2060 results, almost all negative - NO return to Grammar schools. Googling for "return to secondary modern schools" (again, with quotes) produces no results at all.

I know this is an imprecise survey, but it's still meaningful. We live in a society in which it is unremarkable that people should say "No more good schools", but nobody should say "No more bad schools". As it has turned out, the comprehensive system has actually ensured that now almost every English child goes to a Secondary Modern.

It seems that the "almost" in that last sentence rankles with some. Brighton Council has said it will allocate children to schools by lottery, to prevent Middle Class parents making a school outperform others in the area by moving within its catchment area. There have also been calls at the national level to force independent schools to admit a quota of disruptive pupils.

These initiatives will have a predictable effect: to make good schools worse without making bad schools better. The arrival of a handful of intelligent, well-motivated pupils in a school with disruptive pupils can have no effect whatsoever; the arrival of a few disruptive pupils in a high-performing school will ruin the education of every child on the roll.

Making schools worse does not make things equally bad for everybody. The wealthy can still hire tutors, send their children abroad or otherwise ensure they have a good education. As the rest of the population slides further behind, the gap widens even further. Thus, these initiatives designed to further equality have precisely the opposite effect.

What makes this inexcusable is that we did have a period, ending in the late 1970s, when social mobility was higher, and this was the consequence of the Grammar School system and the Direct Grant. So we actually know, experimentally, that reversing the current education policies would create greater social mobility and improve standards - for everybody: A report published through the LSE reviewed the real life laboratory experiment that the continuation of Grammar Schools (with reformed entrance arrangements) in Northern Ireland up to the present has provided. It shows that:

Using administrative data before and after the reform, we find that the open enrolment reform of 1989 (which affected the 1979 birth cohort) had a clear impact in Northern Ireland relative to England. A 15 percentage point increase in the number of pupils enabled to attend grammar school (at the age of 11) was accompanied by shifts of similar magnitude in the number achieving five or more GCSEs at A*-C and one or more A-level. This suggests a strong causal effect of expanding the more academic track on overall educational achievement.
[...]
Although this research cannot be interpreted as evaluating the overall effects of a comprehensive or selective (‘tracked’) system of education, it is an example of where widening access to the more academic track has generated positive net effects. It illustrates the high price that pupils pay for being excluded from the academic track, even when they are some way down the ability distribution within their birth cohort.

The study also provides clear evidence that selection into the more academic track really has a causal impact – the improvement in educational outcomes is not simply an artefact of the selection process.

On Radio 4 this morning, John Humphreys interviewed David Cameron about a Sutton Trust report that showed social mobility had got worse. A child born in 1970 was less mobile than one born in 1958. This can be paraphrased as follows: A child born into a society with academic selection and centres of excellence open to all on merit alone had a greater chance of social mobility than one born into today's Comprehensive system.

Humphreys advocated the Brighton lottery appeal. Cameron disagreed, but said there should be "No return to the 11 plus". "A lottery is completely fair," remonstrated Humphreys.

In fact, a lottery would be (almost) completely random. Random is not the same as fair and it's strange that anybody should conflate the two.

But it's much more strange that neither man advocated a return to a system of education that we know - from experience - works better than the present one.

It's also plain that when the established media and both major parties advocate educational policies we know, from experience - from experiment - can only fail, we're in trouble.

Walk, chew gum, walk...

Seems I'm not so good at doing two things at once. Have been exceedingly busy. However, I'm going to try to post a bit again.

Quote of the Day

You may steer clear of the word "pupose" in a gramatical sense

Comments to a Times Q&A with Christopher Hitchens about religion.

Blimey - a libel!

I'd been planning to post again today after a long work-induced break. How exciting, though, to wake up to find a libel in the comments to a post about Gore.

I don't know whether I'm obliged to remove a libel from the comments section. This one has been the subject of litigation, in 1993, and my commenter, Dr Justin Lancaster, retracted and apologised. Here he is repeating his libel without giving any context for the reader. Not very honest. Not very creditable. Rum chaps, some of these global warming alarmists.

Blog attack

Sorry for not posting - I'm just so busy with my day job I can't spare the time for thinking through new posts properly.

Tim Worstall has a slightly different concern: what happens when newspaper attacks could mean a blogger loses his day job entirely. A Civil Servant called Owen Barder has been attacked by the Mail on Sunday over remarks made over a longish period of time in his blog.

