Good news: U.S. launches charm offensive to bridge new ties with some of our traditional rivals! Bad news: our new point of agreement is the need to squelch gay rights. From Human Rights News, via Sadly, No!

In a reversal of policy, the United States on Monday backed an Iranian initiative to deny United Nations consultative status to organizations working to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a coalition of 40 organizations, led by the Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, called for an explanation of the vote which aligned the United States with governments that have long repressed the rights of sexual minorities. [...]

In voting against the applications to the NGO committee, the U.S. was joined by Cameroon, China, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Senegal, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.

I miss the days when we were the good guys.

Perhaps to show solidarity with our newfound friends, ballot measures for the 2006 elections are springing up around the country, concentrating on denying homosexual couples the right to adopt children. (USA Today, via Balloon Juice.) Do you think these efforts arise from a sincere desire to protect children, perhaps bolstered by studies showing that it’s better to be raised in an orphanage than by loving same-sex adoptive parents? Of course you don’t.

Election-year politics. Republicans battered by questions over ethics and Iraq “might well” use the adoption issue to deflect attention and draw out conservatives in close Senate and governor races in states such as Missouri and Ohio, says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, University of Southern California political scientist.

The aim is to replicate 2004, says Julie Brueggemann of the gay rights group PROMO: Personal Rights of Missourians. She says marriage initiatives mobilized conservative voters in 2004 and helped President Bush win in closely contested states such as Ohio. Republicans “see this as a get-out-the-vote tactic.”

You can look back through history and see people arguing passionately in favor of all sorts of positions that today we would characterize as absolutely beyond the pale: slavery, denying women the right to vote, the divine right of kings, and so on. I used to wonder, what is it that we are doing now that will seem most embarassingly backward a hundred years from today? Major contenders, off the top of my head:

• Denial of civil liberties to gays and lesbians.
• Erosion of privacy and the right to a fair trial in the name of homeland security.
• Attacks on science and on intellectuals and experts more generally.
• Arrogant and uninformed unilateralism in foreign policy.
• A startling lack of urgency on issues such as nuclear proliferation and alternative energy sources.

Okay, that’s depressing, I’ll stop now. Happy day-after-President’s Day!

I’m guessing that you’ve heard about the Mohammed cartoon controversy (see Wikipedia article). To make a long story short, Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, just trying to do their bit for world peace and harmony, invited artists to submit cartoons with the prophet Mohammed as their subject. They published twelve of them, featuring various degrees of ridicule of Islam. (You can see the cartoons here.) Muslims worldwide reacted with outrage, featuring protests, rioting, arson, and at least one counter-cartoon contest — sponsored by an Iranian newspaper, asking for cartoons about the Holocaust. (Presumably because they think that Danes were the major targets of the Holocaust?) There is no shortage of blogging on the topic; for contrasting views, see series at Daily Kos and the Volokh Conspiracy.

I haven’t said anything about the controversy, both because I’ve been busy and since I thought the major points were perfectly obvious. The most-discussed points of contention seem to have been: “Did the Danish newspaper have the right to publish such offensive cartoons?”, and “Did the protestors have the right to resort to arson and rioting in response?” Put that way, the answers are obviously “Yes” and “No,” and there’s not much more to say.

Denmark, as far as I know, is not covered by the First Amendment, but in a democratic society newspapers should be permitted to publish just about whatever they want. The fear of offending people is no reason to suppress public speech. (Speech within private associations is a different matter.) The correct response, if something is said with which you disagree, is to say something else in return — the free market of ideas. True, the cartoons in question are low-brow and intentionally provocative, not the expression of any subtle argumentation. But quality of the speech is not relevant. If you don’t like it, let your displeasure be known, like this London (!) protester is doing:

A little self-undermining, maybe, but certainly taking advantage of an appropriate outlet for his own personal expression.

