Does Allahu Akbar Mean the Same in Fort Hood as in Mecca?

If spoken in Fort Hood, then one is led to doubt the mental sanity of the dear doctor (Major Nidal Hassan). If in Mecca, all the cries are received as the highest level of mental sanity. One is enlightened enough to see Allah as the only god.

All of us are a little crazy. That is the only way for me to understand these fundamental contradictions.

Is There Anything to Learn from Fort Hood Massacre?

For the next few days we are going to be thinking on what happened in Texas.

Doctor kills patients.

Allahu Akbar at Fort Hood

What should the US Government do?

My gut feeling is that we should just ask:

Why do we kill humans?

You can read some questions at the NYT today here.

Reader from Killeen

I got one reader from the town in Texas near Fort Hood. I hope my ideas help the reader.

You can read about the town, here.

Milky Way

Timescapes Timelapse: Mountain Light from Tom @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

Virginia Tech Massacre and Fort Hood Massacre

Is it logical to connect these?

No

It is not helpful either to say that Muslims in the military should be punished. It is understandable that we put things together, that we think go together. One school, Virginia Tech, two mentally handicapped persons: Seung-Hui Cho,  and now Major  Nidal Malik Hasan, one the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre the other the culprit in Fort Hood.

This connection is just the beginning. Now, like President Obama told us, we shouldn't jump to conclusions.

National Strike in Mexico

Telephone and university workers are going to strike. The Union of Electrical Workers  (SME by its initials in Spanish), was vanished by President Calderón, when he decreed the end of the Central Electrical Company (LFC by its Spanish initials). The strike is scheduled for November 11.

The 2012 coming presidential elections, will test the popularity of Calderón's decision.

I believe his conservative party, PAN, will pay a big price because of this fundamental change of the Mexican economy. Current events in Mexico remind me of the beginning of the USSR collapse in 1989. After the Mexican revolution of 1910, a new socialized economy was created. In 1960 President López Mateos nationalized some electrical companies. Now President Calderón is dismantling that system.

We will know who wins in 2012.

Dr. Julio Frenk

No Implications

I am not privy to any dark mafia plan. But one could imply with my question below, that some group is behind the shootings in Texas in Fort Hood.

I do not have a way to know. Just wondering.

What I am afraid of, is that some misguded American, would attack a Muslim American. Sadly it has happened before.

A Republican from Texas, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison said this:

“Our hearts go out,” she told Fox 4 News. “These are soldiers who are getting ready to go out to Iraq or Afghanistan and their families were under stress already. This was just a terrible tragedy and we don’t even know the extent of it yet.”

"CNN reports that a cousin of Major Hasan said that he took “flak” for being of Middle Eastern origin."

Twenty Two Users!

By typing Major Malik Nadal Hassan's name, that I took from the NYT, I got 22 readers!

Search based blogging is an important innovation of the Internet.

Just write a name high up in the search lists, and you'll get a hit.

Hmm.

Malik Nadal Hassan

First Barack Hussein Obama's party looses in New Jersey and Virginia. Then Major Malik Nadal Hassan is wounded in Fort Hood in Texas.

Is this good for Muslim Americans ?

Cosmic Accelerators

""The detection of M82 indicates that the universe is full of natural particle accelerators, and as ground-based gamma-ray observatories continue to improve, further discoveries are inevitable." said Martin Pohl, a professor of physics at Iowa State University who helped lead the study. A next-generation VHE gamma-ray observatory, the Advanced Gamma-ray Imaging System (AGIS), is already under development."

Taken from Science Daily.

''The wicked are denied their light, and their upraised arm is broken.''

The NYT describes lawlessness in Mexico.

Wealthy politicians are using biblical references in their crusade against criminals.

I prefer separation of Church and State.

