Categories
travel

It’s the little things

I have a carry on bag that works alright, it’s the right size, and I like how the pockets work. The only thing I’ve never really liked is the fact that the handle for the rolling option is about 3 to 4 inches too short. I don’t consider myself overly tall at 6 feet (that’s 2 meters for you non US types), but you’d be surprised what that 3 inches does to your back and/or shoulder if you have to wheel it around for a while. Anyway, the top handle broke on my Malta trip and it has been the perfect excuse to go look for another. I managed to find one bag tonight that had a tall enough handle, but it was incredibly ugly. I’m not usually real finicky about how my luggage looks, but this thing was terrible. Plus, this thing felt like I could rip it apart, there’s no way it could handle a full load without self-destructing. The guy kept telling me that it was “real leather” when it was obviously vinyl… I’ll look when I’m back in the states, I’ll deal with this bag for at least one more trip…

Categories
odds and ends

The best story I’ve heard this month…

One of my housemates was telling me about how he once bought some pot from an… brace yourself…. albino Rastafarian from Greenland. This happened in Rome… Imagine white dreadlocks and pink pupils in one of the plazas in Rome… He said it felt like he was in the Matrix or something. I haven’t laughed so much in ages. My mind was severely bent trying to imagine that….

Categories
Religion

The New Testament

OK, everything I said about the Old Testament doesn’t go for the New. I’ve read Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts and I am most impressed. I had read one of the accounts before, but i don’t remember which one, probably Mark. Here are some random thoughts I’ve had so far:

Jesus totally kicks ass. He is the first one in the entire Bible that speaks with any authority. Everyone else (Moses, Abraham, Jacob, David, et. al.) would probably shrug their shoulders and say “That’s what God said,” if anyone questioned them. Jesus is the only one that knows which way is up. Perhaps my frustration from the Old Testament makes Jesus’ teachings seem even more authoritative.

My favorite Jesus moment. Someone asked about the truth of the resurrection, after all Moses and everyone else didn’t seem to mention it. Jesus pointed out that David and other prophets referred to “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” God is the God of the living, not of the dead so those people mentioned are alive. That blows my mind…

Matthew starts with the heritage of Jesus as traced through Joseph. What does Joseph have to do with anything? I thought God was Jesus’ father, so why trace through Joseph? Jesus wasn’t a descendant of David, there is none of David’s (or Joseph’s) blood in Him. I can understand if they did it through Mary (they don’t of course), but I see nothing that would change my notion of Joseph as the supportive step (or foster) father…

I begrudgingly admit that my reading of the Old Testament helps understand the New. I still stand by my thoughts that most of the Old Testament isn’t very useful and that most of the “prophecies” about the Messiah are incredibly vague. Why not a little more clarity? Perhaps I’m missing some stuff, but I don’t recall any prophecies about the Christian era other than the end of days. It sounds like people were expecting a literal descendant of David to rule on the throne forever, none of this dying and living in heaven stuff.

It’s shocking how dense the Apostles were. Jesus told some parables that I thought were pretty straightforward, but they stumped the Apostles. it makes me worry what else they missed of His teachings…

What, exactly, did Thaddeus and Bartholomew do? Maybe they come in later, but so far I don’t think they were credited with doing anything.

Judas is portrayed in a much more narrow way than I was anticipating. According to what I have read, there wasn’t any deliberation or even any thoughts as to what he was going through, he was just evil. I’ve always found this to be odd, he was one of Jesus’ disciples and he was instrumental in the events that lead to the salvation of all mankind, so where’s the love for Judas?

Jesus admitted that Moses had “put in” that whole thing about divorce to make people (men) happy. Was there anything else he put in there?

Since Gentiles weren’t expected to follow Mosaic or Levitical law, what is it that we nonJews are supposed to do? Jesus mentions a handful of commandments, but it sounds like the whole of Mosaic and Levitical law are not applicable to us. That raises interesting questions about a variety of “sins.”

There is a tremendous amount of duplication of the description of what Jesus did. On one hand, this makes it seem that these were the most important things that He did. Of course, if He was God, then it would seem like everything He did would be important. Even “Pass the salt,” would have some sort of importance if God said it. This is my biggest frustration with the New Testament, we get relatively little Jesus. Not only are huge parts of His life missing, but huge parts of His days of preaching. He did that for what, three years? And we get a couple hundred pages worth of description and several thousand of His words. Very disappointing… The other thing that the duplication does is it makes you winder about the provenance of the books. It really sounds like they were copied from a common source with minor embellishments…

