a case of life imitating The Onion

US planes rain dollars on Afghanistan - The Times of India

posted @ 5:53 PM -

WTC memorial

Would this be a fitting memorial or a distasteful reminder? Timothy Noah in Slate thinks the former; I'm less sure but I can certainly see the point.

posted @ 5:03 AM -

really new Jews

There has been an interesting letter in response to the AlterNet article about changing Jewish identity, which I wrote about the other day. The letter quite rightly points out that we European Jews tend to overlook the increasing number of converts to Judaism, so in a different sense of 'new', the new Jew looks nothing like the ancestral Jew. It kind of makes the opposite point from the original article, in that converts are people with a non-Jewish heritage who find the religion, while the 'new Jews' referred to in the article are people who have found a new pride in our heritage and culture without necessarily being interested in the religious belief.

posted @ 2:09 PM -

emergence

Steven Johnson, author of Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software, is the guest on a long (and I think ongoing) discussion at the Well. His book and the general thrust of this discussion do a lot to explain why the kinds of things I want to spend my life researching are not just minor technical issues but directly relevant to understanding a vast range of phenomena out in the world.

Thanks to Adnan for the link.

posted @ 12:15 PM -

the enemy is not at the gates

Am I the only person who just can't take this succession of security alerts seriously. In fact I can put that more strongly - I know I'm not the first to suspect that this has nothing to do with real security threats, but everything to do with the convenience to the US political establishment of maintaining a state of fear, so that they can justify anything they do as a measure to protect the 'homeland' from the nameless, intangible 'enemy'.

One of the points Orwell said he was trying to make with 1984 was that this could happen in any country at any time - we're seeing how right he was now.

posted @ 3:22 AM -

tide is rising

Another country that is apparently set to be swallowed entirely by rising sea levels: Tokelau, and this time my source is the CIA world factbook, so not really a publication that could be accused of leftie or tree-hugging bias. I don't really know what to say to this except that it is quite depressing.

posted @ 6:42 AM -

free access to information

George Soros (he who gives away vast sums of money because he's loaded but "can only wear one pair of shoes at a time") has decided that academics should be his latest beneficiaries, with a scheme to support the setting up of subscription-free online academic journals. This will be a great leap forward, partly for the reasons he gives (even in wealthy countries universities can't afford all the journals their faculty would like them to subscribe to, and in the third world this is a huge barrier to teaching and research), but also because it will improve the accessibility of science to the general public. There is so much terrible science journalism out there making ludicrous claims that can be seen to be so with even a cursory glance at the original papers, and it might just get questioned more if lay people could go and check for themselves. I am well aware that a lot of people would never think to do so, but the more often people who try are actually rewarded by easy access to the information they want the better.

posted @ 6:28 AM -

mens sana in corpore sano

I finally went to my first kung fu class for several months and I'm wondering why it took me so long to get back. For about a month I've had no real reason not to, beyond feeling too busy, but saving a few hours by not going to 1 or 2 classes a week is the ultimate false economy. Kung fu improves my sleeping pattern, energy level and general clarity of mind so much that I'll get the time back over the next few days, while also feeling a whole lot better. Must keep training.

posted @ 8:04 PM -

quote of the day

"Being very happy does not seem to be a malfunction."

from Very Happy People, by Ed Diener and Martin Seligman, in the latest (January 2002, vol. 13, issue 1) issue of Psychological Science.

Actually there is worth in the paper - it explains that studies of depression seem only to look at very unhappy people, and not really consider what makes very happy people so very happy, which could give ideas as to how to help the very unhappy - but there are some real 'it took a professional researcher to tell me that?!' statements in it.

Thanks to Sam for sending that to me, it's brightened up my day.

posted @ 12:52 PM -

only in Brighton

Not only does our football team have a poet-in-residence, but our police force have decided to write Valentines' poems to wanted suspects. I have a feeling they might be the first police force in the world to try seducing criminals in this way....

posted @ 11:53 AM -

the year of the horse

oh yeah, happy new year to those who are celebrating it right now

posted @ 6:54 AM -

etymology of kike

On a fairly related note, I have wondered for years how on earth kike came to be an insulting term for Jews. Yid and Heeb have pretty obvious derivations, but I've finally seen something that provides some possible explanations for kike.

posted @ 6:25 AM -

yiddishkeit

AlterNet have published a very interesting piece about how Jewish identity is changing from one generation to another. The main point is that for the last few generations Jewish identity has been largely defined by negatives - a sense of exile and a sense of being discriminated against. Now that my generation no longer see ourselves as consistent victims of prejudice, and mostly feel quite at home in the Diaspora countries that our ancestors adopted through necessity, that sort of self-definition by our problems no longer makes sense.

