sh Administration considered attacking
Syria itself, but rejected that option. The implication was that the Israeli
intelligence about the nuclear threat had been vetted by the U.S., and had been
found to be convincing.
Yet officials I spoke to in Israel
heatedly denied the notion that they had extensive help from Washington in
planning the attack. When I told the senior Israeli official that I found
little support in Washington for Israel’s claim that it had bombed a nuclear
facility in Syria, he responded with an expletive, and then said, angrily,
“Nobody helped us. We did it on our own.” He added, “What I’m saying is that
nobody discovered it for us.” (The White House declined to comment on this
story.) http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
There is evidence to support this
view. The satellite operated by DigitalGlobe, the Colorado firm that supplied
Albright’s images, is for hire; anyone can order the satellite to photograph
specific coördinates, a process that can cost anywhere from several hundred to
hundreds of thousands of dollars. The company displays the results of these
requests on its Web page, but not the identity of the customer. On five
occasions between August 5th and August 27th of last year—before the Israeli
bombing—DigitalGlobe was paid to take a tight image of the targeted building in
Syria.
Clearly, whoever ordered the images likely
had some involvement in plans for the attack. DigitalGlobe does about sixty per
cent of its business with the U.S. government, but those contracts are for
unclassified work, such as mapping. The government’s own military and
intelligence satellite system, with an unmatched ability to achieve what
analysts call “highly granular images,” could have supplied superior versions
of the target sites. Israel has at least two military satellite systems, but,
according to Allen Thomson, a former C.I.A. analyst, DigitalGlobe’s satellite
has advantages for reconnaissance, making Israel a logical customer. (“Customer
anonymity is crucial to us,” Chuck Herring, a spokesman for DigitalGlobe, said.
“I don’t know who placed the order and couldn’t disclose it if I did.”) It is
also possible that Israel or the United States ordered the imagery in order to
have something unclassified to pass to the press if needed. If the Bush
Administration had been aggressively coöperating with Israel before the attack,
why would Israel have to turn to a commercial firm?
Last fall, aerospace industry and
military sources told Aviation Week & Space Technology, an authoritative
trade journal, that the United States had provided Israel with advice about
“potential target vulnerabilities” before the September 6th attack, and
monitored the radar as the mission took place. The magazine reported that the
Israeli fighters, prior to bombing the target on the Euphrates, struck a Syrian
radar facility near the Turkish border, knocking the radar out of commission
and permitting them to complete their mission without interference.
The former U.S. senior intelligence
official told me that, as he understood it, America’s involvement in the
Israeli raid dated back months earlier, and was linked to the Administration’s
planning for a possible air war against Iran. Last summer, the Defense
Intelligence Agency came to believe that Syria was installing a new
Russian-supplied radar-and-air-defense system that was similar to the radar
complexes in Iran. Entering Syrian airspace would trigger those defenses and
expose them to Israeli and American exploitation, yielding valuable information
about their capabilities. Vice-President Dick Cheney supported the idea of
overflights, the former senior intelligence official said, because “it would
stick it to Syria and show that we’re serious about Iran.” (The
Vice-President’s office declined to comment.) The former senior intelligence
official said that Israeli military jets have flown over Syria repeatedly,
without retaliation from Syria. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
At the time, the former senior
intelligence official said, the focus was on radar and air defenses, and not on
any real or suspected nuclear facility. Israel’s claims about the target, which
emerged later, caught many in the military and intelligence community—if not in
the White House—by surprise.
On the days before the bombing, the
Koreans had been working on the second floor, and were using a tarp on top of
the building to shield the site from rain and sun. “It was just the North
Korean way of working,” the Syrian senior officer said, adding that the
possibility that the Israelis could not see what was underneath the tarp might
have added to their determination.
The attack was especially dramatic,
the Syrian senior officer said, because the Israelis used bright magnesium
illumination flares to light up the target before the bombing. Night suddenly
turned into day, he told me. “When the people in the area saw the lights and
the bombing, they thought there would be a commando raid,” the senior officer
said. The building was destroyed, and his government eventually concluded that
there were no Israeli ground forces in the area. But if Israelis had been on
the ground seeking contaminated soil samples, the senior officer said, “they
found only cement.”
A senior Syrian official confirmed
that a group of North Koreans had been at work at the site, but he denied that
the structure was related to chemical warfare. Syria had concluded, he said,
that chemical warfare had little deterrent value against Israel, given its
nuclear capability. The facility that was attacked, the official said, was to
be one of a string of missile-manufacturing plants scattered throughout
Syria—“all low tech. Not strategic.” (North Korea has been a major exporter of
missile technology and expertise to Syria for decades.) He added, “We’ve gone
asymmetrical, and have been improving our capability to build low-tech missiles
that will enable us to inflict as much damage as possible without confronting
the Israeli Army. We now can hit all of Israel, and not just the north.”
Whatever was under construction, with
North Korean help, it apparently had little to do with agriculture—or with
nuclear reactors—but much to do with Syria’s defense posture, and its military
relationship with North Korea. And that, perhaps, was enough to silence the
Syrian government after the September 6th bombing.
It is unclear to what extent the Bush Administration
was involved in the Israeli attack. The most detailed report of coöperation was
made in mid-October by ABC News. Citing a senior U.S. official, the network
reported that Israel had shared intelligence with the United States and
received satellite help and targeting information in response. At one point, it
was reported, the Bush Administration considered attacking Syria http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
itself, but rejected that option. The
implication was that the Israeli intelligence about the nuclear threat had been
vetted by the U.S., and had been found to be convincing.
Yet officials I spoke to in Israel
heatedly denied the notion that they had extensive help from Washington in planning
the attack. When I told the senior Israeli official that I found little support
in Washington for Israel’s claim that it had bombed a nuclear facility in
Syria, he responded with an expletive, and then said, angrily, “Nobody helped
us. We did it on our own.” He added, “What I’m saying is that nobody discovered
it for us.” (The White House declined to comment on this story.)
