Greetings from the International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science in Beijing. I once read, in Ray Monk’s biography of Bertrand Russell, about a year that Russell spent lecturing on philosophy in Beijing. He was extremely taken with the city and the country, predicting that it would flower into a leading role in the world. This momentarily puzzled me, as my vision of China didn’t seem in sync with Russell’s democratic ideals. But then common sense clicked in, and I realized that we were talking about a period just after World War One, during the Sun Yat-sen era. The new Republic of China was struggling to emerge out from Imperial rule, and the Communist takeover was decades in the future. One could have easily imagined that this sprawling country, united by a common language and a rich heritage of culture and innovation, would rapidly take its place among the free and prosperous nations of the world. The fact that it didn’t is one of the great tragedies of twentieth-century history.

These days China is increasingly prosperous, but not quite free. Upon landing at Beijing International Airport, one fills out the usual customs declaration form, full of admonishments against bringing in firearms or questionable agricultural products. But there is an extra item on the list of dangerous imports: writings, recordings, or other collections of information that could be judged as a threat to the political, moral, or social good of the nation. The didn’t actually ask to search my laptop, but the warning was there.

It’s well known that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) censors blogs, so I’ve been poking around using the internet connection here in my hotel room, trying to judge the extent to which this is true. (The flipside, of course, is the perilous situation of bloggers located in China; apparently they’ve been required to register in order to blog, but I don’t have the latest on that. I should mention that there are all sorts of blogs about China, not that I have any expertise about them.) Access to most websites is fine, but certain addresses are certainly being blocked. Of course it’s impossible for me to distinguish between the actions of the local ISP, the city of Beijing, or the Chinese government itself, but you draw conclusions using the data you have, not the data you wish you had.

Any blog on Blogspot is definitely off-limits (so I can’t visit Preposterous Universe for old time’s sake). You can type in the address or click a link, and the browser will think for a minute, and then return a “Problem loading page: The connection has timed out” error. My impression is that that’s been true for a long time, although apparently it’s been on and off for a while now. Typepad blogs are also off-limits, so no Cocktail Party Physics for me, although that might be a recent development. Livejournal seems to be unavailable, and likewise Xanga, but blogs hosted on WordPress.com seem to be available. You can search on Google Blog Search or Bloglines, but Technorati is blocked. I haven’t found any individually-hosted blogs that were off-limits, although certain news sites like philly.com are mysteriously banned. The Eagles are in the middle of training camp, how am I supposed to keep up? Also, the New York Times is readily accessible, so make of that what you will. I also couldn’t reach the BBC, although I can actually watch the BBC news channel on my hotel room TV.

Google, of course, is available, in the wake of their somewhat-infamous deal struck with the Chinese government. But Wikipedia is a little confusing — blocked at times, available at others. Apparently this is an ongoing skirmish. I typed in “China” to Google, and the first link was the the Wikipedia page, so I clicked there, and saw it no problem. Then I typed “China internet” into the Wikipedia search box, and was given a list of pages, including Internet Censorship in the People’s Republic of China. But when I clicked there, it briefly began to load, before switching to a “The connection was reset” error. A little spooky, to be honest. Right now I seem to be able to see most Wikipedia pages, although apparently not those specifically about the PRC (although the main China page is still okay). You might think, no problem, I can just look at the Google cache pages for whatever Wikipedia article I’m interested in. But no, you can’t; nothing in Google’s cache seems to be available. So much for infamous deals.

None of which has prevented me from reading any of my favorite blogs. I just do what I always do, and read the feeds via Bloglines. They’re all perfectly visible, even for the blocked sites. Google reader works just as well. A lack of internet savvy on the part of the censors, or an intentional oversight? The one thing that one can’t do is leave comments (or start up your own blog, obviously), and maybe that’s the point.

(I also notice that when I visit google.com, I am not automatically redirected to the local version google.cn, which seems to happen in European countries. Is this because the hotel’s service provider is rigged for foreigners, and ordinary citizens have different rules? Not sure.)

It could be much worse, of course. I mean, here I am, typing away on my own blog, with little fear that the secret police are going to burst into my hotel room in the middle of the night to haul me away. But the biggest single reason I don’t have that fear is that I know that word would get around, and that it wouldn’t look good — free information protects free people. Amnesty International has a campaign, irrepressible.info, to protest against internet censorship around the world. The more noise people make about this issue, the more pressure governments will feel to keep the web free.

