Shakespeare Santa Cruz is putting on a fantastic production of King Lear. It’s still going for another week. Well worth the trek over the hill.
Sumer and Egypt
I recently picked up a very interesting volume of ancient Near Eastern primary texts of various sorts. It’s got a bit of everything: mortuary texts, legal documents, letters, ostraka, hymns, temple rituals, legends. There’s even an old Sumerian lullaby from about 4,000 years ago. The purpose of the book, according to its incipit, is both to provide sources relevant to the work of Old Testament scholars (that being the main category of Near East scholars when the first edition was written) and to provide enough other works to give you a feel for the context of the time.
Something I’ve been noticing while reading through this is how different the various cultures feel. The Hittites come off as warlike: not only do they have a lot of documents about war (that might be simple selection bias), but their approach to it is far more gung-ho than the others’. Not in a good way, in a “we like to kill people” sort of way. The Egyptian texts feel far more foreign than I expected: part of this is because they come so predominantly from tombs, but the culture seems to look towards a political center much more than any of the others. Even by comparison to royal texts from other lands, that country seems dominated by the overwhelming power of a single political entity. The Sumerian and Akkadian texts, on the other hand, feel almost familiar; the stories and concerns of the people feel like they wouldn’t be out of place today.
I suspect that this is because we (I?) actually have a good deal more continuity of culture with the Sumerians. The Jews started out there, and came back later in Babylonian days; their old customs and ours are pretty hard to tell apart. And despite the fact that in history class we hear far more about the ancient Egyptians, we don’t actually have much culture in common with them, and it’s not clear that anyone really does; the break between the culture of the Middle Kingdom and the culture of Greek, and later Roman, Egypt was pretty deep. Whatever their powers may have been, the Ptolemies were no Pharaohs.
There’s something very odd about reading texts from an old place, and realizing that they don’t feel foreign to you. The world suddenly feels like it has some sort of structure. But I suppose that this firm an anchoring in history may be where a lot of the Middle East’s problems come from in the modern day, too.
Bits of good news, for once
Again, not yet the big politics post. Instead, some interesting things:
Grigory Perelman declined the Fields Medal, as he has declined a host of other honors and awards in the past, for his proof of Thurston’s Geometrization Conjecture. This conjecture basically states that there are eight basic pieces, and some simple surgery rules, out of which all possible three-dimensional compact surfaces can be built, and therefore we can classify all 3D compact surfaces. A compact surface is roughly speaking one that fits into a finite region; for example, in two dimensions, the surface of a sphere is compact, as is the surface of a donut, but a flat plane isn’t. Proving Thurston’s Conjecture also proves the Poincaré Conjecture, which roughly states that the only 3D compact surface that has no holes in it that you could wrap a string around (like you could wrap a string around the inner hole of the surface of a donut, and it couldn’t shrink because it would get “caught”) is a 3-dimensional sphere. It’s a major problem in mathematics that has been open for over a century, and Thurston’s conjecture is a regular tool of various fields of physics and applied math.
And perhaps even more excitingly, a smoking gun for the existence of Dark Matter has been found. A team pointed the Chandra X-ray observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and various other telescopes at a place where two clusters of galaxies had collided and gone through each other. They could clearly see that the “luminous” part of the galaxies had gone past one another and were well-separated, but 90% of the mass — as visible by its gravitational effects on light — was somehow still in the middle, and completely transparent. Apparently, the luminous matter had kept on going, but there was so much dark matter that the two big lumps from each galaxy cluster had rammed into each other and come to a stop. This confirms the existence of what’s technically known as non-baryonic cold dark matter. “Dark” means that it isn’t luminous or visible to the eye; “cold” means that it isn’t a gas of photons or neutrinos, since those disperse much more quickly; “non-baryonic” means that it isn’t made of any ordinary kind of matter, and we know that because of how transparent it is relative to its mass. (In fact, its transparency tells us that whatever it is doesn’t interact electromagnetically very much, or perhaps at all.) Previous investigations have suggested that the universe is about 70% dark energy (which is not visible to the eye, but unlike dark matter, doesn’t form clumps or shapes; it’s just uniformly spread out), 27% dark matter, and 3% luminous matter; this experiment confirms the dark matter / luminous matter ratio, and all previous hypotheses about the dark matter, very beautifully.
Now, the next question is just what it is made of…
Subtle up of the ante:
Speaking about Iraq, our president said: “We’re not leaving so long as I’m president.”
While I suppose we’ve all known this for a while — given the unholy mess we’re stuck in, there’s really no way we’re going to get out of there for many years to come — it’s interesting to see him completely give up on pretending that we’re going to win the war Real Soon Now.
(Coming soon: A real write-up about the recent war with Hezbollah and what was going on behind the scenes. The short answer is “a hell of a lot.”)
Edit: Will wonders never cease. Take a look at the transcript of another press conference, and search for the word “weapons of mass destruction.” You will see our president openly and publicly admitting that the entire WMD rationale was wrong, and that Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. Thanks to for the link.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 