There is evidence to support this
view. The satellite operated by DigitalGlobe, the Colorado firm that supplied
Albright’s images, is for hire; anyone can order the satellite to photograph
specific coördinates, a process that can cost anywhere from several hundred to
hundreds of thousands of dollars. The company displays the results of these
requests on its Web page, but not the identity of the customer. On five
occasions between August 5th and August 27th of last year—before the Israeli
bombing—DigitalGlobe was paid to take a tight image of the targeted building in
Syria.
Clearly, whoever ordered the images
likely had some involvement in plans for the attack. DigitalGlobe does about
sixty per cent of its business with the U.S. government, but those contracts
are for unclassified work, such as mapping. The government’s own military and
intelligence satellite system, with an unmatched ability to achieve what
analysts call “highly granular images,” could have supplied superior versions
of the target sites. Israel has at least two military satellite systems, but,
according to Allen Thomson, a former C.I.A. analyst, DigitalGlobe’s satellite
has advantages for reconnaissance, making Israel a logical customer. (“Customer
anonymity is crucial to us,” Chuck Herring, a spokesman for DigitalGlobe, said.
“I don’t know who placed the order and couldn’t disclose it if I did.”) It is
also possible that Israel or the United States ordered the imagery in order to
have something unclassified to pass to the press if needed. If the Bush
Administration had been aggressively coöperating with Israel before the attack,
why would Israel have to turn to a commercial firm?
Last fall, aerospace industry and
military sources told Aviation Week & Space Technology, an authoritative
trade journal, that the United States had provided Israel with advice about
“potential target vulnerabilities” before the September 6th attack, and
monitored the radar as the mission took place. The magazine reported that the
Israeli fighters, prior to bombing the target on the Euphrates, struck a Syrian
radar facility near the Turkish border, knocking the radar out of commission
and permitting them to complete their mission without interference.
The former U.S. senior intelligence
official told me that, as he understood it, America’s involvement in the
Israeli raid dated back months earlier, and was linked to the Administration’s
planning for a possible air war against Iran. Last summer, the Defense
Intelligence http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
Agency came to believe that Syria was installing a new
Russian-supplied radar-and-air-defense system that was similar to the radar
complexes in Iran. Entering Syrian airspace would trigger those defenses and
expose them to Israeli and American exploitation, yielding valuable information
about their capabilities. Vice-President Dick Cheney supported the idea of
overflights, the former senior intelligence official said, because “it would
stick it to Syria and show that we’re serious about Iran.” (The
Vice-President’s office declined to comment.) The former senior intelligence
official said that Israeli military jets have flown over Syria repeatedly,
without retaliation from Syria. At the time, the former senior intelligence
official said, the focus was on radar and air defenses, and not on any real or
suspected nuclear facility. Israel’s claims about the target, which emerged
later, caught many in the military and intelligence community—if not in the
White House—by surprise.
The senior Israeli official, asked
whether the attack was rooted in his country’s interest in Syria’s radar
installations, told me, “Bullshit.” Whatever the Administration’s initial
agenda, Israel seems to have been after something more.
The story of the Israeli bombing of
Syria, with its mixture of satellite intelligence, intercepts, newspaper leaks,
and shared assumptions, reminded some American diplomats and intelligence
officials of an incident, ten years ago, involving North Korea. In mid-1998,
American reconnaissance satellites photographed imagery of a major underground
construction project at Kumchang-ri, twenty-five miles northwest of Yongbyon.
“We were briefed that, without a doubt, this was a nuclear-related facility,
and there was signals intelligence linking the http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
construction brigade at Kumchang-ri to
the nuclear complex at Yongbyon,” the former State Department intelligence
expert recalled.
Charles Kartman, who was President
Bill Clinton’s special envoy for peace talks with Korea, told me that the
intelligence was considered a slam dunk by analysts in the Defense Intelligence
Agency, even though other agencies disagreed. “We had a debate going on inside
the community, but the D.I.A. unilaterally took it to Capitol Hill,” Kartman said,
forcing the issue and leading to a front-page Times story.
After months of negotiations, Kartman
recalled, the North Koreans agreed, under diplomatic pressure, to grant access
to Kumchang-ri. In return, they received aid, including assistance with a new
potato-production program. Inspectors found little besides a series of empty
tunnels. Robert Carlin, an expert on North Korea who retired in 2005 after
serving more than thirty years with the C.I.A. and the State Department’s
intelligence bureau, told me that the Kumchang-ri incident highlighted “an
endemic weakness” in the American intelligence community. “People think they
know the ending and then they go back and find the evidence that fits their
story,” he said. “And then you get groupthink—and people reinforce each other.”
It seems that, as with Kumchang-ri,
there was a genuine, if not unanimous, belief by Israeli intelligence that the
Syrians were constructing something that could have serious national-security
consequences. But why would the Israelis take the risk of provoking a military
response, and perhaps a war, if there was, as it seems, no smoking gun? http://louis-j-sheehan.de/
Mohamed ElBaradei, expressing his
frustration, said, “If a country has any information about a nuclear activity
in another country, it should inform the I.A.E.A.—not bomb first and ask
questions later.”
One answer, suggested by David
Albright, is that Israel did not trust the international arms-control
community. “I can understand the Israeli point of view, given the history with
Iran and Algeria,” Albright said. “Both nations had nuclear-weapons programs
and, after being caught cheating, declared their reactors to be civil reactors,
for peacetime use. The international groups, like the U.N. and the I.A.E.A,
never shut them down.” Also, Israel may have calculated that risk of a
counterattack was low: President Assad would undoubtedly conclude that the
attack had the support of the Bush Administration and, therefore, that any
response by Syria would also engage the U.S. (My conversations with officials
in Syria bore out this assumption.)
In Tel Aviv, the senior Israeli
official pointedly told me, “Syria still thinks Hezbollah won the war in
Lebanon”—referring to the summer, 2006, fight between Israel and the Shiite
organization headed by Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. “Nasrallah knows how much that
war cost—one-third of his fighters were killed, infrastructure was bombed, and
ninety-five per cent of his strategic weapons were wiped out,” the Israeli
official said. “But Assad has a Nasrallah complex and thinks Hezbollah won.
