Soapbox

A wacko sect called the Raëlians claimed it has successfully cloned a human being. When I was an undergraduate in Paris, I saw some posters of the then nascent sect, with such fascinating captions as “Raël – the stars’ messenger” and such amazing feats of circular reasoning as “If Raël is not a major prophet, the equal of Christ, Muhammad or Buddha, his revelation is false. That is impossible.” Poking fun at them used to provide us with hours of entertainment in our dorm (granted, we were easily amused).

This isn’t amusing any more. While these people are not homicidal maniacs like the Aum Shinrikyo sect (which launched Sarin nerve gas attacks against the Tokyo subway), they must be stopped, and a comprehensive, global ban on reproductive cloning instated by the United Nations.

I moved in August 2001. My entry in the white pages still points to my old address, both in the paper and online version. When I called Pac Bell’s customer service, it took 3 transfers and 45 minutes for them just to figure out what happened.

Apparently, it takes two or three billing cycles before the change of address percolates to the white pages database, and the online database is a mirror of the paper directory, i.e. updated only once a year in November.

In France, France Telecom guarantees three days between a change of address and its update in the online directory service. Apparently, in California, even 15 months is too much to ask for.

This leads to an average time of 9.7 months before updates (the seasonality of moves from US Bureau of the Census report SIPP P70-66 does not change this figure much). About 15.9% of the US population moves each year (source: Census report P20-531), and thus we can expect about 13% the addresses in the phone book to be incorrect.

Conclusion 1: batch processing is bad. Just say No.

Conclusion 2: don’t expect big, fat, happy, dumb and technologically challenged Baby Bells to lead the way into the broadband future…

Update (2002-12-19):

I learned yesterday that over half of California households have unlisted numbers. That figures…

Hypothetically, what would you say if you learned Bavaria proudly flew the nazi swastika over its capitol? And if they asserted the nazis were misunderstood, that World War II was fought for European unification, not racial supremacy and genocide?

Your reaction would be outrage, obviously.

Nazi flags do not fly over Munich because, after the war, Germans had to confront the sheer horror of what they had done and atone for it (unlike many Austrians who eluded this soul-searching with the convenient fiction that nazism was imposed militarily by Germany onto Austria). And the Germans do not fly nazi flags in their World War II military cemetaries either.

To this day the state flags of Mississippi and Georgia contain the “southern cross”, the battle flag of the Confederacy. And that flag still flies in a place of honor in the South Carolina capitol. Southern revisionists try and claim the Confederacy was about states’ rights, and that the Union was less than pure in its motives.

While it is certain the Union was less than ideal (the abolition of slavery was belated, and driven more by foreign policy than moral considerations), it is also equally clear the Confederacy’s motives were unambiguously evil. Unfortunately, the short-lived Reconstruction never forced the southerners to confront the true nature of slavery, which is why neo-confederates can deny slavery had anything to do with their cherished Confederacy, the same way too many Austrians unapologetically vote for Jörg Haider.

Recently, campaign billboards have been flowering here about the issue of homelessness. A look at the website www.wewantchange.com shows it is run by a Hotel industry group, and leans heavily towards harsh Giuliani-style enforcement. One statistic is arresting, however: 100 homeless people died in San Francisco last year, compared to 6 in Chicago. San Francisco’s weather is mild all year round, quite unlike Chicago’s freezing winters and stifling summers, and you would expect the opposite.

San Francisco has famously dysfunctional local politics. Thirteen years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, politicians were still squabbling about how to ensure the seismic safety of the Bay Bridge.

In this case, the posturing and special-interest pandering of the Mayor and Supervisors is leading to avoidable loss of life.

National Geographic aired a special today on Fox, mixing interesting prerecorded footage on how the logistics of building the pyramids were handled (by skilled workers augmented by seasonal labor, well fed and treated, not slaves). What mars this show are the two “live” publicity stunts, opening a 4500-year sarcophagus and drilling a hole through an obstruction in a narrow shaft leading from the Queen’s Chamber.

I had a feeling of déjà vu: I remember seeing a documentary on TV about a German engineer who designed a robot, “Upuaut” to explore that same shaft. I only caught the National Geographic special halfway through, but there did not seem to be any credit given to the truly original work done by the Upuaut project. There are other unpleasant aspects to this show, such as the frequent name-dropping with the two featured archeologists, and the on-screen histrionics of one of them, an Egyptian who is also his government’s chief official archeologist (not to mention the conflicts of interest between his official position and the one he holds with National Geographic).

Even the presenter’s pompous final words rankle: “We still stand on sacred ground, home to the world’s first great civilization”, as if that distinction did not in fact belong to Uruk and Susa, in ancient Sumer and Elam in Mesopotamia (modern-day Irak and Iran).

A quick search on Google found an interesting page on this subject. All in all, this is a rather unpleasant spectacle of self-aggrandizement and boosterism, and I am rather disappointed by National Geographic’s unseemly behavior.

I do not agree with most of the latter website’s flights of fancy. Napoléon Bonaparte started Egyptomania with his 1798 expedition to Egypt, and ever since, all sorts of pseudo-mystical fantasies have grown around the supposed cosmic significance of the pyramids. Indeed, one can read Martin Gardner’s excellent book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science to see how Jehovah’s Witnesses were originally an apocalyptic sect who thought the shape of the great pyramid’s main shaft predicted history and the coming end of the world. When the apocalypse failed to occur, twice, they moved on to slightly more mainstream beliefs…

On a lighter tone:

• A hilarious cartoon on User-Friendly.
• Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids, set in the Discworld but with thinly veiled references to Egypt.
• P.J. O’Rourke’s great article on Egypt in The Atlantic