Mr. Megrahi was released for the right reasons. The Scottish justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, freed Mr. Megrahi, who is dying of cancer, on compassionate grounds. Mr. MacAskill’s courageous decision demonstrates to the world that both justice and compassion can be achieved by people of good will. Despite the uproar over the release, others agree. A recent survey of Scottish lawyers showed that a majority of those surveyed agreed with the secretary’s decision.

It’s worth pointing out that we Libyans are far from the only ones who believe that Mr. Megrahi is innocent of this terrible crime. In June 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission determined that a “miscarriage of justice” may have occurred and referred the case to the High Court. A retired Scottish police officer who worked on the case has signed a statement saying that evidence was fabricated. The credibility of a key witness, a shopkeeper in Malta, has subsequently been disputed by the Scottish judge who presided in the review. Even the spokesman of a family group of Lockerbie victims has said that the group was not satisfied that the verdict in the Megrahi case was correct.

However, Stratfor lays out the case against Megrahi here (h/t Seraphic Secret):

Investigators were also able to trace the clothing inside the suitcase containing the IED to a specific shop, Mary’s House, in Sliema, Malta. While examining one of the pieces of Maltese clothing in May 1989, investigators found a fragment of a circuit board that did not match anything found in the Toshiba radio. It is important to remember that in a bombing, the pieces of the IED do not entirely disappear. They may be shattered and scattered, but they are not usually completely vaporized. Although some pieces may be damaged beyond recognition, others are not, and this often allows investigators to reconstruct the device

In mid-1990, after an exhaustive effort to identify the circuit-board fragment, the FBI laboratory in Washington was able to determine that the circuit board was very similar to one that came from a timer that a special agent with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service had recovered from an arms cache while investigating a Libyan-sponsored coup attempt in Lome, Togo, in 1986. Further investigation determined that the company that produced the timers, the Swiss company MEBO, had sold as many as 20 of the devices to the Libyan government, and that the Libyan government was the company’s primary customer. Interestingly, in 1988, MEBO rented one of its offices in Zurich to a firm called ABH, which was run by two Libyan intelligence officers: Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Badri Hassan.

The MEBO timer, model MST-13, is very different from the ice-cube timer in the PFLP-GC device found in Frankfurt in October 1988. Additionally, the ice-cube timer in the PFLP-GC device was used in conjunction with a barometric pressure switch, and the IED used a different main charge, TNT, instead of the Semtex used in the Pan Am 103 device.

Nor was flight 103 the only flight about which that Libya admitted guilt. The younger Qaddafi doesn’t address that in his op-ed. Furthermore it appears that rumors of Megrahi’s impending death may have been exaggerated. (via Israel Matzav via Seraphic Secret)

Both parties now want the doctor identified in order to determine whether the government allowed itself to get hoodwinked by the Libyans. The alternative theory would be that the government wanted to construct a good cover story for Megrahi’s release for other reasons — for instance, oil deals, as Moammar Gaddafi hinted and his son flat-out claimed.

The government thus far has refused to identify the doctor and says speculation on the length of Megrahi’s life is “tasteless.” But that was the basis of Scotland’s decision to release a mass murderer after serving only 11.57 days for every life he took. The Scottish government made the calculation of Megrahi’s life expectancy into public policy, and it’s completely dishonest to now claim modesty and etiquette when challenged on it.

Of course, we’ll know by January if Megrahi really is that sick. If he’s still breathing when the 21st anniversary of the bombing rolls around on December 21, we’ll have a pretty good sense that the deal to get him released was political with “compassion” the cover for an action that was anything but.

Is the younger Qaddafi sincere? Erratic seems like a good description of the younger Qaddafi’s pronouncements.

Esquire last year listed him as one of the most influential people of the 21st century.

The second-oldest son of “Brother Leader” Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi would appear to be out of his mind. Reared by the military dictator who admitted responsibility for the Pan Am flight 103 bombing, Saif al-Islam el-Qaddafi believes democracy can take root in Libya. He once told Al Jazeera, “You have to bring democracy to your countries,” referring to the Arab world, adding, “The Arabs should either change or change will be imposed upon them from the outside.” With him in power, the Western world, and the U. S. in particular, could get what it theoretically wants in Iraq–the conversion of a large, oil-rich extremist Middle Eastern regime to a peaceful democracy–without the in-between step of a war.

