November 2007 Archives

Geoff Pullum comments on a story about a woman arrested for blasphemy in Sudan, the whole story being frankly ridiculous. An excellent summation.

See also responses from a fellow language log poster, and a student of his. The whole thing just beggars belief.

This is an interesting example of Chinese calligraphy, the character for horse drawn in such a way that it looks like, well, a horse. This is from Alice's Adventures in China, where the Islamic influence is noted (this is a pot of halál noodles).

Check it out. I have no idea what this video is from or what part in the storyline of the movie it plays, but it is the best tractor-themed scene in a film I have ever seen.

Something new happened to me today. Some dude walked up to me and offered to sell me drugs. Grass, specifically. Right out of the blue.

Now that I think about it, it's a wonder that in my almost three years in Edinburgh it hasn't already happened. (However, it only took about four months of me living here before someone approached me to ask for drugs. I must look shifty.) I've been offered drugs before, at parties for example, but in a friendly way, rather than as part of a business transaction.

The guy was obviously trying to get rid of the stuff - drug dealers don't generally approach people unsolicited - and to be honest when he came up to me at first I thought he was going to ask for some spare change. In my first year here something similar happened to my flatmate - we lived on the ground floor, and he was cooking with the window open, and some fellow leaned through and asked if he wanted any weed. Again, probably a guy in a similar situation, trying to get rid of his stock for whatever reason.

I'd like to know how many drug dealers in Edinburgh are actually addicts themselves - and also, how many homeless people in Edinburgh are addicts. As much as I hate to sound preachy, drug abuse really tears society apart. I'll admit to complete ignorance about drug culture, and part of me wishes I'd stopped and asked him how much it was, rather than just mumbling "no thank you" and walking on. But do I really want to know?

As a Baha'i, I don't partake of drugs or alcohol. "It is inadmissible that man, who hath been endowed with reason," said Baha'u'llah, "should consume that which stealeth it away." (Kitab-i-Aqdas, p62 K119.) This prohibition applies to "any substance that induceth sluggishness and torpor" (Kitab-i-Aqdas, p75 K155), and as such includes most "recreational" drugs and hallucinogens. In the time of Baha'u'llah, one of the most commonly-used drugs was opium. Abdu'l-Baha says the following about opium:

As to opium, it is foul and accursed. God protect us from the punishment He inflicteth on the user. According to the explicit Text of the Most Holy Book, it is forbidden, and its use is utterly condemned. Reason showeth that smoking opium is a kind of insanity, and experience attesteth that the user is completely cut off from the human kingdom. May God protect all against the perpetration of an act so hideous as this, an act which layeth in ruins the very foundation of what it is to be human, and which causeth the user to be dispossessed for ever and ever. For opium fasteneth on the soul, so that the user's conscience dieth, his mind is blotted away, his perceptions are eroded. It turneth the living into the dead. It quencheth the natural heat. No greater harm can be conceived than that which opium inflicteth. Fortunate are they who never even speak the name of it; then think how wretched is the user.

Strong words! (The source: Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, §129; it is from the Tablet on Purity and as such is reprinted in other publications.) In the same text, he later says:

Experience hath shown how greatly the renouncing of smoking, of intoxicating drink, and of opium, conduceth to health and vigour, to the expansion and keenness of the mind and to bodily strength.

The Baha'i objection to drink and drugs isn't purely a spiritual issue, it's physical - it's about your health! And perhaps more importantly, the health of society. The majority of incidences of domestic abuse in Scotland were committed under the influence of alcohol, for instance.

But it isn't just the Baha'i Faith that holds this view. In Islam and Christianity (the two religions after the Baha'i Faith that I know most about), there are similarly harsh words against the use of intoxicants:

They ask thee concerning wine and gambling. Say: "In them is great sin, and some profit, for men; but the sin is greater than the profit."
Qur'án 2:219

O ye who believe! intoxicants [...] are an abomination, of Satan's handiwork: eschew such (abomination), that ye may prosper.
Qur'án 5:90

Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also
Habakkuk 2:15

And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit
Ephesians 5:18

The translations used are Yusuf Ali and the King James, respectively. The bible quotes are a little more opaque, however there is some good explanation at this Christian website.

This condemnatory attiude, however, in no way implies that Baha'is think less of or try to stop people from using drugs. Indeed, Shoghi Effendi clarifies that drug use is permitted "under the advice of a competent and conscientious physician, who may have to prescribe it for the cure of some special ailment" (Kitab-i-Aqdas, p226-7 N144). Imposing one's views on another is fundamentally opposed to the Baha'i spirit of dealing with one another in "fellowship and unity". A Baha'i who takes the stance of moral superiority over someone who has the occassional glass of wine isn't really a Baha'i at all.

Today seems a good day for excellent posts from Baha'i bloggers, young and old alike. Here are three of them:

• Childhood Diabetes and Race from Bahá'í Thought and Black America
• From growth to resilience: is this the world’s future? from Barnabus quotidianus
• Investigation of truth from Alice's Adventures in China, a relative newcomer to the Baha'i blogging scene.

Seeing posts like this make me wish I had more time to write. Roll on the holidays!

I was about to post this yesterday, but my flat was struck by a power cut, and so I lost it. That'll teach me to save my work!

My friend Nura sent me this link to an article from the International Herald Tribune, about a report from Human Rights Watch and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights about state interference in religious freedom in Egypt.