Update: In the United States, we prefer to have our censoring-for-political-content performed by corporations, rather than directly by the government. Different cultures, different systems.

Chet Raymo, who for years wrote very enjoyable science columns for the Boston Globe, has a blog called Science Musings that is well worth checking out. He posts today about an article in the Atlantic, derived in turn from this report, that compares the mathematical performance of U.S. students to those in various Asian countries.

(I wonder if the Australian scores were collected before or after Mark got there?) Now, self-confidence is a good thing, all else being equal. But being educated well is also a good thing. It’s no secret that we don’t train our teachers well, provide schools with proper resources, or challenge our students enough in the classroom. Maybe there’s something we can learn from what’s going on in Asia.

Declan Butler, a reporter at Nature, is calling for scientists to follow the lead of Lawyers Without Borders in speaking out against the sham trial of the “Tripoli Six.” There is also an urgent editorial in Nature calling for action.

Five Bulgarian nurses (Valya Chervenyashka, Snezhana Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, and Kristiyana Valtcheva) and one Palestinian doctor (Ashraf al-Hajuj) had been sentenced to death by firing squad for infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998. The Libyan Supreme Court ordered a retrial after international outrage at the unfairness of the original proceeding. During that trial, Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Vittorio Colizzi of Rome’s Tor Vergata University analyzed the viruses from the children, concluding that they had mostly been infected before the health care workers ever arrived in Libya. This testimony was thrown out in favor of a study by Libyan doctors. It seems likely that the cause of the infections was poor hospital hygiene, which doesn’t reflect well on the Libyan government.

The medics have now spent five years in jail, during which two of the nurses were raped. Muammar Gaddafi’s government has demanded $5.5 billion in compensation if the prisoners are freed. As the Nature editorial says, scientists should be speaking out against this travesty of justice:

The scientific community has also been relatively silent on the case, perhaps in the hope that it would be sorted out by diplomacy. But the latter has not proved to be the case, and scientific leaders need to use all their influence urgently, as the fate of the medics will be sealed in the coming weeks. It is time not only to save the doctor and nurses, but also to defend a common vision of science and law in establishing the truth, above all other imperatives. Meanwhile, Gaddafi has the opportunity to put this affair behind him by giving the six an immediate pardon.

International pressure was crucial in forcing the original retrial of the six health-care workers; Bill Hooker has information about places to contact with expressions of concern. Anyone with a blog or other platform can help by spreading the word.

Thanks to Janet for the pointer.

It’s tough being a scholar sometimes. Just ask Pope Benedict. In the course of a long speech, he took the time to tell a little story about a 600-year-old meeting between two educated thinkers, one Christian and one Muslim. And now he has the whole Islamic world angry at him. His story went something like this:

The Pope’s speech quoted from a book recounting a conversation between 14th century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and an educated Persian on the truths of Christianity and Islam.

“The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war,” the Pope said.

“He said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached’.”

Benedict described the phrases on Islam as “brusque”, while neither explicitly agreeing with nor repudiating them.

Hey, this is a popular blogging technique! Just link to a story somewhere else, without giving any explicit endorsement. I wonder if Benedict has been reading Instapundit, or Little Green Footballs?

So now apparently Muslims are upset, as they don’t appreciate the linkage between Islam and violence. Personally, I find it unpersuasive to claim that the two are unconnected when so many people persist in connecting them. Also, if your goal is to insist that your religion is one of peace and tolerance? Probably burning the Pope in effigy is not the best way to get that message across.

The real problem with the Pope’s speech was his claim that violence had no place in true religion (you know, like Christianity).

“Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul,” the Pope said.

We all know that most big-time religions have many examples of terrible violence in their past, and Christianity is certainly no exception. Even putting aside the many recent incidents, it’s interesting to consider the record that is part of official Church doctrine, as recorded in Scripture. Steve Wells has done the hard work of going through the Old Testament and counting up the death toll for both God and Satan, taking care not to exaggerate by only including those examples for which specific figures are given. (Via Cynical-C.) The final tally:

• God: 2,270,365.
• Satan: 10.

This doesn’t include stuff like the Flood, for which reliable figures are unavailable. If violence is incompatible with the nature of God, He sure has a funny way of showing it.