And, ‘If he did it, I can do it.’ This led to an adventurous mood in Damascus.
Today, they are more sober.”
That notion was echoed by the
ambassador of an Israeli ally who is posted in Tel Aviv. “The truth is not
important,” the ambassador told me. “Israel was able to restore its credibility
as a deterrent. That is the whole thing. No one will know what the real story
is.”
There is evidence that the preëmptive
raid on Syria was also meant as a warning about—and a model for—a preëmptive
attack on Iran. When I visited Israel this winter, Iran was the overriding
concern among political and defense officials I spoke to—not Syria. There was
palpable anger toward Washington, in the wake of a National Intelligence http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
Estimate that concluded, on behalf of
the American intelligence community, that Iran is not now constructing a
nuclear weapon. Many in Israel view Iran’s nuclear ambitions as an existential
threat; they believe that military action against Iran may be inevitable, and
worry that America may not be there when needed. The N.I.E. was published in
November, after a yearlong standoff involving Cheney’s office, which resisted
the report’s findings. At the time of the raid, reports about the forthcoming
N.I.E. and its general conclusion had already appeared.
Retired Major General Giora Eiland,
who served as the national-security adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,
told me, “The Israeli military takes it as an assumption that one day we will
need to have a military campaign against Iran, to slow and eliminate the
nuclear option.” He added, “Whether the political situation will allow this is
another question.”
In the weeks after the N.I.E.’s
release, Bush insisted that the Iranian nuclear-weapons threat was as acute as
ever, a theme he amplified during his nine-day Middle East trip after the New
Year. “A lot of people heard that N.I.E. out here and said that George Bush and
the Americans don’t take the Iranian threat seriously,” he told Greta Van
Susteren, of Fox News. “And so this trip has been successful from the
perspective of saying . . . we will keep the pressure on.”
Shortly after the bombing, a Chinese
envoy and one of the Bush Administration’s senior national-security officials
met in Washington. The Chinese envoy had just returned from a visit to Tehran,
a person familiar with the discussion told me, and he wanted the White House to
know that there were moderates there who were interested in talks. The
national-security official rejected that possibility and told the envoy, as the
person familiar with the discussion recalled, “‘You are aware of the recent
Israeli statements about Syria. The Israelis are extremely serious about Iran
and its nuclear program, and I believe that, if the United States government is
unsuccessful in its diplomatic dealings with Iran, the Israelis will take it
out militarily.’ He then told http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
the envoy that he wanted him to convey
this to his government—that the Israelis were serious.
“He was telling the Chinese leadership
that they’d better warn Iran that we can’t hold back Israel, and that the
Iranians should look at Syria and see what’s coming next if diplomacy fails,”
the person familiar with the discussion said. “His message was that the Syrian
attack was in part aimed at Iran.”
Ann Tucker is pushing a shopping cart
through the produce section of a supermarket in Plainview, N.Y., when she turns
to kiss her husband. The supermarket kiss is a regular ritual for the Tuckers.
So are the restaurant kiss and the traffic-light kiss. "I guess we do kiss
a lot," says Mrs. Tucker, a 39-year-old mathematician at a
money-management firm.
Mrs. Tucker is living happily ever
after, and scientists are curious why. She belongs to a small class of men and
women who say they live in the thrall of early love despite years of marriage,
busy jobs and other daily demands that normally chip away at passion.
Most couples find that the dizzying,
almost-narcotic feeling of early love gives way to a calmer bond. Now,
researchers are using laboratory science to investigate Mrs. Tucker and others
who live fairy-tale romances. The studies could help reveal the workings of
lifelong passion and perhaps one day lead to a restorative.
Philosophers and writers have long
examined passion and love. The 19th century introduced psychologists and
sociologists to the discussion. In recent years, neuroscientists have joined
in. While love is historically tied to the heart, they are looking for answers
in the brain, using magnetic imaging and other modern tools to try to map
love's pathways.
Sam Schechner reports on a study
looking at the brains of people who claim to have stayed madly in love for over
a decade.
Psychologists studying relationships
confirm the steady decline of romantic love. Each year, according to surveys,
the average couple loses a little spark. One sociological study of marital
satisfaction at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Penn State University
kept track of more than 2,000 http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
married people over 17 years. Average
marital happiness fell sharply in the first 10 years, then entered a slow
decline.
About 15 years ago, Arthur Aron, a
social psychologist at Stony Brook University, became curious about couples
outside the norm. His own work turned up the usual pattern of declining
passion. But he was drawn to what statisticians call outliers, points way off
the curve. These dots represented people who claimed they'd been madly in love
for years. "I didn't know what to make of that," Dr. Aron says.
"Was it random error? Were they self-deceiving? Were they deceiving
others? Because it's not supposed to happen."
On a clear day in late August, Mrs.
Tucker visited New York University's Center for Brain Imaging. There, a
four-ton device called a functional magnetic-resonance imaging scanner would
analyze her brain while she looked at a photo of her husband. The machines
record changes in oxygen levels of blood feeding the brain. Because the brain
is quick to supply fresh blood to working areas, researchers use them to see
where the brain is more active during such mental tasks as recognizing words or
feeling love.
Mrs. Tucker drove in with Bianca
Acevedo, one of Dr. Aron's graduate students. Ms. Acevedo's doctoral
dissertation studies brain images to compare new love with long-term love.
Only a handful of studies have used
magnetic imaging to study love, in part because scientists debate whether it is
a good measure of hard-to-define mental states. The first widely cited study,
published in 2000, scanned men and women who claimed to be madly in love. It
found evidence that love could be traced in the brain.
Over the next few years, Dr. Aron
collaborated on a study that would push further. Published in 2005, it helped
establish the link between romantic love and the so-called reward-seeking
circuitry, which is thought to be linked to such deep motivations as thirst or
drug addiction. Dr. Aron joined Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers
University in New Jersey, and Lucy L. Brown, a neuroscientist at Albert
Einstein College of Medicine in New York's Bronx borough. They examined blood
flow in the brains of 17 volunteers, mostly college students, who were scanned
as they looked at photos of their lovers.