The article is good, although a nitpick I have is that it uses the outdated term "Bahaism", which is considered incorrect in modern use. But I'm splitting hairs. An interesting point is raised towards the end of the article, where it states that "the government policy has no basis in neither Egyptian nor Islamic law". This policy (and indeed the controversy as a whole) is about stating one's religion in official government documents like ID cards. I think it's worthy of note that in neighbouring Sudan, also an Islamic country, stating your religion is not a requirement on ID cards - it's seen as a personal issue that the state has no business interfering in.

The excellent Baha'i Faith in Egypt blog has a great post about this, and in the comments some helpful people have made lists of news reports like the one above. The world is watching, Egypt.

As much as the neo-conservative politics and "justified" use of torture annoy me, I do enjoy the TV series 24. Check out a spoof video of 24 as it would have been in 1994, back in the golden age of computing.

Link found via my mate Sam, via Coolest Gadgets.

There's an interesting article over at Linguistic Mystic, about creating new writing systems in order to conceal the meaning of what you're writing. This is something I've actually done from time to time, not necessarily to hide something I'm writing, but just as a linguistic game. It's also something that I think would be good to use in real cryptographic methods (although it would need some refinement).

Go and read the article, if you haven't already. Or skim it. In brief, you create a writing system (alphabet or whatever) or use an existing writing system, and write out the sounds of English (or whatever language you're writing in), rather than the letters. The advantage of writing out the sounds rather than the spelling is that it makes it more complex than a simple letter-substitution, and thus harder to decode. The article assumes that you'll be handwriting this stuff, which is how using an invented writing system is possible, and also gets around neatly the problem of computers doing statistical analysis on letter frequencies and so on.

Unfortunately, for practical application of this into a real encryption algorithm, there are a couple of hurdles to get over. First is the problem of phonemic transcription - we need to be able to take a word, break it into its phonemic form (the sounds), and then build it up again. While a human can do this okay most of the time, it's laborious. A machine can do it, but it there are two problems - some words are spelled the same but pronounced differently (I can read vs He read the book), and some words are pronounced the same but spelt differently (to, too, two). The scond hurdle is the problem that phonemic transcription is still open to frequency analysis - in fact, by some accounts, it makes it even easier.

Using this system, however, as a basic encryption method, before putting the text under more conventional algorithms, I feel would add an extra layer of security. Imagine someone trying to decrypt an email they've intercepted, and after finally decoding it, to discover that it's in Armenian! At least, it just looks like it's in Armenian - most people don't know any better. While the dedicated spy would seek out someone knowledgable of Armenian, who would inform them that it's just weird English, this would take time, and that's really what cryptography is - delaying the transfer of sensitive information. Here's some English in an Armenian system (I realise not everyone has Armenian language support on their computer (the fools!), so I've included an image below of what it should look like, in a slightly larger font):

Աի հօպ իտ ւարկս

However, this highlights another problem - that often there isn't a complete matching between English sounds and that of another language. For example, Armenian as it stands cannot handle English "th" sounds. What I wrote above was meant to be "I hope it works", but it might as well have been "I hope eet warks". Which looks a little like Dutch.

This is definitely an interesting area, and something I think has potential. It's especially useful as outlined in the original article, for use in a personal diary or journal. Your recipes will be safe! For the time being.

This blog post from the Hermenautic Circle discusses the re-publishing of Tintin in the Congo, an early Hergé comic that features stereotyped and frankly racist depictions of the Congoese and of Africans in general.

The question, the article raises, isn't so much about the book, but about whether the existence of this book affects one's enjoyment and appreciation of Hergé's other works.

This is a question asked in this BBC News Magazine article, which discusses Brian Daveys. Daveys was a respected music teacher and textbook writer, and also a paedophile. The article also mentions Eric Gill, famous sculptor and typographer, who after his death it was discovered that he regularly had sex with his daughters, his sister, and his dog.

Do the views or actions of these people degrade their creations? Do they change them? This question has further implications, for example do Chomsky's political leanings affect his linguistic theories?

Where this is concerned with intellectual pursuits it's generally easier to determine things. If someone believes that black people are racially inferior to white people, then we can feel justified in our rejection of their treatise on human diversity. If someone is a notorious career criminal, we can take their writings on moral philosophy with a pinch of salt.¹

But with art it's different. What about the racist's symphony? Is it also inherently racist? Or the criminal's paintings?

I propose what is perhaps an obvious answer. It only really matters if it's something directly related. So, for example, for Daveys to write a music textbook while being a paedophile is fine. It's not as if he's writing a children's story, or guidelines on how to run a creche. Gill blurs the boundaries a little. While I would suggest that the majority of his work, especially his typefaces, are essentially unaffected by his paraphilia, it would be naïve of me to claim that his nude sketches of his daughter are unsullied by his background.

This question goes deeper. How much does one's private life impact upon one's public life? I think an important example is the Monica Lewinsky affair - where President Bill Clinton was found to be having an extramarital affair. There was a media uproar, which lead to Bill lying to congress, which lead to his being impeached. Arguably, if the US media cared less about his private life, none of that would have happened. Did his lack of integrity as a husband affect his integrity as a world leader? Does it matter?

I'm good at asking questions. I'm not so good at answering them.

¹ That doesn't mean we should dismiss it out of hand, of course.

Right, time for some links that have been floating around my browser history.

• The Onion - Fifth-Grade Science Paper Doesn't Stand Up To Peer Review.
• Living Dead Dolls pencil sharpener.
• Jack-o-Lanterns, via Communications from Elsewhere.
• "Murder with Impunity", via The Muslim Network for Baha'i Rights.
• Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues, via Whoopdedoo.
• Cows versus alien invaders.
• If We Had No Moon.

Enjoy!