The spectroscopically confirmed huge cosmic structure at z = 0.55

"We report on the spectroscopic confirmation of a huge cosmic structure around the CL0016 cluster at z = 0.55. We made wide-field imaging observations of the surrounding regions of the cluster and identified more than 30 concentrations of red galaxies near the cluster redshift. The follow-up spectroscopic observations of the most prominent part of the structure confirmed 14 systems close to the cluster redshift, roughly half of which have a probability of being bound to the cluster dynamically. We also made an X-ray follow-up, which detected extended X-ray emissions from 70% of the systems in the X-ray surveyed region. The observed structure is among the richest ever observed in the distant Universe. They will be an ideal site for quantifying environmental variations in the galaxy properties and effects of large-scale structure on galaxy evolution."



Huge Filament Far Far Away

Taken from:


Astronomy and Astrophysics

Claude Lévi-Strauss

The NYT has this in the piece about the hundred year old ethnologist that died late last week:

"It was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the West. But he worried about the fate of the West. It was, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, “allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage.”"

Less we forget.

Euclid's Elements

I just downloaded Project Gutenberg’s First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid,
by John Casey.

I can't resist writing here:

A point is that which has position but not dimensions.

The whole thing is in TeX!

I will learn some Geometry and some TeX, what a treat.

You can download it from:

The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid by John Casey and Euclid

Drought in Mexico

The BBC tells the world, what just a few months ago the Mexican Government was not willing to say.

Drought in Mexico

I see a perfect storm coming to Mexico for the general presidential 2012 election.

Maher Arar

Shame on US!

Read today's news.

Why Should the Present be Different than the Past?

In Mexico in the sixteenth century, people died from foreign diseases. Millions disappeared. In Europe in the first millennium we see the same pattern. Are we entering a similar Era now?

Judging by the famine in Darfur, I say yes.

We should all get ready for hard times. Don't expect the NYT to warn you.

Are we Being Realistic?

Human decisions and actions have changed the biosphere. Is this a natural phenomenon, or as we like to say this is artificial?

Artificial is what we do, natural is everything else. Somehow this doesn't ring true to me.

What if humans are just developing a program for the particular universe we inhabit? I do not mean to say that I believe in fate, but if we got this far, we should be more self assured than we seem to be. When we fear destroying all possibility of life, we are diminishing, not increasing our ability to survive.


We cannot stop being human, and humans change the environment.

Nuclear Energy

James Lovelock advises the people of the world to get over the fear of nuclear plants. I was never happy with the visceral reaction to nuclear plants, as a physicist I see a solution in harnessing the energy of the nucleus.

With the present concern on carbon pollution of the atmosphere, I welcome a resurgence of the nuclear option for energy production.

What about side effects?

What are the options? Global warming does not seem better to me. In any case I am not being asked. I do expect new nuclear plants starting before 2027. Maybe my dystopia won't happen.

Environment and Natural Regularities

The Sun comes every day. This regularity is understood by classical mechanics. Clouds go up and rain goes down, this regularity is less understood. In any case as a physicist I am partial to mathematical and logical arguments.

Social and political decisions are taken differently, if a group has power over another, then usually the second will get the brunt side of the event.

What I bring up with this note, is that those natural regularities are not social or political, they seem to belong to other categorical aspects of reality.

Powerful and powerless, are equally exposed to real big catastrophes; equalizing suffering.

At the end all of us die. I wish that instead of taking advantage of each other, we join hands to face these menacing clouds together.

This is not romantic thinking, it is realistic thinking. Together we stand, separate we fall.

Future History

I know the title is an oxymoron. But since it is impossible to run alternative histories, at least allow me to imagine how the world will look, some years from now.

Roger Cohen's exercise at thinking the past as: What if? encourages me to write this note.

In the year 2027 we see many poor people all over the world, from Katrina devastated New Orleans, to the collapsed state of Bangladesh. Millions of poor people trying to enter the few habitable spots on Earth; just like we saw in the movie: "Children of Men" ,directed by Alfonso Cuarón, in 2006.