From what I have seen (the blog is now offline), I'd personally lose little time in criticising Mr Barder's sentiments but the notion that he should be able to express these in a private capacity is, as Tim says, an absolute principle that should be defended as strenuously as possible.

Timmy:

I have to admit that I think this piece in the Mail is really rather extraordinary. As above, you can see that it's a mixture of gross distortions, garbled (and wrongly attributed) quotes and in general a hit job.

Which is really something that all of us other bloggers might want to start thinking about. If they hound Owen out of his job on the basis of the above farrago and tissue of innuendo and misquotation then that's rather going to be the end of this enjoyable pastime for most of us, isn't it? Anyone writing tens of thousands of words over the years is open to such an assassination of the character.

Quite. Because this is important, I have nipped in to help publicise this as widely as possible, and to link to Tim's post on this subject.

Let's hope it's plagiarised

Just when you think you have a few days to spend on some more interesting things, something blows up. Part of my emergency work has been upgrading a remote server from FreeBSD 5.5 through 6.0 to 6.2 - remotely. Think of upgrading a Windows server from NT to 2003, on a machine nearly 100 miles away with no CDs, just the internet connection. All done online. Can't be done. But it can with FreeBSD - and if you're really feeling good you can keep serving websites while you're doing it, with short breaks for four reboots.

FreeBSD is a superb operating system. It differs from Linux in lots of ways, but one is the license it is distributed under. Unlike the GPL (all derivatives must carry this same license and conditions), the BSD license boils down to: do what you like with this, but give us credit where appropriate. That's why Apple were comfortable using FreeBSD as the basis for OS X.

But this made me think of Mr Friedman, and this tribute from a news show when he died.



Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Good King Stephen?

Stephen (1135-54) is one of the least well known, and least well loved, of English Kings. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle said of his reign:

Men said openly that Christ and his saints slept

Stephen shares with John the distinction of having no subsequent heir to the throne named for him. As with John, there have been attempts to argue that Stephen's bad reputation is not entirely deserved.

Stephen's reign has tended, for the past couple of hundred years, to be referred to as a time of "anarchy". This isn't a very apt description, in fact, but there was a sort of civil war for some of his reign and the legitimacy of his claim to the throne has been questioned, though more since than at the time he was alive.

I've just started reading Donald Matthew's 2002 book about Stephen. Matthew has an interesting idea about why modern historians, as well as some medieval chroniclers, were either scathing or dismissive of Stephen but I will come to that later.

Setting the scene in the first chapter, and arguing that there has been a fashion for judgement, as well as analysis, in history, something of which Matthew does not really approve, he has this to say:

The use of history for moral purposes cannot be mocked as 'old fashioned', religious wishful-thinking. It goes back further than Christianity and has not yet been abandoned. The inclination not only to understand public affairs in terms of conflicts between the good and the bad, but to believe that the wicked should and can be punished for their evil deeds, if not by divine providence, then by the dedicated efforts of the righteous themselves still prevails, not least amongst popularist politicians. The determination to be proved right is so strong that even victory in war is no longer thought sufficient to resolve any doubts. It is now routine to have the moral worthiness of the cause and the war vindicated in the law courts by securing convictions of the enemy for war crimes. In any dispute, it is assumed that human judgement can and should be employed to establish which party was in the right and which wrong. The historian is not expected to confine attention to elucidating, as precisely as possible, what happened when and why. 'History' itself is somehow supposed to weigh up the evidence and pronounce judgement.

It seems to me that Matthews is touching on a serious and unusual point. This trend to legalise history, especially recent history, is perhaps an entirely bad thing. Is it not enough for one side to win, and to understand how this came about? It reached an apogee in the aftermath of the Second World War, with the Nuremberg trials, and we seem to have been plagued by a combination of paralysis of action and the continual establishment of impotent international legal institutions ever since. It might be better to act if something bad is happening, or you are threatened, then move on without the paraphernalia of ritual moral supremacy.

This first chapter ends well:

Historians, even of Stephen, may not be able to distance themselves completely from the preoccupations of their own age, but they must also try to observe the rules of their craft and test modern ideas against what the twelfth-century evidence clearly has to say about the reign. In other words, the sources must be coaxed into telling us what they really did witness, not tortured into confirming what we would like to believe.