The violent reaction from some Muslims (not all, certainly) is completely inappropriate by any standard. This kind of destructive impulse is not something unique to Islam; it’s a familiar human response, one that is encouraged by fundamentalism of all kinds. At its source, it’s the same impulse that leads people to bomb abortion clinics or set fire to rural churches. Demonization of people unlike you, and violent action against them, is a frequent feature of extreme religious belief; not all religious belief, obviously, but a particularly virulent strain. It is antithetical in every way to the values of a liberal democratic society. This is a paradox of free societies: they must tolerate all sorts of belief, even those that are incompatible with freedom.

The subtleties of the cartoon issue only arise when we move from the question of whether Jyllands-Posten should have been allowed to publish the cartoons (since they obviously should have been), to whether it was a good idea to actually do so. Just because speech is allowed doesn’t mean it is mandatory. Knowing that the cartoons would offend the sensibilities of many Muslims, should the newspaper have printed them?

It’s easier to defend freedom of offensive expression when you’re not the one being offended. The same newspaper has apparently been less willing to publish potentially offensive cartoons about Jesus, for example. And many of the folks who are vociferously defending the cartoons are less willing to stand up for freedom of expression when it comes to flag burning. On the flip side, they have asked whether those who wring their hands over giving offense were all that bothered about works of art that offended Christians, such as Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ or Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary (you know, the one with the elephant dung).

Whether or not a group should offend another group (granting that they have the right to) isn’t a matter of fundamental rights, it’s a matter of politeness and civil discourse. The analogy between the Mohammed cartoons and Piss Christ is not a very close one. The former were published in a newspaper, almost begging to be distributed as widely as possible. The latter was shown in an art museum; if you didn’t want to go, nobody was forcing you. Art is (sometimes) supposed to be shocking and provocative; the idea that a gallery should refrain from displaying pieces that offend some people’s sensibilities is dangerous and counter-productive.

Still, even though it was a much more public forum, I don’t think that requirements of civility and politeness are paramount here. It’s true that, although I personally am happy to explain to Muslims why their ideas about religion are completely incorrect, I wouldn’t go out of my way to simply be offensive to their beliefs. But it’s not my newspaper. The editors of Jyllands-Posten weren’t being offensive by mistake; they were making every effort to be offensive, but it’s not like they were putting up posters in downtown Mecca. I may think it’s juvenile and stupid (and I do), but it’s their choice. I doubt that many of the rioters are regular readers of Jyllands-Posten, a right-wing Danish rag; they should have just ignored it.

Unfortunately I can’t demonstrate my good faith by my willingness to allow anyone to offend my own beliefs in the same way, since my beliefs are of a somewhat different character. But, for the record, if anyone wants to draw some offensive cartoons about Galileo, or John Stuart Mill, or Charles Darwin, or Virginia Woolf, or Einstein, or Shakespeare, or Jane Austen, or Bertrand Russell, be my guest. I promise not to riot.

This famous photograph was taken on Christmas Eve, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders. It’s usually rotated by 90 degrees, but apparently this view is what Anders actually saw. (Don’t ask me how they know that.)

Peace on this tiny little ball!

Congratulations to the people of Iraq, who held an historic vote yesterday. Regardless of the wisdom of our choice to invade the country, we can all be happy to see the first steps toward what hopefully becomes a functioning democracy, complete with campaign-finance laws and gerrymandering. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to go to a polling place and cast a meaningful ballot after a lifetime of dictatorship, but I imagine it must be a remarkable feeling.

Seems like the vote went fairly smoothly, at least by local standards, although there were some unfortunate incidents. Even the Aljazeera account was largely indistinguishable from those in the Western press, except for these short paragraphs near the end:

After casting his vote in the western city of Ramadi, 21-year-old Jamal Mahmoud said: “I’m delighted to be voting for the first time because this election will lead to the American occupation forces leaving Ramadi and Iraq,” echoing a belief common among voters across the war-torn country.

In the holy city of Najaf, stronghold of the ruling Shia Islamist Alliance’s list No. 555, 40-year-old Abdullah Abdulzahra said: “I’ll vote for 555 because they’ll kill all Baathists.”

I think that Ann Coulter might have a future in Iraqi punditry.