Many poor people are dying right now, and more will on, and after that year. From this very moment all of us should be working to change this catastrophic course, if we don't, it could be worse than what I am writing here.

Dobler, Finkbeiner et al.

   These physicists show indications that something is in the center of the Galaxy.

"This settles a long-standing question about the origin of the WMAP haze. Until recently, it has been argued that the WMAP haze had alternative explanations, such as free–free emission from hot gas or spinning dipole emission from rapidly rotating dust grains. However, the existence of this ICS signal proves that the microwave haze is indeed synchrotron emission from a hard electron spectrum."

You can read their paper here.

The electrons may come from unknown forms of matter.

No man is an island:

Acknowledgments: We acknowledge helpful conversations with Carlos Frenk, Igor Moskalenko, Simona Murgia, and Kent Wood. This work was partially supported by the Director, Office of Science, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. NW is supported by NSF CAREER grant PHY-0449818, and IC and NW are supported by DOE OJI grant # DE-FG02-06ER41417. TS is partially supported by a Sir Keith Murdoch Fellowship from the American Australian Association. This research made use of the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) and the IDL Astronomy User’s Library at Goddard.13

Mexico City Legislative Assembly Sues Federal Government

Mexico City confronts President Calderón today. I read this from a Mexico CIty newspaper, the NYT is not a Mexico City information source. They choose what are, and when to print the important developments south of the border, events that could have important implications for the US.

The revolution won't be reported in the NYT.

There is a legal battle in Mexico right now, one of the oldest Mexican unions was disappeared by the President. My opinion is that the conservative government of Mexico doesn't know Mexico.

Eventually this struggle will get to the NYT, I wonder when.

From the Pamphlet

"Examples of how this might begin to play out are everywhere. Last year there were riots in Mexico, Morocco and the Philippines over a jump in food prices caused almost entirely by increased global use of biofuels. The great hidden factor behind recent conflicts in Somalia and Darfur has been the vast reduction in the areas of arable land as a result of water shortage and desertification. When we think of both the forces that have generated this disaster and more to the point, the people who will pay the consequences of it, the class divisions are openly exposed. It will not be those with the money and technology to move from the worst affected areas or pay for measures to adapt. The worst affected will be those who now bear the least responsibility: those without economic or social power."

You can get the pamphlet in:

Not Environmental

Cecilia Espinoza

Nuria Uriza and Atenas Cárdenas

Nuria, and Atenas are two beautiful young members of my family. They are talented also, one as horse rider, and the other as singer. I want them to live in a world  where they can do what they do, better and better. They are too young to know the danger the world is in.

I feel responsible to them and my own children, they deserve a better world than the one we are giving them right now. Rivers full of rats, oceans with huge garbage islands floating around, and pandemics threatening us all.

Copenhagen; next stop.

Too Little?

"Unless something changes drastically, we’re looking at many years of high unemployment."

That is the doctor's diagnosis. This doctor has a Ph.D. and a Nobel Prize. His name is Paul Krugman, and to top it off, teaches at Princeton!

This may turn up to be dangerous.

2012?

Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe

Not Environmental

I just added a link to my blog list. NotEnvironmental.blogspot.com. I was warned that there may be some blogger violations. I downloaded a pdf from the blog. Maybe that is a violation, I don't know. The document in question is called: pamphlet.pdf, and one can read a well reasoned argument about the mess we are in. As I understand the message, one could say, that the people that caused the problem to begin with, the greedy capitalists, are not going to solve it. The Copenhagen meeting in a few days won't get a solution. Those people are the problem, like Ronald Reagan used to say, the Government is the Problem. I think he meant, the Government that stopped his wealthy friends from screwing up most of us.

The point of the pamphlet is different. The governments at Copenhagen are the problem, because they mainly represent the greedy wealthy. Al Gore, has a new book out. "Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis". Gore sides with the governments as opposed to the pamphlet writers.