They found robust activity in a brain
region called the ventral tegmental area, which is rich in dopamine, a brain
chemical connected to feelings of pleasure. Another of Dr. Aron's students
repeated the results in China, bolstering the case that romantic love is a
biological drive not bound by culture.
None of the published studies,
however, focused on people in long-term relationships. Ms. Acevedo's research
plan -- hatched with Drs. Aron, Fisher and Brown -- was to repeat the
experiment with people who had been in love for more than a decade to see how
they compare. The first hurdle was finding such couples.
Mrs. Tucker is a meticulous woman with
black hair in a pixie cut who moved to the U.S. from Korea when she was 5. She
is shy and speaks carefully, sometimes slipping into statistical jargon when
talking with her husband. When the two Ph.D.s plan a party they weigh a
"Type I error" against a "Type II error," too little food
or too much.
Her husband, Alan, 64, is a lanky,
applied-math professor at Stony Brook who speaks with a youthful enthusiasm.
They met sitting across a horseshoe-shaped table at a math conference in the
Adirondack Mountains. "I knew immediately we'd get married," Mrs.
Tucker says. They got their marriage license less than a year later, on
Valentine's Day.
They share a two-story home in Cold
Spring Harbor, N.Y. One afternoon last fall, their son Teddy, now 10, works his
PlayStation, and their toddler James plays with a toy train. Mr. Tucker
recounts their courtship. "After the second date, it would be three steps,
stop and kiss," he says. After nearly 11 years of marriage, they still see
each other as romantic ideals.
Researchers also found Michelle
Jordan, a 59-year-old communications consultant, and her husband, Billy Owens.
On a cross-country flight, she sat next to Mr. Owens, a well-built man from
Gadsden, Ala. "I had this immediate reaction of, 'What a nice-looking
guy,' " she says. They chatted throughout the flight, her dry wit mixing
with his easy charm.
Ms. Jordan and Mr. Owens lived in
different cities so it took months of long-distance dating before their first
kiss. "You're always cautious about setting yourself up for disappointment
again," recalls Ms. Jordan, who was 42 at the time. They married three
years later and now live in Newport Beach, Calif. Even now, Ms. Jordan still
seeks her husband's hand when they're together. "It comes very
naturally," she says.
Ms. Acevedo was confident that such
long-term love was a real if somewhat rare phenomenon. Brain activity in the
ventral tegmental area would support the idea. Dr. Brown, the neuroscientist on
the project, was skeptical. Her theory: Mrs. Tucker and Ms. Jordan weren't
experiencing the same brain impulses as new lovers, and brain scans would show
that.
Mrs. Tucker recalls taking off a gold
bracelet, a gift from her husband, before sliding into the fMRI machine. Images
of her husband are reflected on a mirror above her. She recalls feeling "a
warm contentment."
Until recently, most neuroscientists
considered love an ill-defined topic best avoided. But a growing body of work
showed that our attachments have a neurological underpinning. In 1996, a
privately funded conference in Stockholm took the title "Is there a
neurobiology of love?" Among the organizers was Sue Carter, an expert on
the prairie-vole brain.
The prairie vole is a North American
rodent that mostly mates for life, making it a useful proxy for studying human
attachment. Dr. Carter, a neuroendocrinologist now at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, helped establish a link between vole monogamy and oxytocin
-- the so-called love hormone that helps bind mates, as well as mothers and
their offspring.
Psychologists and social scientists
worked on a different track, applying their theories about love to social
experiments and surveys. Their http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
most popular measure is the Passionate
Love Scale. People are asked to score 15 statements about their lovers, such
as, "For me, [blank] is the perfect romantic partner."
The work of Dr. Aron and his
colleagues reflects growing collaboration between the social and neurosciences.
Days after Mrs. Tucker's brain scan,
Dr. Brown, the neuroscientist, sat in her book-lined office looking at the
results. "Wow, just wow," she recalls thinking. Mrs. Tucker's brain
reacted to her husband's photo with a frenzy of activity in the ventral
tegmental area. "I was shocked," Dr. Brown says.
The brain scan confirmed what Mrs.
Tucker said all along. But when she learned the result, she too was a bit
surprised. "It's not something I expected after 11 years," she says.
"But having it, it's like a gift."
The scan also showed a strong reaction
in Mrs. Tucker's ventral pallidum, an area suspected from vole studies to have
links with long-term bonds. Mrs. Tucker apparently enjoyed old love and new. In
the months since, Dr. Brown analyzed data from four more people, including Ms.
Jordan, who also showed brain activity associated with new love. The study is
ongoing, and more volunteers are being sought.
There is much work ahead before
scientists can map the human-attachment system and learn what factors affect
it. A love drug is an even more distant dream.
"People in the field, we've
kidded about it, but nobody thinks it's, in the short term, realistic,"
says Dr. Aron. "Of course, maybe we'll be contacted by a pharmaceutical
company, http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
and they'll give us $10 zillion and
we'll find something."
February is African History month. A
perfect time to learn about the ancient history of Egypt.
To me, the most fascinating aspect of
ancient Egypt is the length of time its style of government lasted. The family
of the rulers changed, and sure, Egypt had shifting borders, sometimes
extending further south into Africa, sometimes extending east into what is now
the Middle East, but it was still Egypt, and despite the fact that a Greek
follower of Alexander the Great took over as ruler of Egypt, it kept the same
system of government -- with a pharaoh at its head -- for not just centuries,
but millennia -- from 2920-31 B.C. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
Because of the climate of Egypt, as
well as the religious beliefs of the ancients, monuments in its desert, still
standing five thousand years later, reveal information about who the ancient
people were. How closely related they are to the inhabitants of today's Egypt,
we don't know, but we do know that the builders of the past had practical
knowledge of geometric measurement and amazing building skills.
Archaeologists, linguists, and
historians have joined efforts to understand the picture writing known as
hieroglyphs that adorn princely burial chambers. From remains of Egyptian
pyramids and the coffins (sarcophagi, plural of sarcophagus -- literally, flesh
eater) themselves, Egyptologists have discovered a complex society focused on
the afterlife.
