Today's science fiction quote, from Isaac Asimov. This is what being a writer is like:

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
LIFE magazine (January 1984)

Barry Gehm's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law, "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." (From Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact Magazine, 1991)

Today's quotes from a science fiction author, Arthur C. Clarke:

Clarke's Three Laws

Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

"Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination" in Profiles of the Future (1962)

Clarke's Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

"Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination" in Profiles of the Future (1962)

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Profiles of the Future (revised edition, 1973)

Interesting news:

JERUSALEM (AP) - A confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Monday that his government would support a division of Jerusalem, which is reportedly a key component of an Israeli-Palestinian declaration to be made at a U.S.-sponsored Mideast peace conference next month.

As part of recent negotiations between the sides, Deputy Vice Prime Minister Haim Ramon has proposed turning over many of the Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem to the Palestinians. Ramon said the Palestinians could establish the capital of a future state in the sector of the city, which Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war.

In return, Israel would receive the recognition of the international community, including Arab states, of its sovereignty over Jewish neighborhoods and the existence of its capital there, Ramon said.

On Monday Ramon said even hawkish elements of Olmert's coalition, like Cabinet Minister Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu Party, would back such an Israeli concession. The centrist Labor Party would also support the proposal, Ramon said.

"There are two central parties that agree to this," Ramon told Army Radio. "The most important thing is to preserve the state of Israel Jewish and democratic."

Under his proposal, neighborhoods in east Jerusalem where about 170,000 Palestinians live would be transferred to Palestinian sovereignty, Ramon said.

Prediction: the Palestinians and Arabs will respond to this proposal by lobbing more mortars at Israelis, together with stepped up attempts at suicide bombing. They are unlikely to accept the proposal. Instead, they will complain about what Israel isn't offering them, accuse them of playing games and not being serious, along with offering lists of the other faults of the Israeli government and how that once again Israel is guilty of not being serious about peace.

If they do accept it, the Palestinians will simply move in mortars and other weapons and use the newly acquired territory for more attacks against the Jews. Any Israeli response will be greeted by more accusations of their warmongering and oppression.

Science fiction/fantasy author quote of the day, from Neil Gaiman, author of Neverwhere and American Gods:

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

from an essay at neilgaiman.com.

The daily mortar attacks from Gaza into Israel rarely make the news. You might not have heard about today's attack:

Two Palestinian armed groups said Sunday they launched four homemade rockets from northern Gaza Strip at the southern Israeli town of Sderout early in the day.

The armed wings of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Fatah movement led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas claimed their responsibility for the attack in leaflets.

The two groups also told media that they attacked the Israeli- Egyptian crossing by eight mortar shells.

Oddly enough, besides being reported in the Jerusalem Post, as one might expect, the above quote came from People's Daily, which comes out of China.

I am still trying to figure out why Israel is always painted as a bad guy. But of course criticism of Israeli policies could never, ever be a consequence of anti-Semitism. Surely the constant drumbeat of negative statements against Israel by those on the far left and far right, in the universities and elsewhere is nothing but legitimate criticism of the Israeli government's current policies. Odd, how both Hamas and Fatah, despite their differences, seem united in their commitment to attacking Israel.

I'm just curious as to what the Palestinians have ever done to promote peace. Perhaps their constant preaching in mosques, newspapers, school text books, magazines, radio shows, and television shows of Nazi-style anti-Semitism are designed to encourage peace with Israel?

Of course if the Israelis respond to this attack in any way, the critics of Israel will be quick to argue that it is Israel, and Israel alone, that is guilty of putting roadblocks in the way to peace. After all, if it weren't for how awful Israel is to the Palestinians, none of this would be happening (which reminds me of what neanderthals have to say about rape victims, but I'm sure I'm just being viscious). I'm sure it would be rude on my part to suggest that those critics of Israeli policy who seem always silent about daily mortar attacks and anti-Semitic preaching might be oh, just a wee bit anti-Semitic themselves in their one sided condemnations of the only liberal democratic nation in the Middle East.

An etymology lesson from a philologist:



I don't recall my English professors ever looking like this. My wife discovered Marina's video lessons and made me watch some of them. If all English teachers looked like this, there would be no child left behind--at least if that child was male. Just visit YouTube and do a search under "hotforwords."