Geoffrey Elton gave a talk to my school Historical Society once, titled "History, the essential study". He argued that history was this because it was a "bulwark against tyranny". The study of history teaches us to question authority, both in a strict and in a more general meaning of that word. A historian must never simply believe what he or she reads, but always ask who wrote it, what preconceptions, bias and distortions they might have introduced, deliberately or inadvertently, to their writing. History is not the process of memorising received wisdom and finding new ways to recite it, but rather of returning over and over again, each new generation and each new individual, to the sources and approaching them afresh, with scepticism and clarity unclouded by interference either from the work of past scholars or by the concerns of their contemporaries.

That is not a description of history as experienced by schoolchildren today. The subjects most studied seem to be World War II, the history of slavery, the history of the settlement of the Americas, all framed in tones of unmistakable morality which it is a crime - metaphorically at the moment in Britain but literally in parts in some European countries - to question or challenge. This is unhistory, and far from being a bulwark against tyranny it is a handmaiden to it, however well intentioned the reasons for this might be.

At the centre of this is the holocaust and, slightly less so, slavery. But the sources confirm quite plainly the truth of what happened. Failing to emphasise the sources and insisting on conformity to a received narrative actually weakens the very thing it is supposed to protect. Once made uncritical, children are just as easily persuaded of the International Jewish Conspiracy as of the Shoah. Only by making them return, whatever anyone tells them, to the sources can we be secure from the mass deceit that underlies all tyrannical government.

Which brings me back to Stephen. Henry I before him, and Henry II after him, were both energetic and reforming administrators and kings, especially Henry II. They did lots of the stuff historians like. They ruled. They governed. There were reams of legal documents produced. Pipe Rolls. Councils. Brilliant.

Stephen did little of this. He ruled, was admired and was acknowledged to have been a humane decent and honourable man. That hasn't been enough for modern judgements. Matthews puts it like this:

Belief in the virtues of strong government, and even more in the duty of all governments to commit themselves to 'reform' of some kind, is unmistakably modern. Its values are purely secular, taking no account of such earlier principles about rulership as respect for the established customs of the realm, for God and for the Church. No excuses for shirking the challenge of government are acceptable. Whereas medieval writers would have acknowledged that men, as inherently sinful, constantly thwart the most noble intentions and, as imperfectable, must fail to achieve their own ambitions in this life, modern confidence that rulers can do what they want and must be judged accordingly makes Stephen look inadequate for his office. Little attention has been given to establishing how much his subjects expected or required him to rule as his uncle [Henry I] had done.

Stephen seems not to have been very New Labour.

I'm warming to Stephen.

OMG!!!

In a moment of pure genius, Jonz put a piece of prose from Lenin's Tomb, as usual explaining how everything is George Bush's fault, through the AOLer translator, which converts normal English into that of a 12 year old internet chatter.

Now, look at this. When you've bombed hospitals, destroyed cities, attacked the civilian infrastructure...

becomes

NOW LOK AT THIS!!111 OMG WTF WHEN U BOMBD HOSPITALS DASTROYED CITEIS ATAKAD DA CIVILIAN INFRASTRUCTUR3...

Deserves to be read in full.

Holocaust denial week

I know this is just an echo chamber post, but via lgf I am awestruck by the decision to invite a holocaust denier to holocaust memorial week. Step forward the Muslim Student Union at UCI:

Musa openly supports Palestinian terrorists and denies that al Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks. He is also a holocaust denier and an antisemitic conspiracy theorist

One for the Windows fans

Business as usual:

System administrators will have to prioritize between updating Exchange and DNS servers while leaving equally important server and application updates dangling, experts say.
Microsoft has released patches for 19 vulnerabilities, 14 of which are critical, hitting at holes in Excel, Word, Office, Exchange, Internet Explorer, cryptographic technology and the whopper of them all, the zero-day vulnerability in the DNS Server's use of RPC.

Michael Sutton, a security evangelist for Atlanta-based SPI Dynamics, said the "pretty high percentage" of critical updates on this Patch Tuesday is going to force a lot of system administrators to juggle updates, making decisions about which servers to update first. System administrators "can't take care of everything at once," he said. "You have to look at severity."

Sutton said he's advising people to first focus on the Exchange and Domain Name System updates, given that those vulnerabilities will leave companies the most exposed to attack. " [It's a] challenge; when you have 14 criticals, you're putting some things secondary that are still top priorities," he said.

An exploit for the DNS RPC (remote procedure call) interface vulnerability was discovered in the wild in April. Within a week of its discovery, four new malicious programs popped up, each trying to take over systems by prying open the DNS hole.

The DNS remote code execution vulnerability affects server-grade operating systems, including Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003, and only those that have the DNS service enabled, such as Domain Controller, DNS Server or Microsoft Small Business Server configurations.