Below is a list of some of the very
most basic concepts, objects, rulers, and gods of ancient Egypt -- the
rudimentary terms about Egypt. Most, you may already be familiar with, from
crossword puzzles or elsewhere. Even so, by following the link-a-day below to
definitions, articles, reviews, and deeper information on other sites, you will
learn more about this fascinating society.
Egyptian Terms for Each Day of the
Month of February
1. Amarna
2. Cartouche
3. Cleopatra
4. Giza
5. Hatshepsut
6. Hieroglyph
7. Horus
8. Isis
9. King Tut (Tutankhamen)
10. Mastaba
11. Middle Kingdom
12. Mummy
13. Nefertiti
14. New Kingdom
15. Nile River
16. Old Kingdom
17. Osiris
18. Papyrus
19. Pharaoh
20. Pyramid
21. Ramses
22. Re
23. Rosetta Stone
24. Sarcophagus
25. Scarab
26. Sphinx
27. Step Pyramid
28. Tuthmose
It is rare for a sociological study to
wind up a part of pop culture, but that’s what has happened to Stanley
Milgram’s “small world” study, which posits that all of the people on the
planet are connected to one another through an average of six acquaintances—or
through six degrees of separation. The first popular use of Milgram’s study was
the John Guare play Six Degrees of Separation, which was later made into a
movie. Then came the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, created by college
students, in which players must connect the actor to another actor by no more
than six other people. In 2006 there was the TV show Six Degrees, which told
the story of six characters who, according to the network, “go about their
lives without realizing the impact they are having on one another.” Even the
popular PBS series American Masters has jumped on the six degrees bandwagon,
with a Web game that allows you to pick any two of the accomplished people it
has profiled through the years—everyone from Aaron Copland to William
Styron—and find the links that connect them. How are Truman Capote and Lucille
Ball connected? This is the Web engine’s answer: Truman Capote is connected to
Lena Horne because Horne appeared in the book Observations by Capote and
Richard Avedon. Horne is connected to Lucille Ball because they—along with Judy
Garland and Gene Kelly—were in the Ziegfeld Follies.
But perhaps the most interesting use
of Milgram’s study came from Judith Kleinfeld, a psychology professor at the
University of Alaska at Fairbanks. In 2002 she realized she had a problem in
her classroom. “My graduate students insisted that social science research was
nothing more than the systematic study of what you already know,” she says. To
challenge them, she decided to have them replicate social scientist Milgram’s
small world study. The more Kleinfeld thought about the assignment, the better
she liked it. They could update the technique, she thought. Milgram had used
regular mail as the mode of communication between acquaintances, but her
students could use e-mail. Maybe they would find that the Internet had closed
the gap further. They could even, Kleinfeld fantasized, track down some of the
participants in the original study and see if they were game for another round.
To do it right, though, she needed to look through Milgram’s papers, which his
wife had donated to Yale http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
University after his death in 1984. Kleinfeld boarded a plane
and made her way to Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in New Haven, Connecticut,
where she donned white gloves and rummaged through boxes 48 and 49 of the
Milgram collection.
Milgram’s original study design was
simple: He gave 60 people in Wichita, Kansas, envelopes and the name of a
target person—a stranger—along with a few details of that person’s life. Their
mission: to get that envelope to someone they knew on a first-name basis who http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
then might be able to pass the
envelope a step closer to the target person. In a subsequent study, he used two
starter populations in Nebraska and one in Boston to reach a target in Sharon,
Massachusetts.
The idea was to see how many steps it
would take to get each envelope to the target person. In his 1967 write-up of
his work in the premiere issue of Psychology Today, Milgram shared one
particularly riveting anecdote from the first study—that of an envelope that
made its way from a wheat farmer in Kansas to the target, a divinity student’s
wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with just two connections. However, he also
reported that the average number of connections (not the maximum number, as people
sometimes mistakenly believe) between strangers was six—still astonishingly
few.
Milgram’s study made headlines and
resonated in the public’s imagination. Were each of us really only six people
removed from a long-lost childhood friend, a lower-caste field worker in India,
or any celebrity? Could we really find our way to, say, Stephen Hawking or Brad
Pitt or even Osama bin Laden in just six steps? Of course, this raises the
question: http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
If we’re only six people away from bin
Laden, why hasn’t he been tracked down and captured? The answer, as Kleinfeld
discovered, is complicated. It involves the misleading reporting of statistical
data, the seductive power of a pleasing idea, and the vagaries of human
behavior.
When Kleinfeld began sifting through
Milgram’s original data at Yale, she was surprised to find how much that data
seemed to conflict with what Milgram had reported. Only 3 of the 60 envelopes
in the original study had reached the divinity student’s wife—a completion rate
of just 5 percent. The second study reported a completion rate of only 29
percent. Moreover, Milgram recruited subjects for two of his studies by buying
mailing lists, which tend to be biased in favor of high-income people with high
numbers of connections. Other sociological work has shown that low-income
people are generally able to reach other individuals with low incomes, but not
those with high incomes.
assumed that Milgram’s study must have
been replicated for his results to have been so widely and enthusiastically
accepted. Confirming the validity of a finding by repeating experiments is,
after all, a hallmark of the scientific process. Kleinfeld scoured the academic
literature but found only two follow-up studies, one done by Milgram himself.
And neither one, Kleinfeld says, substantiated the six-degrees claim. “I was
disappointed in Milgram, who was one of my idols, for avoiding the limitations
of his research in the arresting and well-written article he had published in
Psychology Today,” Kleinfeld says. “My students, however, were not surprised.
The results supported their notions of the limitations of social research.”
Was Milgram so in love with the idea of six
degrees that he overlooked the weak statistics.
Milgram had said that he got the idea
for his small world study from social scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool and
mathematician Manfred Kochen, who, in the 1950s, spent a good deal of time
trying to arrive at a mathematical formula that would explain how closely all
of us are actually connected. But de Sola Pool and Kochen were unable to find
an equation that satisfactorily represented the nuances and complexities of
society. Milgram, who was already famous for the obedience experiment in which
study subjects administered painful electric shocks to other study subjects
when urged to do so by an authority figure, came up with the letter method as a
tool to try to solve the problem in real life.