To be serious for a second: my thing about religion is generally not that it’s bad, but that it’s false. The history of religion is far too complex to be summed up as “good” or “bad,” and there are obviously components of both. The Salvation Army, odious discrimination policies notwithstanding, does a tremendous amount of good. Religious people are generally better at donating to charity than non-religious ones (last I heard; I don’t have specific figures, so this could be wrong). And I like a lot of the art and architecture.

The overall effect of religion may be good or bad, I don’t know how to judge. But if you’re going to talk about it (which the Pope is definitely going to do, given his job description), you should at least be honest, including all the ugly parts. Pretending that either Islam or Christianity is all about non-violence and peaceful dialogue is patently false. You can try to say that the episodes of violence are aberrations, not reflective of the “real” religion, but that’s just the No True Scotsman fallacy. What a religion is, for all important purposes, is revealed by what its adherents actually do, for better or for worse. If Pope Benedict had said “We are all fallible human beings, and people of our faiths do not always act wisely, but we should all strive to promote peace over violence within our churches,” perhaps there would have been fewer effigies.

The Wikipedia article on countries with nuclear weapons is sobering reading. This map is from the article, although the color-coding is a bit misleading. (3quarksdaily points to more maps.)

• The United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France and the People’s Republic of China are the five nuclear powers recognized by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Not coincidentally, they are also the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The US and Russia have about 6,000 active warheads each, while the others have a few hundred each. According to the NPT, only these countries are permitted to have nuclear weapons, and they are prohibited from sharing weapons technology with other countries.
• India did not sign the NPT, and exploded its first nuclear weapon in 1974 (in a test perversely named “Smiling Buddha“). In 1998 they tested “weaponized” nuclear warheads (I don’t know what that means) in Pokhran-II. Numerous complaints and sanctions followed, none of which had any appreciable effect, and the controversy eventually died down. Possession of nuclear weaponry is considered to be a crucial part of India’s self-image as a world power. They are now recognized by the US as a “responsible nuclear state.”
• Pakistan is also not an NPT signatory. They performed their first nuclear test in 1998, in response to India’s test. In 1999 they signed accords with India, agreeing to a bilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. A.Q. Kahn, leader of the Pakistani program, confessed to being involved in a clandestine network to share nuclear weapons technology with Libya, Iran, and North Korea; he was pardoned by President Perez Musharraf in 2004. There is some evidence that his network was also collaborating with the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
• Israel has not acknowledged possessing a nuclear arsenal, but it is an open secret; Israel is not an NPT signatory. (In fact, India, Pakistan, and Israel are the only sovereign states not to ratify the NPT — although see below.) They probably have several hundred warheads, comparable to the stockpiles of China, France, and the UK.
• North Korea, in contrast to Israel, has publicly claimed to have nuclear weapons, although some analysts remain skeptical. After ratifying the NPT in 1985, they withdrew in 2003; no other countries have ever withdrawn from the treaty. In September 2005 they agreed to scrap their existing nuclear weapons and rejoin the NPT, but later stated that no such steps would be taken unless they were supplied with a light water reactor.
• Iran is of course an interesting question.
• South Africa produced a few nuclear weapons in the 1980′s, but later dismantled them. They are the only nation to build nuclear weapons themselves and later give up the capability.
• Saudi Arabia has stated that they might need to develop nuclear weapons, although they deny actually having done so. Some recent reports claim that the Saudis have embarked on a weapons-development program, with aid from the Pakistani nuclear program.
• Several republics of the former Soviet Union found themselves in possession of nuclear missiles upon the collapse of the USSR in 1991: Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. All have subsequently transferred the weapons to Russia and signed the NPT, and are currently nuclear-free. Concerns persist over the possibility that weapons technology was sold through the black market; Ukraine, in particular, was known to be active in selling at least conventional technology.
• Several industrialized nations are thought to be capable of putting together nuclear weapons with very little effort, including Canada, Italy, Germany, Lithuania, and Japan. For the most part there is no evidence that these countries have any desire to pursue such a course. However, former German defense minister Rupert Scholz has argued that Germany should consider nuclear weapons as a way to respond to terrorist attacks.
• Iraq, of course, had a program to develop nuclear weapons that suffered a number of setbacks, notably the Israeli air strike on the Osirak nuclear facility in 1981. After the 2003 invasion, the Iraq Survey Group concluded that the nuclear program had been abandoned in 1991, along with most other WMD programs, but that Saddam Hussein had plans to re-start the program once multilateral sanctions were lifted.
• As part of NATO agreements, the US provides tactical nuclear weapons for use by Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey.
• A number of countries are known to have begun programs to develop nuclear weapons, only to abandon them and eventually sign the NPT; these include Sweden, Switzerland, Egypt, Philippines, Libya, Australia, Poland, Romania, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan, and Yugoslavia.