From an interview with newspaper editor Flemming Rose, Revisiting the Danish Cartoon Crisis

But what really bothers me today—and this hasn't been reported very widely—is that right after the cartoon crisis, the Organization of the Islamic Conference at the United Nations sponsored a resolution condemning the "ridiculing of religion." It didn't pass, but in March of this year the United Nations Human Rights Consul, which is the highest international body in the world for the protection of human rights, passed a resolution condoning state punishment of people criticizing religion. I think this is a big scandal. This was a direct result of the "cartoon crisis." Fortunately the European Union voted against it. But countries like Russia, Mexico and China supported the resolution. And in this resolution, they call on governments to pass laws or write provisions into their constitutions forbidding criticism of religion. This would give a free hand to authoritarian regimes around the world to clamp down on dissidents.

The whole interview is worth reading.

Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein quotes for the day:

Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.

and

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck."

Both of these are from his 1973 novel, Time Enough for Love. One can read a bunch more of his quotes at Wikiquote.

Japan orbited the moon today:

Japan's Kaguya probe slid into lunar orbit late Wednesday after a circuitous 20-day trek from Earth to begin more than a dozen science investigations designed to gain insights about the moon's history.

Email today from Barnes and Noble letting me know they have corrected the spelling of my name on their website for my book, The Bible's Most Fascinating People. I checked, and the spelling correction has already appeared, though they still show Penguin Group, USA as the publisher rather than Reader's Digest.

Happy birthday to the Space Age. 50 years ago today Sputnik became the first artificial satellite.

Christian Book Distributors has let me know that they're fixing my name on their website for my book. Amazon fixed the problem on their site yesterday. So I'm only waiting on Barnes and Noble now.

Interesting article from the British center-left magazine, Prospect:

The question of what to do in Iraq today must be separated from the decision to topple Saddam Hussein four and a half years ago. That decision is a matter for historians. By any normal ethical standard, the coalition's current project in Iraq is a just one. Britain, America and Iraq's other allies are there as the guests of an elected government given a huge mandate by Iraqi voters under a legitimate constitution. The UN approved the coalition's role in May 2003, and the mandate has been renewed annually since then, most recently this August. Meanwhile, the other side in this war are among the worst people in global politics: Baathists, the Nazis of the middle east; Sunni fundamentalists, the chief opponents of progress in Islam's struggle with modernity; and the government of Iran. Ethically, causes do not come much clearer than this one.

Some just wars, however, are not worth fighting. There are countries that do not matter very much to the rest of the world. Rwanda is one tragic example; and its case illustrates the immorality of a completely pragmatic foreign policy. But Iraq, the world's axial country since the beginning of history and all the more important in the current era for probably possessing the world's largest reserves of oil, is no Rwanda. Nor do two or three improvised explosive devices a day, for all the personal tragedy involved in each casualty, make a Vietnam.

The great question in deciding whether to keep fighting in Iraq is not about the morality and self-interest of supporting a struggling democracy that is also one of the most important countries in the world. The question is whether the war is winnable and whether we can help the winning of it. The answer is made much easier by the fact that three and a half years after the start of the insurgency, most of the big questions in Iraq have been resolved. Moreover, they have been resolved in ways that are mostly towards the positive end of the range of outcomes imagined at the start of the project. The country is whole. It has embraced the ballot box. It has created a fair and popular constitution. It has avoided all-out civil war. It has not been taken over by Iran. It has put an end to Kurdish and marsh Arab genocide, and anti-Shia apartheid. It has rejected mass revenge against the Sunnis. As shown in the great national votes of 2005 and the noisy celebrations of the Iraq football team's success in July, Iraq survived the Saddam Hussein era with a sense of national unity; even the Kurds—whose reluctant commitment to autonomy rather than full independence is in no danger of changing—celebrated. Iraq's condition has not caused a sectarian apocalypse across the region. The country has ceased to be a threat to the world or its region. The only neighbours threatened by its status today are the leaders in Damascus, Riyadh and Tehran.

The whole article is worth reading.

Amazon has updated my name to "R.P. Nettelhorst" on my new book's listing on their website. So when you click on my name on my book's page, it now gives you a list of my other books. Potentially, that could increase sales of those books--assuming of course, that people like The Bible's Most Fascinating People.

Speaking of liking: for a couple days I noticed that it was a best seller in a narrow category of "stories" from the Bible--it got at least as high as 29 out of 100, but it has since dropped off that list and the page no longer references that list. Apparently someone had recently pre-ordered the book again and that boosted my sales figures, briefly. The Amazon sales rank is incredibly volitile. A single sale can move you way up on the list, for a little while. But as the days pass with no more sales, the number quickly declines....