More thoughts to come as I think of them…

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Categories
Yemen

A possible explanation for the trash truck…

The trash trucks here are equipped with deafening sirens. I think I have heard a police siren twice here, but the damn trash truck comes every day. 8:30 may not sound real early to some of you, but it is well before I usually get up, or at least it’s well before I want to get up. I get woken up every day around that time. The trash service here is actually very reliable, it’s one of the only things I can think of that seems to operate the way it should. Anyway, I’ve been asking people why the trash truck has to be so fricking loud, and no one has had any idea. I asked my teacher today and he told me that he had recently had a conversation with some of the trash guys about this since he didn’t know either. What he was told is that it makes sure that people know when the truck comes by. This didn’t make any sense to me, after all, in America, we all know when the truck comes by. If we miss it, it’s our problem. The difference is that here, if people miss the truck, they just throw their trash into the street, making an enormous mess. The trash guys are just covering their butts, by using the siren everyone knows when they are there, if the streets are a mess, it isn’t their fault. Apparently, they are worried about their supervisors seeing streets filled with trash. It sounds like this may have happened before. It sure is refreshing to hear of government employees being worried about what their superior thinks. If only the rest of the government were like this…

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Categories
Yemen

FGM and the yemeni public

According to a recent poll, 65% of people in Yemen think that new laws are the solution to Yemen’s FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) problem. The other options that were offered in the poll were education and religious training. We’ll ignore for the time being that FGM is already “illegal’ in Yemen, I think that this poll shows that people still have a real faith in government power. Why I have no idea. With problems like this, top down “solutions” just don’t work. The laws are unenforceable. If you want to make a change in this area, it has to come from the bottom up. For me, education is the key. In a really religious place like this, religious education might help as well, but I would hope that pure humanitarian reasons would be enough to stop FGM. My gut feeling is that until women have some power in these countries, not much will change….

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Yemen

Interesting Yemen fact of the day…

Over half the population of Yemen is below the age of 15. Poor countries have a much higher birth rate than rich ones, for a variety of reasons. People that are worried about “overpopulation” should always pursue policies that improve the economic situations of poor countries…

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science

A good summery about global warming

Warren over at Coyote Blog has written an excellent wrap up that summarizes the skeptic’s issues with the anthropological cause of global warming. It’s still a work in progress, but all of the “data” is there. My skepticism has always come from the statistical realm, all of the data and models I have seen are a mess, and the CO2/warming trends only match reasonably well if you are really lenient and ignore about 40 of the last 100 years. It’s one thing to eyeball a regression or correlation and think it’s pretty close only to find the data doesn’t fit. It’s quite another to eyeball a regression or correlation, realize that it doesn’t fit at all, and then futz with the data until it sorta, kinda works. Mann’s “hockey stick” has been entirely discredited thank God, it wasn’t even mentioned in the last release of the UN’s report even though it figured prominently in the previous version. That was 5 years ago.. settled science my ass…

Warren also brings to light some other interesting facts such as:

CO2’s effect on the atmosphere is one of diminishing returns. Co2 can only raise the temperature by about 1.5-2 degrees celsius. All of the other temperature increases in the various models are ascribed to “positive feedback” mechanisms that so far no one has been able to predict or even demonstrate that exist. The earth has been warmer in the past, and yet these positive feedback loops did not kick in and turn the earth into Venus.

In addition to assuming positive feedback loops, there is the assumption that there will be no negative feedback loops despite the fact that stable systems tend to (and always have) lean towards negative feedback systems. Water vapor is a prime example. Water vapor is much more efficient as a greenhouse gas than CO2 is. If a lot of water vapor is put into the atmosphere, it will cause much more warming than CO2, assuming that it doesn’t form clouds instead. Clouds are a negative feedback process, they tend to cool the earth. Negative feedback is not included in any of the models used even though they are much more likely than run away positive feedback…

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has indeed increased, from .0280% of the atmosphere before the industrial revolution to a whopping .0378% currently. That would be less than 4 one hundredths of a percent. As he says, if you were taking a trip from LA to NYC, .0378% wouldn’t get you off the runway at LAX…

And there’s a bunch more, alternative models that show at least as much correlation as the CO2 models and in some cases much tighter fits, measurement issues, econometric issues (The UN used a calculation that assumes that North Korea, South Africa, Libya and Turkey will all have a higher GDP than the US by 2100. They estimate future CO2 production on these figures. It’s safe to say that they’ll be a ways off…) and more.

“But Isaac, isn’t the downside significantly large to just be careful?” It has gotten to the point that not only would I have to be wrong, but the the overestimated worst case scenario would have to be off by a factor of 5 or more for any of us to worry. The UN’s worst case by 2100 is a 15-17 inch rise in the sea level. What people (at the UN and elsewhere) are purposing in order to “fix” this would stop the economic progress of developing countries (China and India are on the cusp of breaking out of the crushing, lethal poverty that they have been caught in for centuries) and hold us way back from where we would be otherwise. As wealth grows so do life spans, peaceful relations, and yes, even environmental quality (would Brazil cut down more rain forest if it were wealthy or if it were poor?). In my opinion, people either have total doomsday scenarios in mind that are totally unfounded, or they really don’t understand the cost that would be required in order to deal with it. Or maybe both…

I have sent this paper to two of my readers that have told me that they don’t agree with my skepticism, if anyone else wants a copy, let me know and I will forward it to you.