Which side am I on?

I expect that when the shit hits the fan, we have to be ready, it will be a bunch of paramilitary gangs defending the wealthy, like in New Orleans a few years back, when Katrina hit.

I am not about to join any environmental guerrilla group, but I am old enough to know that when the legendary fecal matter gets out, you better hide, or take care of yourself somehow. This won't be the first, nor the last time a catastrophe hits humans. I just read how in 1645 thousands of Mexicans died in Guerrero, due to Spanish deceases they were not immune to. The Mexicans around were not vaccinated, they are just the ones chosen by natural selection, they have immunity now to European diseases.

Get ready, the big waves of Historic Change are coming, and I do not mean the return of Jesus Christ, I just mean a repeat of forgotten human catastrophes, like the collapse of the Mayan, Aztec, and Inca Empires.

Shit happens..

A Year Younger

"Dressed in blue jeans and a button-down shirt open at the collar, Gore looks younger than his 61 years:"

Taken from the November 9 Newsweek issue, on the new book by Al Gore:
Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.

I am 60. I wonder if I look old. There are some things that remind me of my age, but as my mother of 82 says, I do not feel old.

Gore tells the NYT:

"His favorite quote in Our Choice is from the philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969): "The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power … has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.""

Adorno was 66 when he died, I better get something done.

Powers in Place

This Saturday, President Obama, is calling on small entrepreneurs to come and fix this mess.

I remember working at a small startup company in Elgin, IL. I felt that people with money and power didn't see the point of our efforts. They expect solutions from big players like GE, and Sylvania, not from Lynk Labs. Is there a solution for this?

President Obama's administration should look into small companies like ours. The big guys, have failed us. Isn't that clear?

The Revenge of Gaia

I read this book sometime ago. I was thinking today, that humans may actually blow it. Then instead of going from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050, as Tom Friedman writes today in the NYT. we may rather go to 6 or 5 billion, with a lot of grief.

I hope we find the way.

My Beautiful Grand Niece Singing at School/Others Too

New Graduates

My beautiful daughter has a job in Naperville. She went to college. I read Bob Herbert today. A lot of my daughter's generation are not getting jobs.

What is coming?

Here in Mexico it looks gloomier. The obvious idea is self employment, but there is something wrong with this picture. Why are the kids not getting jobs?

One possible culprit are the robots. The problem though is that robots don't buy what they produce. Other candidate are the poorer people. They can do some jobs that used to need a college education. In that case the efficiency may go down.

What I see coming sometime in the near future is rebellion, so products of technology are shared more evenly by everybody. With the free time gained by automation everybody should keep learning; life long learning.

Abigail Won Over Atenas Cárdenas Noverón

Abigail Moyo González

She collected forty seven thousand pesos, and Atenas got forty one thousand pesos.

Abi won!

You can see the winner in:

Galeria de Fotos

My mother also got less money in collections and she lost. My uncle Obdulio Uriza Robles, told me that the mine workers gave most of the money then. The mercury mine won.

Independence Day Beauty Queen Celebration in Huitzuco

Nanche Drink from Vicario in Huitzuco

Yesterday I was in Huitzuco. My mother Emma Uriza Castro lived her younger years there. The Uriza family has lived in that town at least since 1832, when Ignacio Urizar was in the governing council.

I was invited to the High School, CBTis 175 , to give a talk. The Dark Energy of the Universe was the title. I was happy to have my niece Atenas Cárdenas Noverón, present. Atenas is beautiful, like my mother she competed to become the Beauty Queen of Huitzuco. Atenas competed in the Independence Day celebration, and my mother for Carnival. Both lost, but second place is not bad, and besides they had many supporters.

As payment I got a tasty Nanche Drink, from the Vicario family. They also make rompope, and tequila, among other drinks. I am still enjoying my Nanche liqueur. When I was a kid they made very tasty sodas.