Mylos

Karen Armstrong

Anchor Books (Random House), ISBN: 0385721404  Publisher, Buy online

British theologian Karen Armstrong entered a convent at seventeen to become a Catholic nun. She defrocked in 1969 (this caused a great scandal among British Catholics, many have not forgiven her to this day). She has since become a student of the three great monotheistic religions, writing one bestseller on the subject, A History of God

In this book, she recounts the history of the Crusades and how it still shapes the modern-day Middle East. Interestingly, she tries to take a tripartite Christian/Jewish/Muslim view (more accurately, a quadripartite Catholic/Greek Orthodox/Jewish/Muslim view, but she herself writes about a “triple vision”). Most other accounts give short shrift to the Jewish point of view.

Even now, the subject is still fraught with passion and having an entirely unbiased view is difficult, but she does a good job of it in my opinion. Certainly, her assessment is quite critical of the Crusaders, but the only actors to which she is wholly sympathetic are the humanistic Byzantines, who were poorly repaid for their forbearance towards the Crusaders by the sack of Constantinople.

Her central thesis is that the Crusades were the crucible where the modern European identity was forged, and that unfortunately in the process it was alloyed with anti-semitism and a visceral hostility towards Islam. Her second thesis, somewhat less convincing, is that in the current Israeli-Arab conflict, both parties are consciously replaying the Crusades.

The convoluted politics of the Middle East, over seven millennia in the making, have a habit of tripping up overly simplistic analyses. The Lebanese master story-teller Amin Maalouf, in his excellent (but clearly not unbiased) The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, notes that shortly after the first crusade, an army of Christian and Muslim allies fought another such army in Syria.

The Crusades were clearly seen at first as a colonial or purely military venture by Arabs of all faiths, it is only later with the sultans Nasr-ud-din and Salah-ud-din (Saladin) that the war took on a religious significance. While Karen Armstrong does a good job of showing how the conflict progressively acquired the traits of a holy war, she is not as good at identifying the purely secular realpolitik that was pursued then as it is today.

All in all, for all its flaws, specially in the political analysis of the current situation, this is an excellent and thought-provoking book. Highly recommended.

A San Francisco judge has thrown out a ballot initiative, “Care not Cash”, voted by a 60% margin last November, saying only county representatives (i.e. the San Francisco Board of Supervisors) have authority to define welfare standards.

While I have my own doubts about that welfare reform package, I find curious to say the least the idea that elected representatives have higher sovereignty than the people they derive their legitimacy from.

Update (2003-09-18):

The San Francisco board of supervisors has killed the measure. Contempt for voters is not the exclusive province of right-wingers, it seems.

Update (2004-04-30):

A state appeal court has reversed the decision, citing saying it was upholding the right of voters and exercising the court’s “duty to jealously guard the prerogative of initiative”. The wheels of justice grind exceedingly fine, but also exceedingly slowly

In the film world, the technical quality of the pictures you take is conditioned mostly by the lens and film you use. A $79 Olympus Stylus Epic with a fixed 35mm lens will take as good or better pictures than a fancy SLR (single-lens reflex) by Canon or Nikon, and you can load it up with Fuji Neopan 1600 or Ilford Delta 3200 film for taking pictures in very low light conditions.

For digital cameras, this does not hold – the more expensive digital SLRs (DSLRs) have much larger sensors that collect more light and thus have a higher signal to noise ratio, which makes for smoother, cleaner pictures and higher sensitivity. Compact digicams peak at ISO 400, which means flash is required at night, with the accompanying “red-eyed rabbit caught in headlights” look…

Unfortunately, until recently DSLRs have been out of most peoples’ reach, with prices above $2000. Canon breached this by introducing its flagship amateur DSLR, the 10D, for under $1500 street price. Many believe that prices will still need to fall below the psychological threshold of $1000 for DSLRs to gain wide acceptance. It’s interesting to look at the Japanese camera manufacturers’ trade association CIPA’s statistics, from which it appears the manufacturers’ average wholesale price for interchangeable-lens digital SLRs was about $910 in February 2003. Some pundits think the $1000 retail price threshold will be crossed around the end of the year.

Update (2003-08-20):

The other shoe drops – Canon just announced its $900 EOS 300D, which packs most of the features (and more importantly, the sensor and image quality) of the EOS 10D for less than 2/3 the price. Canon can do this, as they are a vertically integrated company, making everything from the optics to the sensor.

From the San Francisco Examiner

I take the California street cable car to work or back nearly every day. Unlike the more touristic Powell-Hyde and Powell-Mason lines, this line is used mostly by locals and commuters. It is also celebrating its 125th year of service (not bad for a city that is barely a century and a half old).

An excellent article in The Guardian summarizes the current attacks on politically inconvenient science in the US. It is instructive to compare this with Stalin’s USSR. The parallel is unfortunately too close for comfort.

Trofim Lysenko was an agronomist who devised a method to improve the yield of winter wheat, an important achievement in a country suffering from famine due in large part to criminally incompetent mismanagement by Communist central planners. He believed in a form of Lamarck’s theories, that basically species evolve by transmitting inherited characteristics, rather than by natural selection and survival of the fittest.

Lysenko led a series of attacks on genetics, beginning in the mid thirties and culminating with the purge of of the father of Soviet genetics, Nikolai Vavilov in 1940 (initially sentenced to death, he died in 1943 while in solitary confinement). Lysenko then assumed complete control over Soviet agronomical “science”, all modern genetics starting with Mendel’s laws were banned (some of Vavilov’s vital work on biodiversity survived, but is endangered today), and the most outlandish theories (like spontaneous generation of germs) promulgated.

The Communist regime found Lysenko’s theories congenial, as they offered the perspective of genetically improving homo sovieticus using the same brutal tactics applied to Russian arts, religion and history.

Vavilov was rehabilitated when Nikita Khrushchev came to power, but Lysenko managed to hold on, in part with flattery, in part with outright fraud to cover up his lack of results. He was finally sacked in 1965, when the damage he had done in thirty years became impossible to ignore.