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Rants

Two jokes

A couple of jokes without comment from me on how good/tasteless they are…

President Bush has a press conference and announces, “Tomorrow we will kill 5 million arabs and 1 Israeli.”
“Umm, Mr. President, why will you kill one Israeli?”
The president shrugs and turns to one of his aides. “See, I told you… no one cares about arabs at all…”

This one is imported from France where they have their own “special” problems with Muslims integrating into the culture…

A little boy from Algeria goes to school in France for the first time.

teacher: What’s your name?
kid: Abdul Rahman bin Suliman Adel Muha…
teacher: No, no that will never do, you’re in France now, you should have a French name. From now on you will be called Jean Paul.
kid: OK.

The kid then goes home after school and his father meets him at the door.
Father: Abdul Rahman, how was your first day of school?
kid: I’m not Abdul Rahman anymore, my new name is Jean Paul.
Father: WHAT!? How dare you refuse your heritage, how dare you turn your back on your family?
POW! The father punches the kid in the face.
The next day the kid goes to school with a black eye.
Teacher: Jean paul, what happened?
kid: I wasn’t French for more than 2 hours before some fucking arab punched me!

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food

I give up on seafood

I have never liked fish. Actual fish that is, the kind you get in restaurants or is prepared by people that like fish. It’s not that I think it’s disgusting, I just don’t like it. I have also drifted away from seafood in general. As recently as college I would eat shrimp and fried clams. No more, it just doesn’t appeal. One of the more popular places to eat here is the fish souk. You go to a shop and pick out the fish you want, they clean it for you and then you take it over to a nearby restaurant and they cook it for you. Everyone raves about it and when I tell them that I don’t like fish they always say the same thing, “You just haven’t had FRESH fish before..” Actually I have, multiple times, I don’t like it. Tonight I gave in and decided to try again. We got some sort of shark and a bunch of shrimp. Everyone raved about the shark, I thought it tasted like… fish. Seriously, I have no idea what people see in fish, I can’t really imagine it as anything that I would want to eat, let alone crave. It’s so, bleah with a hint of that special “fish” flavor that I dislike so much. Predictably, whenever I’ve tried fish that others were eating, the favorite around the table was always the fish that tasted the least fishy. Go figure… So anyway, I’m done. I have made up my mind, I do not like fish, I have tried at least 6 or 7 different types (and yes, they were all fresh) and I have found nothing to recommend it. If you are going to stay here for a while, and you like fish, you should definitely check this place out. For those of you like me, don’t bother, it’s same as any other fish…

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Yemen

Dogs

Muslims do not like dogs. There are multiple references in the Koran of how dirty and “weak” dogs are. Muhammad (PBUH) realized that Gabriel was not coming to him whenever a dog was in his house. Once he got rid of the dog, the revelations continued. Of course I’m not sure why Gabriel didn’t just tell him to get rid of the mutt instead of letting him figure it out on his own… Muhammad (PBUH) also changed the direction his army was taking when they came across a bitch giving birth along the way. He saw this as a sign, changed directions, and went on to victory.

People here go out of their way to chase dogs and kill them when they are in a car. Many dogs get poisoned just to get rid of them. Not coincidentally, there are probably 100 cats for every dog here. I go weeks without seeing a single dog, but the cats are everywhere… Cats are considered much cleaner and wholesome here. I happen to like both cats and dogs, but I have been a little shocked at the level of hatred of dogs here. If you’re not going to have a pets, I can sort of understand it. Cats are fairly clean as far as where they go to the bathroom and they keep the rodents under control. Dogs, on the other hand, are pretty messy. I had also heard of problems of dogs forming packs and causing real troubles harassing people.

Last night a group of dogs were fighting along our street. There may have been as few as 8 dogs involved, but it sounded like a 1000. it sounded as though they were killing each other, the barking, growling, yelping, screeching, etc were quite a racket. I like dogs, well domestic, trained ones at least. Feral ones are not on my list of favorites… Anyway, I like dogs, but if I had a gun, I probably would have gone out and started to kill them. The noise they were making was truly blood curdling and sounded downright dangerous. If I had heard that while I was laying in my bed when I was 5 or 6, I’d be terrified of dogs to this day. I guess I’m glad that there aren’t nearly as many dogs as cats here.

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