Halfway down the Danube

Balikbayan interlude 1

While Doug and Claudia prepare for their move from the sunny glades of Bucharest to the snowy slopes of Yerevan, I thought I might distract and appall HDTD's regular readership with stories of someplace completely different.

Like Romania, the Philippines is a Latin country. Over twenty-seven hundred years ago, a pair of twins living in a shack on top of a hill in peninsular central Europe had a vision of the future: Marcello Mastroianni walking down the street badly hungover, every hair on his head perfect. That works! they said. And the rest, as they say, was history.

But all such dreams have their dark side. Twenty-six hundred years and three or four waves of Latin expansion and contraction later, the following horrible events occurred, which I recount for the edification of Brett Bellmore:

Sometime in November 1897, sixteen-year-old Faustina Trias left her home in Calumpit, Bulucan, and moved with her husband, Candido Ramos, to Manila, where they entered the domestic service of a certain Doña Ladislana. After about a month, seamstress Martina Rafael and her husband, Pedro de los Santos, a day laborer, offered to employ the couple. Despite their less-than-lofty social status, Rafael and Santos somehow convinced Trias and Ramos to transfer to their service. Doña Ladislana had already advanced Ramos twenty-three pesos, however, so it was arranged that Rafael would pay the debt in full, and Ramos would reimburse her by going to work as a coachman for another Spaniard, Don Catalino Sevilla.

With the young husband out of the way, Rafael took Trias for a walk a few nights later and delivered her to a house of prostitution run by Alejandra Umali. There Trias was locked up and held as a virtual slave for a month and a half and forced to have sexual relations with those who came to the house. After experiencing genital bleeding, she became frantic but could not escape because the other inmates helped keep guard over her.

She finally slipped away one night when Umali was sleeping and no one else was watching. She found her husband in his lodgings at a rice store owned by a barrio captain, and together they went to the tribunal and told their story to a judge. An action was brought in early 1898 against Rafael, de los Santos, and Umali. A médico titular testified that Trias could not attend the preliminary hearings because of the severe venereal disease that she had suffered for more than a month. Umali had disappeared, and the authorities were still searching for her when Admiral Dewey sailed into Manila Bay, throwing the colonial administration into disarray and effectively terminating minor [sic -- CY] legal actions like this one.

(From Ken de Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines.)

I leave the story's application to the contemporary world as an exercise for the reader.

Welcome! and enjoy the hockey!

I swear, everyone is having kids but me:

On Saturday, Feb. 25, at 7:16 p.m. ET, the population here on this good Earth is projected to hit 6.5 billion people.

And before anyone asks, I ain't too worried about population growth. I'm worried about economic growth.

(Factoid first spotted at University of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks' weblog.)

Puppy hug!

I'm really not a pet person. But for this fella, I might make an exception:

I'm just sighing

First, some background! From the 2000 Texas Republican Platform:

Panama Canal -- The Party urges Congress to support HJR 77, the Panama and America Security Act, which declares the Carter-Torrijos Treaty null and void. We support re-establishing United States control over the Canal in order to retain our military bases in Panama, to preserve our right to transit through the Canal, and to prevent the establishment of Chinese missile bases in Panama.

Yes, you read that correctly. Chinese missile bases in Panama. You see, Hutchison Whampoa Limited of Hong Kong has a twenty-five year lease to run the container ports at both ends of the Canal, beating out certain Texas-connected American companies for that privilege. And even though Hutchison Whampoa is run by Li Ka-shing, the richest Chinese businessman EVAR, it's obviously a front for the Communist Party. It's all clear now, no?

And, yes, it said "The Party". The phrase is from an old Texas saying: "The individual is nothing; the Party is everything." I think John Connally said it first. Anyway, Texas has always been known for its Party animals.

Moving on to the 2004 Texas Republican Platform:

Foreign Purchase of Public Property -- The Party opposes any sale or transfer of public properties to foreign or international entities.

Really? Let me get this straight. The Texas Republican Party opposes any sale or transfer of public properties to foreign or international entities.

I got the time. I'll wait. [Update: we have Texas Republican dissent! Like I said, better than the Olympics. Comments closed; enjoy the puppy!]