Usually scientists publish in academic
journals first, and then bring their results to the lay press. Milgram did it
in reverse by publishing first in Psychology Today. “This allowed Milgram to
sidestep the usual publication lag in academic publishing,” explains Thomas
Blass, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland and author of
The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. But in
writing for the lay public, Milgram omitted statistics—the numbers that would
show how few of his chains were in fact completed. Milgram did publish the
actual results of his second study, including the statistics, in an academic
journal a couple of years later, pondering at length the reasons for the low
completion rates of the chains.
Kleinfeld’s interpretation of all
this—which she also published in Psychology Today (March/April 2002)—is that
Milgram was so in love with the idea of six degrees that he overlooked the weak
statistics backing it up. And worse, he promoted his sketchy results to an
unsuspecting public. Not that she thinks the public minds. In talking to others
about their coincidental experiences running into friends and friends of
friends in unlikely places, she’s become convinced that http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
the idea of six degrees has deep
psychological appeal. “The belief in a small world gives people a sense of
security,” she says.
But that’s not really the end of the
story. In the interval between Milgram’s work and Kleinfeld’s digging through
those boxes, a field known as the science of networks had blossomed. “Just about
anything in the social, biological, and physical world has to do with systems
that comprise lots and lots of interacting components,” says Duncan Watts, a
professor of sociology at Columbia University. It’s important to understand how
networks function because, as Watts puts it, “that has relevance to just about
every question we’re interested in, whether we’re talking about the spread of
epidemics, or changes in social norms, or fashions, or the expression of the
genome.” It’s all about some sort of process driven by many things interacting
with one another. “And the interactions,” Watts believes, “are critical.” http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
In 1998 Watts and Steven Strogatz, a
professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University, published a paper in
Nature that did what de Sola Pool and Kochen hadn’t done: It provided a
mathematical explanation for how random people living far apart can be linked
by a handful of connections. The concept rests upon the idea that we all lead
multidimensional lives. “People organize their lives along different social
dimensions,” explains Watts. “I know some people because of what I do for work,
some because of where I live, and others because of where I grew up. A
professional colleague and someone I grew up with may look at one another and
not think they have anything in common, but I form the bridge because I’m close
to each one of them.”
It’s these acquaintances that allow us
to cut through the swaths of humanity, and many social dimensions, to reach
people who seem far removed from ourselves. But what of the enormous attrition
rate in Milgram’s study, which Kleinfeld found so damning? Milgram, in the
results he published in the scientific literature, speculated that study
participants hadn’t completed their chains because they lacked motivation or
didn’t really believe that they could reach their targets. Watts tends to agree
with that argument—largely because he’s seen it in action
of an e-mail version he did of
Milgram’s experiment. He set up a Web page and recruited 18 targets in 13
countries. In the end, 61,168 starters signed on, and 24,163 chains were begun.
Of those, only 384 were completed. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
Those who finished their chains did so
within slightly more than four links, on average. Watts, unlike Milgram,
included a survey with his study, and one of the questions asked people who
hadn’t finished to give the reason why. Less than one-half of 1 percent of
respondents said they had failed to pass the e-mail on because they didn’t know
who to send it to. Watts believes the majority failed because of other
problems, such as e-mail spam blocks that diverted their requests. Other times,
he suspects, chains failed because the people who received an e-mail weren’t as
interested in continuing the chain as the people who’d started it.
“People
so much want to believe that we live in a global village, all holding hands,”
Kleinfeld says.
Lack of interest, Watts says, points
to the underlying complexity of networking. The question is not just whether we
are closely connected, but how we navigate those connections—and whether we
choose to do so at all. “People can find these paths as long as they’re
motivated to do so and able to motivate people to help them,” he says. “But no
matter how motivated you are, you have to be able to motivate the other person,
who can put you in touch with the next person, and the next person has to do it
too.”
According to Watts, sometimes those in
the best position to help you aren’t inclined to do so. This would undoubtedly
be a problem if the CIA, say, tried to connect with Osama bin Laden. “If you’re
trying to reach bin Laden, the last couple of people in the chain are not going
to be particularly cooperative, even if they could be,” says Watts.
There’s also the issue of belief. Some
people just don’t believe we can be linked by so few people, so they don’t try
to connect. But the perception of connectivity is crucial in completing the
chains. Take the example of Petey Pierre, a student and boxer who worked out at
the Bedford-Stuyvesant Boxing Center in Brooklyn, New York.
In 2006 Pierre agreed to participate
in a small world experiment with Watts and ABC News that addressed two of the
criticisms of small world research: that no studies had ever been played out in
real time, and that the people who had participated in the chains tended be
educated, white, and middle or upper class. Critics say it’s easy to show how
predominantly middle-class professional people can connect to one another in
different countries. But add race and socioeconomic status and it’s a different
ball game.
So ABC recruited Petey Pierre and
Kristina Stewart Ward, then an editor for Hampton Style magazine who split her
time between the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the Hamptons on Long Island,
where she hobnobbed with celebrities. Ward’s assignment: Get to Pierre.
Ward was sure she could connect with
him in just a couple of steps. She first called her friend James, who worked at
Asprey, a store known for its luxury jewelry. She remembered having a
conversation with him once in which he mentioned a fellow employee who boxed.
James promptly put her in touch with that person, a woman named Michelle.
Michelle put Ward in touch with her trainer, Michael Olajide, a former
middleweight contender, who owned a gym in Manhattan’s fashionable Meatpacking
District. He directed Ward to Bruce Silverglade, owner of Gleason’s Gym in
Brooklyn. As it turned out, Silverglade not only knew of Pierre’s
Bedford-Stuyvesant gym, he knew Nate Boyd, Pierre’s trainer. It was Boyd who
made the final connection. When Ward arrived at the gym, both Pierre and Watts
were there. “It was amazing,” Watts recalls. “Pierre was blown away.”
Unlike the people who participated in
Milgram’s and Watts’s experiments, Ward and Pierre were motivated by a camera
crew and a mention on ABC News. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
Most people don’t have that.