But does Saif mean it? When his time comes, will he submit to a vote? Or will he simply inherit the reins of power. I think Esquire’s being too kind here.

The Lede picked this up:

As The Lede noted last week, in 2008 the younger Mr. Qaddafi said in this extraordinary interview with the BBC that Libya had “accepted responsibility” for the actions of Mr. Megrahi and paid compensation for the Lockerbie bombing simply to bring about an end to international sanctions, but “that doesn’t mean we did it.” In the same interview, Mr. Qaddafi called the families of the Lockerbie victims “very greedy” and said, “Instead of wasting their time blackmailing us,” they should now work with the Libyan government “in order to find the real criminal who was behind that attack.”

“[F]ind the real criminal?” Has he been taking lessons from OJ?

Saif Qaddafi seems to want the benefits of dealing with the West, but he still says lots of things that indicate that he’s wedded to the old way of doing business. I think he’s less of voice of change than a voice for preserving his own privileges.

The Lede’s – a blog at the NYT – damaging post about Saif Qaddafi certainly made it seem like the release of Megrahi was part of a deal between Britain and Libya. Now the Times has given Qaddafi the opportunity to respond. Will he ever give his own citizens a similar opportunity?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

A few days ago the Washington Post concluded in Self-Muzzled at Yale:

In effect, Yale University Press is allowing violent extremists to set the terms of free speech. As an academic press that embraces the university’s motto of “Lux et Veritas,” it should be ashamed.

Would it be that the truth were so benign.

Last week in response to Roger Kimball’s column about Yale’s decision not to publish the cartoons, InstaPundit quipped:

I suspect that they were mostly afraid of scaring away Saudi money.

Martin Kramer fleshes out the further:

Imagine, then–and we’re just imagining–that someone in the Yale administration, perhaps in President Levin’s office, gets wind of the fact that Yale University Press is about to publish a book on the Danish cartoons–The Cartoons That Shook the World. The book is going to include the Danish cartoons, plus earlier depictions of the Prophet Muhammad tormented in Dante’s Inferno, and who-knows-what-else. Whooah! Good luck explaining to people like Prince Alwaleed that Yale University and Yale University Press are two different shops. The university can’t interfere in editorial matters, so what’s to be done? Summon some “experts,” who’ll be smart enough to know just what to say. Yale will be accused of surrendering to an imagined threat by extremists. So be it: self-censorship to spare bloodshed in Nigeria or Indonesia still sounds a lot nobler than self-censorship to keep a Saudi prince on the line for $20 million.

Now Prince Alwaleed’s gift was not the first Saudi gift to Yale, back in 2002, the Yale Herald wrote about a gift from (then) Crown Prince Abdullah.

… Abdullah’s comes with several stipulations. Five million dollars will fund a named professorship in the international relations department dedicated to United States-Middle East relations; $2 million will be earmarked for the burgeoning Near Eastern languages and civilizations department, with an emphasis on courses in Arabic language instruction. Smaller, as-yet-unspecifed amounts will be funneled to the Yale University Art Gallery, the Religious Studies department, and a future DeVane Lecture. A large portion of the remaining sum, roughly $350 million, will enable the construction of a 13th residential college–a project previously postponed by the Yale Corporation, which thought it was years away from execution for fiscal reasons.

Now think about it, given these “stipulations,” what would be the orientation of that professor of international relations? Is he likely to harbor any sympathy for Israel? I think we know the answer to that one. And yet the Yale PR machine compares King Abdullah’s stipulations, to those of Paul Mellon.

Perhaps you remember that Yale once returned a $20 million endowment for the teaching of Western civilization. The stated reason was that the donor, Lee Bass, had stipulated that he wished to have veto power over professorial appointments. Perhaps Saudi royalty makes no such explicit demands, but the episode with the book about the Danish cartoons shows that it had no need to. The Yale administration knows its limits.

