Out for six weeks

Well, I’m out of here for the next six weeks or so. Posting will be very much light to variable. I’ll try to catch up via internet cafes.

The sirens of Titan

I guess we all read Kurt Vonnegut’s 1959 novel when we were young. I have clearer memories of Slaughterhouse-5 and Mother Night.

But this is the real thing, the actual surface of Titan, filmed by the Huygens probe’s cameras over a year ago.

Clip commentary:

This movie was built with data collected during the 147-minute plunge through Titan’s thick orange-brown atmosphere to a soft sandy riverbed by the European Space Agency’s Huygens Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer on Jan. 14, 2005,

In 4 minutes and 40 seconds, the movie shows what the probe “saw” within the few hours of the descent and the landing. On approach, Titan appeared as just a little disk in the sky among the stars, but after landing, the probe’s camera resolved little grains of sand millions of times smaller than Titan.

At first, the Huygens camera just saw fog over the distant surface. The fog started to clear only at about 60 kilometers (37 miles) altitude, making it possible to resolve surface features as large as 100 meters (328 feet). Only after landing could the probe’s camera resolve the little grains of sand. The movie provides a glimpse of such a huge change of scale.

Us from 1.5 billion km

Shaun at LP got there first with a better pic, but here is another image of the Earth as seen from Saturn, photographed by the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft from a distance of 1.5 billion kilometers.

More astonishing, breath-taking images here.

There’s something truly awesome about these pictures from space. In a weird way they make your blood race. A favourite.

Word of the day

Yclept.

Not much hope for Darfur, then

Whatever it is, according to the government in Khartoum, it’s all the fault of — guess who? — the Jews and the Israelis.

(It occurs to me I’m getting a little shrill on this subject.)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new project

Expelled or exiled — perhaps “exhaled” would be a better word — Netherlands politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a new project.

Slender, elegant, stylish and articulate [*] (in English, Dutch and Swahili), she has found an intellectual home here at theAmerican Enterprise Institute, where she is writing a book that imagines Muhammad meeting, in the New York Public Library, three thinkers — John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, each a hero of the unending struggle between (to take the title of Popper’s 1945 masterpiece) “The Open Society and Its Enemies.” Islamic extremists — the sort who were unhinged by some Danish cartoons — will be enraged. She is unperturbed.

Rafe Champion will be intrigued.

[*Why do they have to keep saying that? I mean, I know she is and all, but....  Is it a boy thing?]

(Via Peaktalk.)

Man marries goat

In February this year, in the Sudan, a man named Tombe was compelled to marry his neighbour’s goat, because…..

Well, read it for yourself.

You have to wonder if they’re still together.

Update: Via bonjour triteness in comments at Tim Blair’s — food for thought.

The non-killing of Mohammed al-Durah, Palestine 2000

In September 2000, shortly after the 2nd intifada exploded in the ocupied territories of Palestine, France2 television broadcast footage of a seminal event: the killing in the Gaza Strip of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Mohammed al-Durah. Pinned down behind a barrel by withering Israeli fire for 40 minutes, protected by the sheltering arms of his desperate father, he was finally slain by Israeli bullets.

The images were shown around the world, to outpourings of horror. The incident became both the symbol and inspiration of the renewed Palestinian resistance to the occupation, and provided much of the emotional fuel for five more years of intifada.

Yet it never happened. It was faked. It was staged for the cameras.

This may seem like an old story. But in the recent weeks, the matter has come before the courts in France, where France2 has launched a series of defamation suits against bloggers who have challenged its coverage of the alleged al-Durah killings. As of three days ago, things were going badly for France2.

A public prosecutor here asked the judges to drop the charges against Karsenty, acknowledging that he had defamed Chabot and Enderlin, but declaring that the accusations against them were based on serious and impartial investigations and offered “relatively convincing proof” of fraud.

Judgement is expected sometime in October.

All the details are at Augean Stables.

Update: Lest anyone doubts the impact of the al-Durah “slaying” on the course of the intifada and its reverberations through the Middle East generally, Richard Landes of Augean Stables — one of the defendants in the current case in France — lays them out cogently here.

Update 2: Richard Landes writes in comments that he is a witness in the case, not a defendant. Sorry, Richard, my mistake.

An interview with Theodore Dalrymple

Many people don’t, but I have a lot of time for British commentator Theodore Dalrymple. He seems to have the knack of putting his finger right on it. Recently he was interviewed by Paul Belien of The Brussels Journal, and the conversation is well worth a read.

He discusses, among other things, the implicit dignity of work (what is he, an old-fashioned socialist?), the relative cultural malaise of Britain, Europe and the United States, and the social pathology occasioned by a loss of identification with an entity or concept that is larger than the individual’s necessarily minute ego.

Folk music revival, 1960’s

Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick perform the British mining song Byker Hill. Enjoy.