Nevertheless, for Watts the TV experiment provided another bit of evidence that
the idea of six degrees of separation has a lot of truth behind it. Kleinfeld
is more skeptical. “I still find one of the most interesting questions to be
why people so much want to believe that we live in a global village, all
holding hands.”
More than a trillion tons of methane
lie trapped in permafrost and under frozen lakes in the Arctic. As the region
thaws, the gas—a huge potential source of alternative energy—is bubbling out,
simultaneously attracting venture capitalists and worrying climatologists. The
U.S. Geological Survey estimates that methane locked in ice (known as hydrates)
could contain more organic carbon than all the world’s coal, oil, and
nonhydrate natural gas combined. But that isn’t the only reason to keep track
of methane release. Because of the way methane absorbs warmth radiating from
Earth, it is as much as 21 times more heat-trapping—and thus
climate-warming—than carbon dioxide. Yet current models of climate change do
not take into consideration the potential impact of methane. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
Katey Walter, a researcher at the
University of Alaska at Fairbanks, has spent the past few years mapping and
measuring hot spots of methane emission in the rapidly melting regions of
Alaska and Siberia. In a recent study, Walter and her team predict that if
these methane reservoirs melt over the next 100 years, the gas released could
re-create climate conditions that prevailed during a 2,500-year warming spell
that began 14,000 years ago.
Walter mapped likely methane deposits
across the region; quantified how much methane, formed when permafrost melts,
is bubbling out of current lakes; and compared that with the amount emitted
from methane-laden sediments taken from ancient frozen lakes. She determined
that 11,000 years ago methane released from thawing lakes contributed 33 to 87
percent of atmospheric methane. After that, melting slowed for the next 9,000
years and the lakes refroze. But now due to global warming over the past 100
years, methane release in the Arctic seems to be accelerating, Walter says, and
left unchecked, it will continue to rise well above the levels found 10,000
years ago.
A 386,000-square-mile tract of
permafrost in Siberia contains as much as 55 billion tons of potential methane,
Walter says —10 times the amount currently in the atmosphere. Several
companies, including BMW, have expressed interest in methane-to-energy
technologies for large-scale operations. Walter sees the benefits of using
methane as an energy http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx
source as twofold: “Not only does it
prevent a potent greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere by converting it
to weaker greenhouse gases—water vapor and carbon dioxide—but using it on-site
would also reduce the demand for other fossil-fuel sources.”
For astronauts toiling in the close
quarters of the International Space Station or on a shuttle to Mars, an
ordinary germ would be risky enough. But a recent experiment published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that a microbe can
turn even more dangerous in space than on Earth. In that study, a bacte–rium particularly nasty for
humans—salmonella—was shown to become more virulent after just 83 hours of
growing in space.
The experiment on the space shuttle
Atlantis was designed to explore how a lack of gravity affects disease-causing
microbes in space. Astronauts aboard the space shuttle grew the salmonella, and
back on Earth researchers used it to infect a group of mice. For comparison,
bacteria grown in a laboratory on Earth in normal gravity infected another
group of mice. The mice infected with the space-grown germs had a mortality
rate almost three times higher than that of mice given germs grown in normal
gravity.
Researchers noticed that while on
board the space shuttle, the salmonella encased themselves in a biofilm, a
protective coating that is notoriously resistant to anti–biotics. Several follow-up experiments
on space shuttle flights over the next few years will look to see whether other
bacteria undergo similar changes in virulence in microgravity. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
1 Arguably the inspiration for much
science fiction traces back to classical mythology. Think of it—Earthlings
abducted by beings from the sky, humans morphing into strange creatures, and
events that defy the laws of nature.
2 Birth of the (un)cool: In 1926
writer Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, the first true science-fiction
magazine.
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below
3 Gernsback loved greenbacks. He tried
to trademark the term science fiction, and he paid writers so little that H. P.
Lovecraft later nicknamed him “Hugo the Rat.”
4 Rat’s revenge: The most famous
sci-fi writing award is called the Hugo.
5 Writers for the early pulp magazines
would often write under multiple pseudonyms so they could have more than one
article per issue. Ray Bradbury—taking this practice to another level—used six
different pen names.
6 Serious science-fiction heads say
sci-fi carries schlocky, B-movie connotations. Many prefer the abbreviation SF.
7 Prominent physicists and space
travel pioneers have (often secretly) contributed to SF lit. German rocket
genius Wernher Von Braun wrote space fiction and was an adviser to sci-fi
movies such as Conquest of Space.
8 During the 1960s, James Tiptree Jr.
penned sci-fi classics like Houston, Houston, Do You Read? but was so secretive
that people suspected he was a covert government operative. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
9 At age 61, Tiptree was outed—not as
a spy but as outspoken feminist Alice B. Sheldon.
10 One of the more famous works in the
growing field of gay sci-fi is Judith Katz’s Running Fiercely Toward a High
Thin Sound, about a woman who bolts from her overbearing Jewish family to the
mystical all-lesbian city of New Chelm.
11 Irony alert: Ray Bradbury, one of
the world’s most influential SF writers, studiously avoids computers and ATMs
and claims he has never driven a car.
12 Not to be outdone, sci-fi legend
Isaac Asimov wrote about interstellar spaceflight but refused to board an
airplane.
13 Neal Stephenson’s acclaimed 1992
novel Snow Crash has inspired two major online creations: Second Life (derived
from Stephenson’s virtual Metaverse) and Google Earth (from the panoptic Earth
application).
14 Meanwhile, in the humble
brick-and-mortar world: Sci-fi author Gene Wolfe helped develop the machine
that cooks Pringles, while Robert Heinlein conceived the first modern water
bed.
15 Sexual liberation plays a big role
in Heinlein’s books, which really puts the water-bed thing into perspective.
16 In Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001, the HAL
9000 computer discusses its feelings and Pan Am flies passenger shuttles to the
moon. After the book’s release, Pan Am announced a real-life list of passengers
waiting to go to the moon; Walter Cronkite, Ronald Reagan, and 80,000 others
signed up.