The best news is that the Sunnis turned out in large numbers, indicating a willingness to join the new government as full participants. How smoothly that will go remains to be seen; some prognostications at Crooked Timber by Kieran Healy and Daniel Davies. Regardless, an historic occasion, hopefully the first of many in the region.

It seems that Europe, led by the UK in a surprising display of the items usually kept in a jar on George Bush’s mantlepiece, has decided to stand up against one of the most disgusting and damaging abuses of science by the current administration. As The Guardian reports

Europe, led by the UK, last night signalled a major split with the United States over curbing the Aids pandemic in a statement that tacitly urged African governments not to heed the abstinence-focused agenda of the Bush administration.

The statement with which the article is concerned makes clear that rejection of science is the problem here

We are profoundly concerned about the resurgence of partial or incomplete messages on HIV prevention which are not grounded in evidence and have limited effectiveness,” it says.

The current US stance on tackling AIDS in Africa is hopelessly hamstrung, requiring, among other absurd demands, that no funds be distributed to any organization that even counsels a pregnant woman that abortion is an option, and that two-thirds of funds go to programs that stress abstinence (a third goes to abstinence only programs). If you want to understand how experts in the US see this, see what Planned Parenthood has to say.

A specific example is provided by Uganda, which used to be the poster child for AIDS programs in Africa, and which has suffered a recent setback that is at least partially linked to a decrease in the availability of condoms due to US policies.

The issues here are entirely obvious to anyone who is not blinkered by ideology and/or repression. As the British international Development secretary, Hilary Benn, put it

“Abstinence works if people can abstain, but I don’t think people should die because they have sex. We need to make sure people have all the means [of prevention] at their disposal – condoms and clean needles. It includes education and access to sexual and reproductive health services.”

This is an example of what people mean when they say that the Bush administration is ignoring science in favor of ideology. It is an established scientific fact that abstinence only programs do not work. Yet these are the ones we are using to fight a disease that is ravaging parts of Africa. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It is one of common sense, and of common decency. Is there any chance that sensible, reason-based people, Democrats and Republicans, could agree on this?

A recent study in Britain has found some startling results regarding how the public views murder victims. Here is part of the breakdown:

• One in three people think that if the victim disagreed with things that the murderer said, and debated with them, that they were at least partially responsible for being murdered.
• About the same proportion of people think that victims are partially or wholly responsible for being murdered if they are drunk.
• More than a quarter believe victims are responsible if they wear clothing that hints at violence, such as camouflage jackets or trousers, or jackboots.
• Nearly 15% of respondents thought a victim would be partly responsible for being murdered if he or she was known to take part in boxing, wrestling or kick-boxing as a hobby; and 8% thought that this would make a victim totally responsible.

OK, I’m lying – these statistics aren’t true. I made them up. What a relief; because if they were true, they would be deeply disturbing, painting an unflattering, backward image of society’s attitudes to those people who, through no fault of their own, end up stripped of their human rights by violent predators.

Now take a look at this Guardian article detailing the results of a recent Amnesty International report on rape.

I don’t see any difference and am truly disgusted. We all know that there is the occasional sociopath out there who holds views like this. Heck, some of them have blogs. But the sheer magnitudes of the numbers here amaze me, particularly since there doesn’t seem to be a marked difference between the responses of men and women to the survey questions. I don’t know what’s wrong with people, but it’s serious!

I’ve been keeping quiet on this topic, or at least mentioning it only in hushed tones to those close to me who are in the know. But I can’t stay silent any longer. My home town soccer team – Wigan Athletic – which only became a real professional team when I was ten or so, are currently second in the Premier League and less than two games behind leaders Chelsea.