Halfway to the Permian

Continuing with HDTD's focus on that obscure yet fascinating subject, paleoecology (see 1, 2), friend of HDTD Will Baird live-blogged a teleconference on paleoclimate simulations, recently held in the less-snowy-than-Yerevan paradise of Madison, Wisconsin. I've included a copy of the conference's agenda below the fold, with hyperlinks to WB's comments.

Feb. 16: Morning

8:20am: Refreshments
8:20am: Introduction: Matt and Liu

Session I: Report on paleo CCSM scientific activity: Chair: A. Winguth

A: Pre-Quaternary

8:30am: M. Huber: TBA
9:00am: J. You: Miocene simulation
9:30am: A. Winguth: Permian carbon cycle simulations
10:00am: C. Kelly: Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
10:30am: (video from NCAR) J. Kiehl: Simulations of Latest Permian Atmospheric Chemistry: Implications for Terrestrial Mass Extinction
11:00am: (video from NCAR) C. Shellito: Permian Climate Atmospheric Chemistry Model
11:30pm: Lunch Break

B: Quaternary

1:00pm: S. Vavrus: Testing early human impact hypothesis
1:30pm: Z. Liu: Glacial thermohaline and climate, implication on interhemispheric interaction
2:00pm: B. Briegleb: Transient Holocene simulation
2:30pm: (video from NCAR) C. Ammann: Effect of solar and volcanic forcing on climate in the last millennia
3:00pm: (video from NCAR): N. Mahowald: Dust and sea salt simulations for LGM and Permian
3:30pm: break
4:00pm: D. Archer: CO2 Stew: potential causes of the glacial / interglacial CO2 cycles
4:30pm: C. Jackson: Using Paleodata to constrain CAM3 parametric uncertainties
5:00pm: (video from Purdue) N. Diffenbaugh: Response of the subtropical gyres in the PMIP2 simulations
5:30pm: (video from Nebraska, needs confirmation?) R. Oglesby: deglaciation
6:00pm: (video from Nebraska, needs confirmation?) C. Rowe: TBA

Feb. 17: Morning

8:20am: Refreshment
8:20am: Introduction: Liu and Matt

Session II: Discussions on CSL allocations: Chair: C. Poulson

A. Quaternary Production

8:30am: B. Otto-Bliesner: Interglacial run
9:00am: (video from NCAR) C. Ammann: last two millennia climate

B. Pre-Quaternary Production

9:30am: M. Huber: Pliocene climate
10:00am: C. Poulson: Cretaceous climate

C. Development:

10:30am: B. Otto-Bliesner: update on CCSM development
11:00am: Discussions on current CSL allocations
11:30am: Discussions on the possible future CSL allocations

Handy glossary for the alphabet soup:

CCSM: Community Climate System Model
CSL: Climate Simulation Lab
LGM: Last Glacial Maximum
NCAR: National Center for Atmospheric Research
PMIP2: Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project Phase II

Cambodia notes

Been in Cambodia for a week now.

Truth to tell, I'm not liking it as much as Laos. This may not be fair to Cambodia. I'm working harder, because I have to write both my Laos and Cambodia reports this week -- no way I'm going to get much done in Romania, with kids and moving. So I'm not seeing as much of the city, never mind the rest of the country.

That said, Phnom Penh is kind of a mess.

Random notes on Cambodia:

-- Phnom Penh has even more mosquitoes then Vientiane. Which is saying something.

-- The touts here are more persistent than Vientiane. White guy walking along = money; okay, I got that. But how many times must I say "No, I don't want a motorbike ride" before it sticks?

-- I went to the death camp at Tuol Sleng over the weekend. I don't have much to say about that.

-- In Vientiane, my schoolboy French took me a long way. Everyone over 40 or so spoke French. Here, not; when I try a sentence or two, people just look at me blankly.

It took a while for me to realize that this is because French speakers were particular targets of the Khmers Rouges. IOW, the people who used to speak French are mostly dead.

-- I have a theory that one good measure of the strength of a country's economy is the cutoff point between coins and notes. The higher it is, the stronger the economy.