Perhaps, then, Yale President Levin’s recollection about meeting (then) Crown Prince Abdullah should raise some concern.

THE ENTIRE TRANSACTION WOULD HAVE BEEN ALL BUT IMPOSsible were it not for a whispered conversation held in a United Nations (U.N.) elevator at the end of the summer of 1998. Along with a delegation of Saudi Arabian diplomats, the Crown Prince was attending a conference on the global integration of educational networks and the nation-derived economic determination of such processes, with a focus on the Middle Eastern states. One of the panel’s speakers was none other than Levin himself. After the conference, Levin found himself next to Abdullah in a crowded elevator in the U.N.’s Secretariat office building. “We had talked only formally during the conference,” Levin said, “though I felt we had an unspoken affinity with each other. He showed a pointed interest in the American university system… I don’t know exactly why–perhaps out of habit–but I invited him to campus.” Abdullah accepted, and a week later he became the first member of the royal family to visit an institution of higher education in the United States.

(emphasis mine)
Got that? The (present) King has a strong interest in the American university system. And as Martin Kramer showed, that interest is not altruistic but strategic.

Two years ago, in what read like a press release from the Saudi government the New York Times reported that Saudi King Tries to Grow Modern Ideas in Desert.

On a marshy peninsula 50 miles from this Red Sea port, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is staking $12.5 billion on a gargantuan bid to catch up with the West in science and technology.

Between an oil refinery and the sea, the monarch is building from scratch a graduate research institution that will have one of the 10 largest endowments in the world, worth more than $10 billion.

Its planners say men and women will study side by side in an enclave walled off from the rest of Saudi society, the country’s notorious religious police will be barred and all religious and ethnic groups will be welcome in a push for academic freedom and international collaboration sure to test the kingdom’s cultural and religious limits.

The report goes on to portray this as the enlightened monarch attempting to bring his country into the modern world. But at the end of the article we learn that there limits to that enlightenment.

But the kingdom’s laws will still apply: Israelis, barred by law from visiting Saudi Arabia, will not be able to collaborate with the university. And one staple of campus life worldwide will be missing: alcohol.

So even though some of the top scientists in many disciplines are from Israel, the Saudis won’t bend their rules to enhance science. And I love the juxtaposition: No Jews and no beer, as if these restrictions are of equal import.

This makes a mockery of the claim made by another academic about its partnership with the Saudis.

“We are working with a university that has guaranteed nondiscrimination on the basis of race, religion or gender,” said Peter Glynn, director of the Stanford institute. “We recognize that this university operates in Saudi Arabia. Having said that, this university recognizes that if it wants to be world-class, it has to be able to freely attract the best students and faculty from around the world.”

If the Yale scandal was simply a matter of bowing pre-emptively to fears of extremism, the damage to intellectual inquiry would be discrete. But if, as it appears, the calculation was to avoid offending a benefactor – whose generosity Yale (and other universities) seeks, then its an ongoing problem. It is a corruption of academia.

There seem to be many who feel it is necessary to question their assumptions about Israel, who are diffident about challenging bogus charges of undue Jewish influence in the world. But when it comes to oil money, they are noticeably incurious. That money would seem to buy both influence and silence.

Saudi money speaks louder than ideas.

UPDATE: One reason I like blogging is because it involves linking to my sources. Readers can check out my sources and determine if I read them correctly.

I quoted from a Yale Daily Herald article from 2002. It was a perfect example of the deference academic institutions showed towards the Saudis.

It was in fact, too perfect. It was an April Fool’s satire. I think that my basic contention that the Saudi investment in academia corrupts the institutions that take the money. However one of the bases of my contention was mistaken. I should have been more careful.

In fact the tone of the satire matched the tone of at least one of the New York Times articles I used. Still, I should have been more careful.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Wow, a really funky color enhanced picture of the moon from NASA.

