From a nerve news item about a survey of people’s romantic honesty in Wales:
And if your East Anglian girlfriend says she loves you, there’s a twenty-nine percent chance she’s a perfidious wench.
That’s just a wonderful use of the English language.
Random quote for the day
good moment
I’m grading papers right now, and I just had a student who’s been having some trouble despite working hard completely nail a really difficult problem set. It looks like a bunch of things just clicked.
It’s a really cool feeling when that happens. There’s a sense of accomplishment to having one’s students succeed. I think it’s one of the things that keeps me teaching.
The Winter’s Tale
The photos from our little production are now up! (Unfortunately I forgot to tell Albert about the magic juju that triggers the autofocus, so only about half of them turned out right)
Doing this was very neat, and thanks to everyone who participated or watched. And Ted, your cell phone seems to have gone off during the play – when I got home I had three answering-machine messages-full of the paranoid ramblings of a mad Sicilian king.
Come to think of it, that may be something entirely unrelated to the play; I get those sometimes.
Ill-chosen book titles
Our math library has a new book in stock: “Monte Carlo methods in finance.”
I’m just going to assume that this book is about numerical simulations, and not about taking the company till and running off to play blackjack…
Extremely neat
OK, this is cool. I just got a digital camera (a Sharp VE-CG30U, for those who know more about this than I) and it is very nifty. Sample picture here, after downsampling it 50% on my computer for ease of posting. Shot was taken at a range of about 4″, to test out the “macro focus” feature.
Neat thing: It has five modes, ranging from fully automatic (point-and-click) to fully manual. (Set shutter speed, gamma correction, light balance, etc…) There’s something about that that just suggests a really intelligent design decision.
Woohoo! New toy!!
Follow-up to yesterday…
Well, it looks like the attack threatened yesterday happened – but mercifully didn’t go off as planned. Details here. The big one wasn’t the car bomb at the hotel, but notice a couple of other things:
- Two Stinger missiles (shoulder-mounted heat-seekers) were fired at a B757 as it was taking off from Mombasa airport. This would have been the first successful destruction of a passenger aircraft, not from aboard the craft but from the ground.
- There are also rumors (debka, so take with some grain of salt) that aircraft strafed the hotel building in Kenya which was bombed.
- There were four major, synchronized attacks: The aircraft strike, the Kenya bombing, the attack at the polling place in Israel, and a nearby major car bomb. (Which failed to detonate) Multiple widely separated, synchronized attacks are a classic al Qaeda calling card. (cf. Sept. 11, or the embassy bombings a few years ago)
So yes, sometimes it pays to be paranoid. One interesting point of analysis from debka: “The Mombasa attacks like the Bali bombing targeted exotic tourist spots frequented by Western vacationers – focusing on Australians in the first and Israelis in the second. “
Photos
Well, I got back the pictures from Israel, and disappointingly few of them turned out well. Time to get a digital camera.
I stuck up some of the best here. Most of these are probably not of general interest, but some of you may like the last two.
The inscription is from the dig site I was visiting. This photo was taken on top of one of the (still-being-excavated) walls of the city from the Jebussite stratum (ca. 2000-1300BC). The inscription is a bit faint in the picture (it’s the scratched lines in the stone) but it reads “Nahum” (a man’s name) in the Hebrew script of that period. From its language one can infer that it was written after the Jewish conquest of the city, so it’s probably ca. 1300.
The other picture was taken from a hillside in Jerusalem. (For purposes of orientation: This is on a hillside adjacent to the Old City. Relative to the center of this picture, the Wall is at 4 o’clock, and the al-Aqsa mosque is at 5 o’clock. The hill itself is part of Jerusalem. The hill on the left of this picture is actually a Palestinian village; the hill on the right is part of Jerusalem; and the valley between the two is Gehennom, the valley of Hinnom, which several thousand years ago was used as the city dump, and was a place to throw the bodies of people you really didn’t like. Thus going to Gehennom when you died was considered a generally bad thing.
For further orientation: The Jebusite wall (v.s.) is at 9 o’clock to me in this picture, and about fifty meters straight down. Did I mention that all archaeology in this city is urban archaeology, and goes right through buildings? Almost all of the city is about as dense as the hill on the left in this picture.
News information
Update: Since people wanted to link to the previous post, which was friends-only, I decided to move the more unofficial stuff to a separate post and secure that. Basically, this is stuff gleaned from a lot of reading through foreign press and so on; there seems to be some decent reason not to yet publicly discuss all of it, so I’m talking about it here and not in the general-public post.
Random post for those of you interested in politics, a summary of key things from non-US media and various “unofficial sources:”
There has been a major al Qaeda regrouping, probably including all senior people (bin Laden and al-Zawahiri included), in the deserts in the southwest of Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Those two governments have nominal sovereignty over those regions, but realistically those areas are the domain of certain Bedouin tribes who have familial alliances to the organization.
US forces based out of Djibouti (apparently some hybrid of CIA and Army special forces; details are, of course, very hush-hush) are hunting for people and occcasionally acting. The carful of al Qaeda operatives that got hit by a Predator drone a few weeks ago was part of their work; bet money that they’re actively hunting for some of the big fish, and are hoping to pull of a coup by gibbing one or two of them in some dramatic and public fashion.
The unofficial funding game is a bit more interesting. There’s a succession fight going on in Saudi Arabia between the families of Prince Sultan (the current defense minster) and Crown Prince Abdullah. Prince Naif, the interior minister and a relative of Sultan’s, has apparently been funneling a great deal of cash into al Qaeda, and is probably providing the unnoficial cover for their setup in the desert. Also, Prince Bandar bin Sultan (Prince Sultan’s son) just bought a 25% stake in the al-Jazeera media network – this is part of more of this rather complicated plot. More Machiavellian scheming on this front detailed here.
So there’s a very complicated Saudi involvement in this, a major refortification of al Qaeda, and secret operations going on on both sides.
Random news items
Update: Since people are linking to this post, I’m moving the friends-only part (the part that really shouldn’t be discussed in public yet) to a separate post. The “this just in” part is probably of sufficient public interest that it should be transmitted broadly; there’s a potential for trouble today, but several factors (including those described in the locked post) may mean that there are surprises in store for both sides today. For those of you not on the locked list, this is the end of a post on various political developments of the past few weeks.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 