As described on premierleague.com

Wigan Athletic are in the Premiership for the first time in their history, having made a remarkable rise in the last decade under owner and chairman Dave Whelan. While Manchester United were winning the inaugural competition in 1993, Wigan were being relegated to the new Third Division, and the following year they finished 19th, their lowest ever league position. But everything changed when JJB Sports supremo Whelan took over in 1995. The former Blackburn Rovers player immediately signalled his intent by signing the so-called ‘Three Amigos’ – Isidro Diaz, Jesus Seba and Roberto Martinez. Under former Norwich City manager John Deehan they won promotion to the Second Division in 1997, clinching the title on goals scored from Fulham, and in 1999 they left Springfield Park for their impressive new home, the JJB Stadium. A dramatic play-off final defeat followed the next season, as Gillingham scored twice in the final seven minutes to snatch a 3-2 win. In 2001, goalkeeper Roy Carroll signed for Manchester United and manager Steve Bruce left to join Crystal Palace after just six weeks in charge. Former player Paul Jewell was installed as his replacement. Nathan Ellington joined from Bristol Rovers for a club record fee in 2002, and Wigan stormed to the Second Division title in 2003 by 14 points, amassing 100 points in the process. After just missing out on the play-offs in 2004, Wigan completed their astonishing climb to the top flight in 2005, securing promotion from the Championship with a 3-1 win over Reading in the final game. Strike duo Ellington and Jason Roberts, who were both named in the Championship Team of the Season, scored 45 goals between them as the Latics finished second behind Sunderland.

You don’t have to take my word about their recent success. Here’s the current league table.

I must say; I’m truly amazed by this start to the season. I thought I’d comment now, since upcoming fixtures are against Arsenal, Spurs, Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester United, and could lead to something of a correction to the above table. I grew up as a Liverpool fan, but went to watch Wigan play several times after they made it into the fourth division. I have no option but to support them now though, even when they play Liverpool at Anfield on December 3rd.

It’s the 60th anniversary of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which premiered in December, 1945, just a few months after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The goal of the magazine has always been simple, if somewhat ambitious: to save the world by working to minimize the threat of nuclear war. It came out of a time when physicists were central players in questions of international security.

The most famous product of the Bulletin is of course the Doomsday Clock, an iconic image that is far more famous than the magazine itself. The minute hand on the clock moves in response to the perceived danger of imminent global disaster. It’s fascinating to peek back at the timeline for the evolution of the clock, as it bounces back and forth in response to world events.

• 1947: Seven minutes to midnight. Chosen mostly for artistic reasons, apparently. The original conception didn’t include the idea that the clock would actually move to reflect developments in international security.
• 1949: Three minutes to midnight. The Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb.
• 1953: Two minutes to midnight. The US and USSR explode hydrogen bombs.
• 1960: Seven minutes to midnight. International cooperation to check the growth of nuclear weapons grows.
• 1963: Twelve minutes to midnight. The US and USSR sign the Partial Test Ban Treaty, the first international arms-control agreement. (For some reason, the Cuban Missile Crisis doesn’t seem to have really registered — possibly it came and went too quickly.)
• 1968: Seven minutes to midnight. France and China acquire nuclear weapons; arms stockpiles increase while development aid to developing nations languishes.
• 1969: Ten minutes to midnight. The US Senate ratifies the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
• 1972: Twelve minutes to midnight. The US and USSR sign the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I).
• 1974: Nine minutes to midnight. Arms control talks stall; India develops a nuclear weapon.
• 1980: Seven minutes to midnight. Small wars and terrorist activities grow, while arms-control talks remain stuck.
• 1981: Four minutes to midnight. Terrorism and repression of human rights grows, along with conflicts in multiple theaters around the world.
• 1984: Three minutes to midnight. Arms race picks up steam.
• 1988: Six minutes to midnight. The US and USSR sign a treaty limiting intermediate-range nuclear weapons.
• 1990: Ten minutes to midnight. Democracy flourishes in Eastern Europe; Cold War ends!
• 1991: Seventeen minutes to midnight. The clock leaps dramatically backward as the Cold War remains over, and the US and USSR announce signficant cuts in nuclear stockpiles.
• 1995: Fourteen minutes to midnight. Turns out that the peace dividend wasn’t quite what it might have been, as arms spending continues at Cold War levels. Fear grows of proliferation of nuclear weapons from poorly-controled facilities in the former Soviet Union.
• 1998: Nine minutes to midnight. India and Pakistan go public with nuclear weapons.
• 2002: Seven minutes to midnight. The U.S. rejects a series of arms control treaties and announces its withdrawal from the ABM treaty. Significant concerns about proliferation of nuclear weapons to terrorists.