17 Forty years later, computers can’t
discuss printer drivers, let alone emotions, and Pan Am has been dead for 17
years.
18 When sci-fi visionary Philip K.
Dick inadvertently re-created a Bible scene in his book Flow My Tears, the
Policeman Said, he became convinced that the spirit of the prophet Elijah had
overcome him, kicking off a long bout of schizophrenia.
19 After Dick’s death, fans built an
android likeness of him that mimicked his mannerisms and quoted his writings.
20 In 2005, the Dickbot was misplaced
by a baggage handler. It remains at large.
Several outbreaks of ciguatera fish
poisoning have been confirmed in consumers who ate fish harvested in the
northern Gulf of Mexico, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday.
The FDA said that fish such as
grouper, snapper, amberjack and barracuda represent the most significant threat
to consumers. They feed on fish that have eaten toxic marine algae. The toxin
is stable in the tissue of living fish and does them no harm. But larger
carnivores have higher concentrations of the toxin in their tissues. As a
result, the greatest risk of poisoning for humans comes from the largest fish.
Symptoms of ciguatera poisoning
include nausea, vomiting, vertigo and joint pain. In the most serious cases,
neurological problems can last for months or even years. Several outbreaks of
the illness were confirmed in Washington, D.C., and St. Louis, the FDA said.
Overall, there have been at least 28 reported cases across the country, with
the first case being reported in late November.
The fish linked to the illnesses were
harvested near the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, an area of 56
square miles in the northwestern Gulf. The FDA recommends that processors not
purchase fish harvested near the sanctuary.
Ciguatera is common in fish living in
tropical and subtropical regions, including the Caribbean Sea, the South
Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. But the FDA has considered it rare for fish
in the northern Gulf of Mexico to have the toxin.
The FDA warned processors to reassess
their hazard control plans as necessary, and that failure to take proper
precautions may cause products to be considered adulterated by the agency.
Consumers who think they may have
ciguatera poisoning are encouraged to report their symptoms and what fish they
ate to a doctor or local health department.
According to the Chinese calendar, the
Year of the Rat begins tomorrow. But here it may have started sooner:
Unexpected changes in Vietnam's food chain and diet have sparked a
rodent-eating bonanza.
Due to bird flu, field rats have
become a popular food in Vietnam. Watch how rats are caught and prepared, and
see WSJ reporter James Hookway have a taste.
In Tu Son, a small village sitting
near the banks of the Red River, rat hunter Ngo Minh Tam reckons
"99%" of the people regularly dine on rat meat, an estimate local
street vendor Nguyen Thi Le supports. "I've sold two kilos [almost 4.5
pounds] in the past quarter hour," she boasts, displaying a large metal
bowl of skinned and cleaned bodies.
Rat-based cuisine is beginning to
catch on in the big cities as well. Handwritten signs in some of the backstreets
of Hanoi offer cash in return for freshly caught rat. "Both Vietnamese and
foreign tourists are eating more rat meat these days," says Pham Huu
Thanh, proprietor of the Luong Son Quan restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City, the
former southern capital Saigon. Mr. Thanh serves rat grilled with lemon grass
or roasted in garlic for around 60,000 Vietnamese dong, or $4, a serving. (Rat
may taste like chicken, but with a tiny rat drumstick between your fingers,
it's hard to pretend it really is.)
Rats have been a delicacy in Vietnam's
rural areas for centuries, with recipes dating back 150 years. For a long time,
however, this country's big city folk were generally less enthusiastic, often
associating the animals more with garbage-digging vermin than mouth-watering
entrees.
Nguyen Huy Duc stir-fries some rat.
Smoking seems to help mask the smell.
But in 2004, flare-ups of bird flu
claimed scores of lives here and prompted many diners to search for alternative
sources of protein. Demand went up, but paradoxically supply did too. That's
because rats' natural predators -- snakes and cats -- are increasingly finding
themselves on the menus of posh restaurants frequented by wealthy Vietnamese.
In the Le Mat district of Hanoi,
dozens of restaurants specialize in snakes either farmed for the table or
caught by hunters. Other snakes are shipped to China, where they are also
considered a delicacy. A booming economy has caused snake prices to double in
the past year in some places to roughly $18 a pound.
And despite a 1998 government ban on
cat consumption enacted to control the rat population, felines are also
sometimes eaten at some restaurants; on menus, they appear as "little
tiger."
"If people are eating the rats'
natural predators, then that means more rats for us," says the spry Mr.
Tam as he pursues his quarry one recent morning. The 53-year-old farmer and
part-time taxi driver supplements his income by hunting the rodents in the
fields and industrial estates around this village on the outskirts of Hanoi.
He is joined in the hunt by his
friends Ngo Van Phong, 55, and Nguyen Huy Duc, 53, and his two trusty dogs, Muc
and Ki. The party gets lucky on some disused land at the back of the Tong Thanh
Dong Packaging factory. Muc catches the scent of a rat. After a brief chase she
burrows her muzzle into a grass embankment and wags her tail furiously -- a sign
she has found a candidate for lunch. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
Digging Into the Ground
Messrs. Tam and Duc leap into action,
digging into the ground, while Mr. Phong secures the rat's possible escape
routes. Mr. Duc pulls dry straw from a canvas sack, stuffs it into holes in the
embankment and sets it on fire. As the fire takes hold, a fleeing rat ends up
instead in a bamboo funnel which Mr. Tam placed over a hole.
GROUND RAT MEAT AND CHILI
Ingredients:
Two field rats, chopped into quarters
Two chopped cloves of garlic
Half cup of lemon leaves
Half a cup of dried chili peppers
Quarter cup of fish sauce
A dash of salt
• Mash up the chili peppers and add
fish sauce to moisten the mixture. Then added the chopped garlic.
• Place the lemon leaves in a bowl of
water to soak.
• Heat a frying pan over an open flame
and add vegetable oil. Then add the chili pepper mixture. When sizzling, add
the rat meat. Stir vigorously until cooked, and then add the lemon leaves.
Simmer for five minutes, adding water as necessary to keep it moist.
• Serve with steamed rice.
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