Earth’s Moon

This composite image depicts the moon’s rugged south polar region and is the highest resolution topography map to date of the moon’s south pole. It was generated by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, using data collected using the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Solar System Radar located in California’s Mojave Desert. This new map provides contiguous topographic detail over a region approximately 311 miles by 249 miles (500 kilometers by 400 kilometers).

Image Credit: NASA/JPL

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

One of the scientists Ling asked to join the team is Dean Kamen, a sort of rock star in the world of inventors. His creations include dozens of medical devices, and the Segway.

They are inventions which have made him a multimillionaire.

“When the folks from the Defense Department came to this office and said, ‘Here’s what we need,’ what did they tell you?” Pelley asked.

“We want these kids to have something put back on them that will essentially allow one of these kids to pick up a raisin or a grape off a table, know the difference without looking at it. That is an extraordinary goal,” Kamen explained.

“He basically said, ‘You’re crazy.’ That’s what he told us,” Ling remembered. “He said flat out, he and he himself, who’s a crazy guy himself, I mean he is very innovative thinking. He’s a brilliant man, totally brilliant man, but mad scientist.”

Kamen told Pelley he thought the Pentagon and DARPA were unbelievably optimistic in their expectations and that he told them that.

“He said to us, he said, ‘I can do my, you’re crazy. But, we’re willing to rise to this, rise to the challenge because it’s important,’” Ling remembered.

Towards the end of the segment, 60 MInutes correspondent Scott Pelley interviews Capt. Jon Kuniholm about the efforts. Kuniholm is not only a scientist working on artificial arms, he lost an arm four years while in patrol in Iraq. Kuniholm is also involved in other parallel efforts, including “Air Guitar Hero,” an effort to differentiate between fine tune an amputee’s control over their limbs.

Inspired by Wii-hab, Armiger and colleague Jacob Vogelstein borrowed a colleague’s copy of Guitar Hero and attacked the controller with a soldering iron. They rewired the standard guitar-shaped controller to take instructions from the VIE.

Next they substituted muscle contractions for button presses. In particular, they had to rejigger the inputs. Two-handed gamers normally play by using one hand to press colored “fret” buttons to correspond to the correct notes while using the other hand to push a “strum” button in time with the note. Onscreen, these same five colored buttons scroll down the display in time with the notes the players are supposed to hit. To correctly play a note, the player must press the right color fret button and the strum button with the opposite hand.

But Vogelstein and Armiger wanted to use the game to train an amputee. So first they needed to make the game’s controls one-handed. They did that by wiring the two controls together so that an input from a muscle contraction would be read by the VIE as a simultaneous “fret” and “strum.”

One aspect of the story left out by 60 Minutes, is the role of open source thinking involved in improving prosthetic technology.

The two prostheses from Walter Reed were state-of-the-art, the latest in prosthetic design. But back in North Carolina, Kuniholm and his partners at Tackle Design were shocked at the lack of innovation in arm and hand prostheses. They were sure they could do better. And that is how the small North Carolina design firm got into the prosthetics business. More, Kuniholm and his partners have created a clearinghouse for prosthetic designs, an online consortium they call the Open Prosthetics Project (OPP), whose goal is to nurture useful ideas for innovations and then freely give the designs away. The idea is to benefit not only people such as Kuniholm, who already have the resources that come from living in a first-world economy, but also amputees all over the world.

Here’s an IEEE video of an interview with Dean Kamen as he explains his “Luke” arm.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Baltimore's Inner Harbor - from the Light Street Pavilion

A green headed mallard

Police on bikes and a Segway

Which way are you going?

Looking down a channel through a circle.

When Obama says he’s going to raise taxes on families making more than $250,000, what’s the limit for singles? No one ever mentions that, and I’m curious as to what Obama thinks is rich.

I think his and my ideas on that subject are not going to be the same.