So we’re right back where we started. If you don’t agree with the positioning of the clock as decided upon by the Bulletin’s board, you can always consult the Rapture Index for an alternative take on the imminence of Armageddon.

Matt McIrvin, on a quest to figure out when the USA was displaced from the center of the world (at least where map-makers are concerned), points to a fascinating map projection site put together by Carlos Furuti. It goes through all the different ways people have thought of to project a spherical Earth onto a flat map, doing their darndest to preserve nice features like shapes and sizes. Only after looking at all these different attempts does it really hit you how distorting most world maps are, if only because the nice features of one will draw attention to the glaring shortcomings of some other one. Round spheres are really quite geometrically different from flat planes — who knew?

My favorite projection is the Quincuncial Projection shown below. It is “conformal” (angle-preserving) almost everywhere, except at the four points where the Equator takes a dramatic right turn. These are also where the size distortions are the most dramatic; fortunately, we can stick these points in the middle of various oceans, where nobody is the wiser. The other obvious problem is that Antarctica is sliced into four little bits. But Antarcticans aren’t a crucial constituency, so we can learn to live with it.

The reason this is my favorite, besides the fact that it’s both fairly accurate and intrinsically cool, is that this projection was invented by Charles Sanders Peirce, someone known much more for his philosophy than for his cartographical skillz. (And “Peirce” is pronounced like “purse,” just so you don’t come off as a poseur when you drop his name in conversation.) Peirce was the orginator of pragmatism as well as semiotics, and was labelled by Bertrand Russell as “certainly the greatest American thinker ever.” His manuscripts, if Wikipedia is to be believed (hey, why doesn’t Wikipedia support trackbacks?), run to over 10,000 pages. And here he is inventing new ways to map the world.

All of which is simply to say: if Charles Sanders Peirce were alive today, he would definitely have a blog.

A few days ago I promised I’d report on my second week in China, so here goes.

On Saturday the 21st, we flew to Beijing and checked into the Jade Palace Hotel, near the Institute for Theoretical Physics, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The same evening, my good friend Teri Weaver arrived from Seoul. I’ve written about Teri before over on Orange Quark. She is a journalist, working for Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, and she has recently returned from a two-month tour in Iraq.

On Sunday, Teri and I spent some time wandering around, shopping in Beijing (OK, we also had mojitos at the Hyatt), and then went to see Tiananmen Square. In one sense, Tiananmen really isn’t much to see – it’s just a very large square, full of vendors trying to sell people the tackiest possible souvenirs of the square and of the upcoming 2008 Olympic games, which are to be held in Beijing. Obviously, though, one doesn’t go to Tiananmen to marvel at either its geometry or its tackiness. Standing on one of the most famous spots in modern political history is a fascinating experience – the 1989 image of that lone student facing down a tank is inked into most of our memories.

Afterwards, Teri went off to see the Forbidden City, and I went to a dinner arranged for us by the symposium organizers.

On Monday the International Symposium on Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology began. The format was that there were to be talks each morning and afternoon. The invited international participants gave 45-minute talks, and a collection of local physicists gave talks that were around 30 minutes long. My talk was the final one, so I got to thank the organizers on behalf of the international participants before getting down to business. I spoke on Connecting Cosmology and Fundamental Physics. The point I wanted to get across concerns the synergy between cosmological measures of the universe, which provide us with a precision accounting of the sources of energy density in the universe, and microphysical experiments performed here on Earth, with which we hope to identify how these sources fit into our greater understanding of particle physics.