For a long time this sort of thing drove me away from Jewish culture altogether - I felt like the religion was irrelevant to me without faith in God, and the culture was insular and unhealthy. It's only quite recently that I've come to realise that these are not reasons to try to reject all engagement with what is actually a very interesting heritage, and would be my heritage whether I liked it or not. I've started to take a lot more interest in the history of my ancestors and the customs, many of which are worthwhile even without belief in the religion, either because they fulfil an important purpose (like the Passover story, which must never be forgotten because it still contains a lesson about how we should behave now) or have intrinsic beauty (like much of the wedding ceremony I attended on the weekend). Meanwhile I still don't feel part of a Jewish community, because I still see much of this old guard influence; people who see prejudice everywhere and end up fostering it by being prejudiced themselves about non-Jews and carrying a distinctly off-putting attitude around with them. I see this in every minority community I know anything about, and it's a shame because people shackle themselves even after society has stopped imposing the chains.

The article, along with various other things over the last few weeks, has really got me thinking about my own self-definition. While I was busily avoiding all things Jewish, I used to believe that I was not like other Jews, because I don't hold the same opinions as the people who taught me about Judaism, and I don't feel at home in Golders Green, Edgware (for people who don't know North London, these are the most obvious centres of the religious and secular Jewish communities respectively) or Israel. Reading this article I see that I am not like those particular groups, but it's hardly surprising given the huge generational differences that exist in every community in Britain right now, including the identity-free majority, and that this article describes people who are very much like me. Perhaps I am far more a product of my roots than I've ever realised, which amounts to a pretty dramatic change in my self-image, because I've always seen myself as very much an individual, striking out my own path. On the one hand it would be great to really feel rooted in something, but on the other I would have to admit to being less special than I thought....

posted @ 6:21 AM -

jurassic puke

I know that this is really quite an important and interesting discovery, but I can't help feeling sorry for the scientists who can now introduce themselves at parties with "I was part of the first ever team to discover fossilised dinosaur vomit".

posted @ 11:03 AM -

trust us | we know

The Brains Trust is celebrating its first anniversary this week, and they have done this in style by publishing one of the funniest issues yet, just as I was growing tired of online satire.

posted @ 10:45 AM -

universal translators?!?

A Russian firm have been publicising a voice-to-voice translator that can be spoken to in English, and will respond with the appropriate phrase in French, German or Spanish. I'd love to get my hands on one of these and see if they're any good, and if they are they could make travelling a whole lot easier. Particularly exciting to me is some vague talk of extending the number of languages to include Chinese (I couldn't work out which Chinese) by the end of the year.

posted @ 7:48 AM -

this is your captain speaking

you've had a lovely cruise for the last few days but prepare yourself for a very hard landing in the morning.

Seriously - Paris was wonderful, and gave me a holiday which I needed a surprising amount considering that it's less than two months since I last went abroad. I am extremely spoilt in that respect, but this is a bit different because I really have been trying to do too many things lately. Unfortunately the world didn't stop in my absence, so tomorrow I have a collection of not very pleasant phone calls to make, and a lot of more pleasant (but time consuming) techie work to do. I feel like I'm being pursued, but it's entirely by demons of my own making....

Still, plenty of good things to focus on. I've had a lovely few days; not just a short trip to Paris, but also celebrating my dad's birthday, catching up with a couple of old friends back here (one who I hadn't seen for several years, and it was really nice to be able to just pick up where we left off - not what I expected), and then going to a friend's sister's wedding last night. The wedding itself was wonderful - a really beautiful service with a great cantor (Jewish services should be beautiful, but aren't usually this good) and a rabbi who took great pains to explain the significance of each part of the ceremony, which is rich in symbolism. What was really notable though, through the ceremony and the party afterwards, was the glow of happiness from the couple themselves. I suppose that sort of thing ought to be a feature of every wedding, but I haven't been to many yet and it was a genuinely heart-warming thing to behold.

posted @ 7:00 PM -