The results of your tests are outlined below:

Your data suggests a slight automatic preference for Black people over White people

Your data suggests a strong automatic preference for John McCain over Barack Obama

Depending on the magnitude of your result, your automatic associations may be described as ’slight’, ‘moderate’, ’strong’, or ‘little to no preference or difference in association’. How implicit associations affect our judgments and behaviors is not well understood and may be influenced by a number of variables. As such, the score should serve as an opportunity for self-reflection, not as a definitive assessment of your implicit thoughts or feelings. This and future research will clarify the way in which implicit thinking and feelings affects our perception, judgment, and action. If you have any questions about this study or if you would like to find out the overall results, please email feedback@projectimplicit.net.

I love the explanation. Before you take the test, they ask you who you voted for, and then if you have warm or cold thoughts towards each candidate, and whether you are “strongly” for or against a candidate. So it’s a pretty keen grasp of the obvious to tell me I have a strong automatic preference for McCain. Also, that was the last of the four tests, so by then, I’d gotten really used to hitting the K or D key.

Of course, here’s where I would normally say “Some of my best friends are black,” but that would be a lie. I have one friend who is black, and all the rest are white. But everywhere I go, I relate to people as people, regardless of race. My parents taught me that when I was a child. Standing in line at the grocery, getting gas, in the mall, at work—I’m not a coward, and this isn’t a nation of cowards. Are we completely finished with racism? Of course not. But we have a black president now. I’m thinking that in itself speaks volumes about the lack of racism in America.

70% of all catalogued objects are in low-Earth orbit (LEO), which extends to 2000 km above the Earth’s surface. To observe the Earth, spacecraft must orbit at such a low altitude. The spatial density of objects increases at high latitudes. Note: The debris objects shown in the images are an artist’s impression based on actual density data. However, the debris objects are shown at an eggagerated size to make them visible at the scale shown.

Credit ESA.

The New York Times reported the other day that two communications satellites – one American. one Russian – collided in space.

“This is a first, unfortunately,” Nicholas L. Johnson, chief scientist for orbital debris at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said of the collision.

It happened some 490 miles above northern Siberia, at around noon Eastern time. Two communications satellites — one Russian, one American — cracked up in silent destruction. In the aftermath, military radars on the ground tracked large amounts of debris going into higher and lower orbits.

“Nothing to this extent” has ever happened before, Mr. Johnson said. “We’ve had three other accidental collisions between what we call catalog objects, but they were all much smaller than this,” the objects always very small and moderate in size.

The communication satellites, he added, “are two relatively big objects.”

If you’re wondering why NASA has someone in charge of orbital debris, that picture above illustrates the problem in a somewhat exaggerated form. While the threat to the space station is viewed as minimal for now, later on in the report there’s a reference to a bigger problem:

Mr. Johnson, who works at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the new swarms of whirling debris might also eventually pose a threat to other satellites in an orbital chain reaction.

About that chain reaction … Two years ago the New York Times reported:

Early this year, after a half-century of growth, the federal list of detectable objects (four inches wide or larger) reached 10,000, including dead satellites, spent rocket stages, a camera, a hand tool and junkyards of whirling debris left over from chance explosions and destructive tests.

Now, experts say, China’s test on Jan. 11 of an antisatellite rocket that shattered an old satellite into hundreds of large fragments means the chain reaction will most likely start sooner. If their predictions are right, the cascade could put billions of dollars’ worth of advanced satellites at risk and eventually threaten to limit humanity’s reach for the stars.

Federal and private experts say that early estimates of 800 pieces of detectable debris from the shattering of the satellite will grow to nearly 1,000 as observations continue by tracking radars and space cameras. At either number, it is the worst such episode in space history.

If I understand the article, the chain reaction that observers fear, would create a ring of debris around Earth that would be nearly impossible to penetrate.

Cascade warnings began as early as 1978. Mr. Kessler and his NASA colleague, Burton G. Cour-Palais, wrote in The Journal of Geophysical Research that speeding junk that formed more junk would produce “an exponential increase in the number of objects with time, creating a belt of debris around the Earth.”

(The Times also provided an interactive graphic to illustrate the problem.)

Whether or not the cascade ever occurs, it’s likely that there will be more collisions like the one that occurred this week.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

This is only a preliminary test. If you do sufficiently well and you’re randomly chosen you still have three more steps to go through to become a contestant.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.