Still, warned Symantec, based in Cupertino, Calif., enterprises and small businesses "should ensure [that] they update their systems with the patch since this vulnerability has already been exploited." A successful exploit would completely compromise the computer.

In the distance...

... I hear the sound of senior policemen starting to weep, softly. They like graphs.

Copperfield:

A reader tells me that at the time of the shooting [to death of a police officer] (6am Sunday 6th May) there were a grand total of seven officers with no air cover and no dog cover on duty in the whole of the Shropshire division, which has a population of 289,000 people, most of whom I admit, probably weren’t about to shoot a police officer. Naturally, I can’t vouch for any of this, but from my own experience, (and I admit that West Mercia might be totally different) it doesn’t seem too wide of the mark.

The solution to officer safety doesn’t lie in giving officers guns. It depends on both the government and senior officers accepting that policing is about more than file building, detections and graphs that go in the required direction.

RPO

More cartoon fun from the Religion of Perpetual Outrage:

The county jail where a Christian minister handed out anti-Islamic cartoons announced it will hire an imam for its Muslim inmates.

The Rockland County Jail also said it will provide religiously appropriate food.

Rockland Undersheriff Thomas Guthrie said Tuesday that the imam will work one day a week, joining the jail's priest and rabbi.

The Christian chaplain, the Rev. Teresa Darden Clapp, was suspended with pay last month after inmates complained she was passing out anti-Islam booklets.

In the cartoon panel stories, a tract titled "Men of Peace?" said Islamic fundamentalists who commit terrorist acts are not "bad Muslims" but "very good Muslims" who act in accordance with their religion.[1] Another tract, titled "Allah Has No Son," said Allah is not God, Muhammad was no prophet, and the Koran is not the word of God.[2] Both stories end with people being convinced Islam is false. In one, a Muslim converts to Christianity.[3]

Local Muslims have called for Clapp's dismissal, and the county requested an independent investigation.[4]

1. That is certainly the view of the jihadists, and it's a significant view among especially younger western Muslims.

2. These are just conventional Christian beliefs.

3. Conventional Christian hopes.

4. Conventional Muslim reaction, and conventional appeasement where none was necessary.

All very conventional, then. If the provision of halal food and the appointment of an Imam were appropriate, they were appropriate anyway and not as conciliation for this incident. This sort of appeasement is very damaging, and there is no similar gesturing when the offense comes from Muslims.

But I have every confidence that the Imam appointed will show the conventional sensitivity to Christian and secular sensitivities.

Egyptian medicine

There's evidence of systematic and effective medicine in Egypt a millennium before Hippocrates:

The research team from the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at The University of Manchester discovered the evidence in medical papyri written in 1,500BC...
[...]

"When we compared the ancient remedies against modern pharmaceutical protocols and standards, we found the prescriptions in the ancient documents not only compared with pharmaceutical preparations of today but that many of the remedies had therapeutic merit."

The medical documents, which were first discovered in the mid-19th century, showed that ancient Egyptian physicians treated wounds with honey, resins and metals known to be antimicrobial.

The team also discovered prescriptions for laxatives of castor oil and colocynth and bulk laxatives of figs and bran. Other references show that colic was treated with hyoscyamus, which is still used today, and that cumin and coriander were used as intestinal carminatives.

Further evidence showed that musculo-skeletal disorders were treated with rubefacients to stimulate blood flow and poultices to warm and soothe. They used celery and saffron for rheumatism, which are currently topics of pharmaceutical research, and pomegranate was used to eradicate tapeworms, a remedy that remained in clinical use until 50 years ago.

Bear necessities

My first night camping in Alaska, twenty six years ago, I heard what sounded like an express train coming through the woods outside my tent. It stopped suddenly, and there was quiet again. Then a rustle. Then quiet.

For maybe five minutes the sounds continued, just beyond the canvas. Then the creature moved off. The next morning, I found bear tracks the size of dinner plates in the soft ground around the tent and under the tree where I had stashed my food. You don't share a tent with food in bear country, if you've any sense. The bear had obviously tried to get at the cache up in the branches, and pretty much ignored me. That could easily have saved my life.

Grizzly bears are shy creatures, though I did meet someone who watched one chase a moose through his garden as he sat eating breakfast. That's rare, but not unknown.

On Sunday, a resident of Homer, Alaska, filmed a grizzly bear killing a moose in his driveway, and eating the heart. Don't click if you're too squeamish.