What are the chances, with all those weapons out there, that someone will use one, say in the next fifty years? Extremely high, I would guess. None has been used in the last fifty years, it’s true, but for most of that time we lived in a bipolar world with clearly defined lines of engagement and relatively symmetrical capabilities and liabilities. (The above list doesn’t even mention non-state groups, of course.) A more fragmented situation exponentially increases the number of events that could lead to a nuclear strike, including the possibility of accidents. And the number of nuclear-capable states shows little signs of decreasing in the near future.

For what it’s worth, Russia, India and China have officially adopted a No-First-Use policy regarding nuclear weapons; the United States, United Kingdom, France, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea have declined to do so. In the 2005 revised Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations, the Pentagon listed the conditions under which a nuclear first strike could be requested, which includes basically any situation in which someone might want to use them. The Doctrine itself was originally published freely on the Pentagon web site, before being cancelled — that is, removed from the site, but not necessarily revised as doctrine. The original document can be read here. Britain and France have similarly asserted the right to nuclear first-use. It is hard to imagine that countries generally thought of as less responsible than the US, UK and France would feel much compulsion against using nuclear weapons if they felt threatened.

Once any country strikes another using nuclear weapons, the presumption against further use will be considerably lowered. The consequences are hard to imagine, simply for being so terrifying.

Stanislav Evgrafovich Petrov is arguably the most influential person who ever lived, although I had never heard of him until seeing this post on Cynical-C and this tribute.

Our story unfolds on September 26, 1983. Lieutenant Colonel Petrov was the officer on duty at the Serpukhov-15 bunker near Moscow with the responsibility of alerting Soviet command if there was any indication that the U.S. had launched a nuclear missile strike against the U.S.S.R. The response, of course, would be massive retaliation, and the deaths of many millions of people.

Just after midnight, the computers indicated that an American missile had been launched. Petrov was skeptical, since it wouldn’t make much sense to just launch a single missile. However, soon thereafter, the computer indicated that another four missiles had been launched.

To make a long story short (see Wikipedia for more), Petrov decided that the multiple launches were still a computer error rather than a real attack, and declined to alert his superiors, putting the Soviet Union at risk if he were mistaken. As it turned out, Petrov was right, and he had certainly averted an accidental worldwide catastrophe. But he had disobeyed procedure in the process; his superiors gave him a reprimand and reassigned him to a lower-profile post. The entire incident was kept secret until 1998.

Forget Easter, here’s a guy who deserves our thanks.

The question is: what would you have done? Presume that you were in an equivalent situtation, responsible for the defense of your country, a mission in which you believed with all your heart. But you have no desire to have millions of people die unnecessarily. How certain would you have to be that an attack was actually occuring before you would set massive retaliation in motion? Fifty-fifty? 100-1? A million to one? Or would you never retaliate, knowing that your decision would lead to hundreds of nuclear warheads raining down on your homeland, and your mortal enemy presumably taking over the world?

Obviously a lot of smart and well-informed people have been thinking about this. Many, like Juan Cole, think that the Iranians are nowhere close to a bomb; ThinkProgress is slightly less sanguine. They are taking the trouble to make this argument because the US is claiming that it would only take 16 days for Iran to make a bomb. There are all sorts of reasons to disbelieve this particular claim: a history of crying wolf, an apparent misunderstanding of the concept of significant figures… Still, is it more like ten days, or ten years?

Steinn Sigurðsson looks at the problem as a physicist, and isn’t optimistic.

I don’t know Iran; I don’t have access to any classified information on nuclear weapons.
I do know something about physics…

First of all, Iran is clearly been working on putting together a full nuclear cycle for about 20 years

That means they want to be able to do it all in-house: mining, enrichment, burning, plutonium extraction, power generation and bomb production.

It is clear that they did the science in the early-to-mid-90s, they tested centrifuges, built small high neutron flux reactors and got small amounts of plutonium extracted.