The connections are many, with the tightest one being to the search for dark matter, as I’ve discussed before. There is overwhelming evidence that the universe contains matter of a type other than that which we see forming galaxies, stars, planets and us (called baryons). In fact, the evidence shows that there is five times more of this so-called dark matter in the universe than there are baryons. It is observed indirectly through many different cosmological methods and, indeed, is the reason that galaxies are able to form the way they do. However, so far we have not been able to determine what the particles that make up the dark matter are. There is a good reason for this. The reason the dark matter is not seen glowing along with much of the rest of the material in galaxies is that it does not experience electromagnetism, the force of nature that leads to light. We think that dark matter particles must be only weakly interacting (electromagnetism is quite a strong force) and a consequence of this is that it is hard to get them to do anything measurable to material on Earth in order to betray their presence.

There are two ways to get around this. One is to build very sensitive detectors to measure even the smallest effects of dark matter on normal matter, since there should be lots passing through the Earth all the time as our solar system orbits the galaxy. There are many people devoted to these efforts and there are reasons to think that success is lurking in the not too distant future. The second way is, rather than waiting for cosmological dark matter to hit something in your detector, to smash particles together hard enough to create some of it all for yourself. If one can do this, then one would be able to measure its properties (its mass and the strengths of its interactions) and study how it fits into the overall structure of particle physics. This is where our colliders are indispensable.

There are other important connections of course, notably to attempts to identify the mechanism responsible for generating the asymmetry between the amount of matter in the universe and the amount of antimatter, as I’ve written about before. I talked about these also, but in a little less details.

Every evening our hosts had some elaborate banquet, or a wonderful outing, or both planned for us. Last Tuesday we were treated to a visit to two small private performances of Chinese opera. The first performance was of the 600-year old Kunqu Opera, which we were told is one of the oldest operatic forms in China. This really was fantastic, as much for the remarkable acrobatic dance and fight scenes as for the vocals themselves. I took a lot of photos (we were told this was allowed) but it was hard to get one that did justice to the show.

The second form was Beijing opera and was not acrobatic at all, but featured delicate and subtle vocals, entirely unlike those encountered in western opera.

Thursday was very different from the other days. In the morning, rather than having talks, there were two panel discussions – one by theorists and one by experimentalists. The purpose was to speak simultaneously to the students and faculty in the audience and also to one of the funding officials who joined us for the discussion and who I assume is responsible for some of the growth in cosmology that China is planning. I sat on the theory panel (obviously), with Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, Ira Wasserman, Henry Tye and Bing-Lin Young. We gave five-minute presentations of our views of the future of cosmology and areas in which China might get involved and make a difference, and then discussed among ourselves and took questions from the audience. I spoke about the connections between particle physics and cosmology and for the need for students to get plenty of exposure to experimentalists and observers as well as theorists if they are to learn and understand what the important questions are.

Everything went fine, but I liked one exchange in particular. I don’t quite remember the question, but it was by a student and was along the lines of how best to go about connecting string theory and cosmology. Renata Kallosh, who wasn’t on the panel because she’d chosen to give her time to Andrei Linde, was in the audience and, since this had been partly the topic of her talk earlier in the week, we asked her to give a response. One could imagine a long and complicated answer to this question, but Renata simply said (as best I can recall, anyway)

“Learn field theory. Learn General Relativity. Learn some string theory. And follow the data.”

which was a lovely answer which earned a round of applause.

Thursday afternoon we went to the Great Wall (the section at Badaling). Once we got past the amazingly tacky parking lot, in which there are huge stalls set out with people trying to sell you every conceivable type of souvenir, we climbed one part of the wall. It was spectacular, both in the scope of the project itself, and the views one gets from it.

Friday, after my talk and the concluding remarks by Henry Tye, we were taken to the airport and left on a twelve-hour flight over the North Pole to Chicago and back to Syracuse.

My China trip was great. I saw part of a country I’d never traveled to before, saw Tiananmen, the Great Wall, Chinese opera and the thousand Island Lake, and was treated graciously and generously by wonderful hosts. Most importantly, I met a bunch of new people, who are fascinated by cosmology and who want to invest in it. Given the pace of change in China, if this initiative moves forward there is no reason the country could not become a major contributor in cosmology within the next decade. I certainly feel privileged to have been part of the attempt to get such an initiative off the ground, and expect I’ll be going back to China multiple times in coming years.