I got a nice email from Amazon.com today letting me know that they will fix my name on their website within "two or three" days. So my book The Bible's Most Fascinating People will now be listed as by "R.P. Nettelhorst" instead of by "Robin Paul Nettelhorst." The nice thing about the change, besides it being my preferred byline, is that it will link my new book with my other books--which may help sales of the older books. At least I like to think it will.

As to why I prefer my byline to be "R.P. Nettelhorst," it is related to the fact that 87 per cent of the people in the United States who are named "Robin" are female. I didn't recognized this could be a problem until I started getting junk mail addressed to "Miss," including tampon samples. The first two days in a row in a new High School my Senior year, one of my teachers called out "Miss Nettelhorst" as he was doing roll call. That's when I realized I had to take action. Ever after, if my name is going to be seen by people who don't know me, I use my initials. That way they won't automatically assume I'm female.

Caroline Glick writing in the Jerusalem Post makes some interesting points regarding the recent visit of the Iranian President:

IT COULD be argued that since Ahmadinejad's central message failed to register on his Western audiences that his visit to America was a failure. The fact that no media organs felt it necessary to analyze what he was talking about could be seen as a clear sign that no one is interested in buying what he is selling. But this is a dangerous argument, for it misses a basic truth.

Ahmadinejad is not interested in convincing the US government or even the majority of Americans to convert to Islam. He is interested in convincing adherents of totalitarian Islam and potential converts to the cause that they are on the winning side. He is interested in demoralizing foes of totalitarian Islam within the Islamic world and so causing them to give up any thoughts of struggle. In this goal he is no different from any of his Sunni counterparts in Saudi Arabia, al-Qaida, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas or their sister organizations throughout the Islamic world and indeed throughout the West.

Throughout the world, Islamic ideologues are aggressively spreading their message of global domination. In mosques, on the Internet, on television, in schools, hospitals and prisons, Islamic preachers can be found propagating the cause of Islamic domination. And aside from Iran, no regime, including the Saudi regime, is immune from the pressures of the message.

Perhaps the central reason that Ahmadinejad's message, and the hundreds of thousands of voices echoing his call throughout the world, are so dangerous is because the Free World is making precious little effort to assert its own message. Indeed, rather than contend forthrightly with the challenge that men like Ahmadinejad and Osama bin Laden pose to the West, the West searches for ways to either co-opt their message by seeking out points of agreement or to show that really, the Islamic imperialists have nothing to fear from the West.

The whole article is worth reading.

October 4, 1957 will be the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Space Age. On that date, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik on top of a R-7 intercontinental balistic missile originally designed to send nuclear warheads to US targets. The R-7 was used by the Soviets to launch the first man into orbit a few years later and modified versions of that rocket continue to loft the current Soyuz Passenger Ships and Progress Cargo Ships to the International Space Station.

There is an interesting article in Newsweek about the effect of Sputnik, attempting to downplay its significance. I don't think the revisionism of the article is entirely right and it seems, especially in its conclusion, entirely too negative about the value of Sputnik's legacy and spaceflight in general.

There is an element in the intellegentsia who think that spaceflight is a waste of money. I think those with that opinion are shortsighted, without much sense of wonder or vision, and ignorant.

Biological Basis For Creativity Linked To Mental Illness

The study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology says the brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Other people's brains might shut out this same information through a process called "latent inhibition" - defined as an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition.

"This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment," says co-author and U of T psychology professor Jordan Peterson. "The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities."

Previously, scientists have associated failure to screen out stimuli with psychosis. However, Peterson and his co-researchers - lead author and psychology lecturer Shelley Carson of Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard PhD candidate Daniel Higgins - hypothesized that it might also contribute to original thinking, especially when combined with high IQ. ....

...."We are very excited by the results of these studies," says Peterson. "It appears that we have not only identified one of the biological bases of creativity but have moved towards cracking an age-old mystery: the relationship between genius, madness and the doors of perception."

This may explain a lot about writers...

Tim Rutten, writing in this morning's Los Angeles Times, does a good job pointing out the problem with allowing the President of Iran to speak at Columbia:

One of the world's truly dangerous men, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left New York a clear winner this week, and he can thank the arrogance of the American academy and most of the U.S. news media's studied indifference for his victory.

If the blood-drenched history of the century just past had taught American academics one thing, it should have been that the totalitarian impulse knows no accommodation with reason. You cannot change the totalitarian mind through dialogue or conversation, because totalitarianism -- however ingenious the superstructure of faux ideas with which it surrounds itself -- is a creature of the will and not the mind. That's a large lesson, but what should have made Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia University this week a wholly avoidable debacle was the school's knowledge of its own, very specific history.

Read the whole article.