So, they learned Pu chemistry, what isotopes you get with different burns, and maybe some metallurgy.

They then set up centrifuge halls and played with an AVLIS (laser isotope separator).

They also ordered a 1GW reactor from the russians, and refined uranium oxide (aka “yellowcake”) into both uranium tetrafluoride, uranium hexafluoride and uranium metal.
Supposedly several tons of uranium oxide were processed.

Now: there are two ways to make bombs, at the basic level.
Get highly refined uranium-235 metal; or, fairly pure plutonium-239. In kilogram quantities.
U-235 bombs are simple and need not be tested. “A grad student could make one of those”.
Pu-239 bombs are notoriously fickle and are said to need testing (although maybe not so much any more…)

Read the whole thing.

Hofstadter’s Law says “It always takes longer than you think, even when taking into account Hofstadter’s Law.” For nuclear weapons, unfortunately, the word “longer” should be replaced by “shorter.” Historically, we always underestimate the proximity of other nations to full nuclear capability (unless we’re trying to cook up reasons to invade them). I don’t know what to do about it, but there’s every reason to believe that, left to its own devices, Iran will have some sort of bomb sooner rather than later.

From a footnote on page 69 of Seth Lloyd’s new book Programming the Universe (about which more later):

I happened to be in [Nobel Laureate Norman Ramsey's office in Paris] when two members of the Academie Francaise came to call. “Why, Professeur Ramsey,” they inquired, “is French not the international language of Science?” Ramsey immediately answered them in his fluent French, with a thick midwestern accent. Horrified, they dropped the subject. In fact, the French Academy of Sciences caused the adoption of English as the international language of science in the seventeenth century by being the first national academy to abandon the previous international language, Latin, and publish their proceedings in their own language. The English and the Germans followed suit. The rest is just an accident of history.

You may have heard that 72% of U.S. troops in Iraq think that the U.S. should leave the country before the end of the year. Presumably that’s because they can see for themselves that it’s a bit of a sticky wicket over there. On the other hand, they don’t seem to be getting very accurate reports from the outside world, since 90% think that the war is retaliation for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.

Hmm, I wonder why their information would be so faulty? Wonkette reported recently on an email from a soldier stationed in Iraq, reporting that their site was blocked by the censors at the USMC Network Operations Center in Quantico. Perhaps the military doesn’t want to distract the troops with salacious stories of Washington sexcapades? In a more recent followup (via firedoglake), the same soldier reports on just which sites are blocked, and which our troops are allowed to spend time surfing.

• Wonkette – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.wonkette.com/) is categorized as: Forum/Bulletin Boards, Politics/Opinion.”

• Bill O’Reilly (www.billoreilly.com) – OK
• Air America (www.airamericaradio.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.airamericaradio.com/) is categorized as: Internet Radio/TV, Politics/Opinion.”
• Rush Limbaugh (www.rushlimbaugh.com) – OK
• ABC News “The Note” – OK
• Website of the Al Franken Show (www.alfrankenshow.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.airamericaradio.com/) is categorized as: Internet Radio/TV, Politics/Opinion.”
• G. Gordon Liddy Show (www.liddyshow.us) – OK

Interesting. I wonder if there is any pattern there? I suspect that there is, but somehow I just can’t put my finger on it. Probably just being paranoid.

Greetings from chilly Vancouver, where I’ve been visiting the University of British Columbia for the last few days. Besides breathtaking topography and amazing Pacific cuisine, a big advantage of the region is that you can’t swing a cat without hitting an atheist around here. That’s right: no religion was the largest reported “denomination” among B.C. residents, with more than twice the number of Roman Catholics, the second-biggest group. Thanks to Scott Oser for pointing this out.

(There don’t seem to be many Jewish people in B.C. I suspect that Moshe is the only one, and he was traveling during my visit.)

I have to admit, though, that I’m confused. People here seem relatively friendly, and there is quite an effective social safety net, including universal health care. Where did all this niceness and compassion come from, without God to tell them how to behave? I’m pretty sure that I’ve heard that godlessness leads to a selfish, cutthroat, me-first attitude, so much unlike the selfless regard for the less fortunate that characterizes our religious culture in the States. These Canadians are probably a bunch of backstabbing Enlightenment hedonists under their smiling facades.