So, the US cutoff is at either $1 or $5, depending on whether you take the dollar coin seriously. The Euro is at 5 Euros. The Japanese yen is at 500 yen, which was about $4.50 last time I looked.

The Romanian leu is at 1 New Leu, which is about 35 cents. The Albanian lek is at 10 lek, which is about 11 cents.

The Cambodian riel is at 100 riel, which is abou 2.6 cents. You can have a fistful of riels, a horse-choking wad of bills, and it may not be enough to pay for lunch.

Not that you'd use riels anyway. This is a heavily dollarized economy. You can use dollars instead of riel pretty much everywhere, and people seem to prefer it.

-- The King of Cambodia is King Sihamoni, who is a son of the famous King Sihanouk. (Not the oldest son. Cambodia doesn't do primogeniture.) Sihanouk is still alive, but he's in his eighties, and not well; he abdicated in 2004.

Sihamoni is the child of Sihanouk's sixth, last, and favorite wife, Monique. "Sihamoni" is a combination of his parents' names.

-- The Cambodian alphabet is based on the old Pali (Indian) script. It only has 47 or so letters, and is phonetic, so it shouldn't be that hard.

But it is, because it's in the most horrible font. Imagine if all English writing, menus, novels, street signs, blogs, was in the densest, gnarliest, most ornate possible Germanic Gothic script, like a medieval manuscript. That's what Cambodian writing is like.

It's partly a religious thing -- for most of Cambodia's history, Buddhist monks were the literate class, and there wasn't much to read besides Buddhist texts. And partly a nationalist thing. Attempting to reform the font is too close to attempting to replace the alphabet. Which the French tried to do, and which was incredibly unpopular. So, even the Communists kept the current (complicated, difficult, ugly) script.

-- On the plus side, Phnom Penh has a very nice esplanade along the Mekong. In the evening, it's full of picnicking families, strolling lovers, young men playing hacky sack (very popular here), and vendors selling cool drinks and fruit. The river is broader and fuller than in Vientiane, and the lights of the houses across the river reflect and twinkle in the dark waters. It's nice.

-- There is a park down the street from the hotel, and there is an elephant there. Every day. For a small fee, you can ride the elephant around the park. I have never ridden an elephant, so I think I must do this.

I could just eat him, he's so cute!

Things are just the littlest bit crazy around here. My agenda for the next weeks: Go to Germany tomorrow, come back next Sunday. To the US on Monday, come back following Monday. To Yerevan Tuesday, come back Saturday. Party on Saturday, Alan's birthday on Sunday, Doug's birthday on Tuesday, move on Wednesday, drive with cars and kids to Germany Thursday. That's also the day Doug travels to the US for training. The week after we travel from Germany to Armenia. Why from Germany? Don't ask.

And if you got dizzy reading this, imagine the state of my mind right now.

So, in lieu of deep philosophical musings on Guantanamo Bay, here's the latest of the latest but not leastest:

A nice weekend, everyone.

Moving on

It was the last day of school for the boys today.

Why this, you may ask. Well, they are leaving the school because we are leaving Romania.

It's a bittersweet good-bye. Romania has been very good to us, we really loved it here. The boys speak fluent Romanian, we liked their school and the results they had there. We have a nice house and the world's best landlords. We have a great nanny/maid team. We have wonderful friends.

This has been our home for the past 2.5 years.

But we are expats and so we do what expats do: we keep moving on. Right there, behind the horizon, is another country that needs Doug's expertise. New challenges, new friends, a new home, a new school. Things will fall into place.

We are leaving Bucharest in about three weeks.

Good bye, Romania.

Hello, Armenia.

There, below

In terms of raw percentage, I am not a big comics reader. (We all know what that means.) But I have friends in the industry, follow the blogs, accumulate geek lore on the subject et cetera.

Anyway, recently there has been a perk, an upswing of interest in the great American symbolist cartoonist Jack Kirby, now that he's safely dead. I've been an admirer of his art for a long time, and not simply because I look like one of his characters. But let me give you his potted biography first.

James Anthony Kirby was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1917, the second of seven children; his family had settled in Harlem by 1924. Although Kirby dropped out of high school during the Depression in order to help support his family (his father died when Kirby was 10), he attended the night classes of the Harlem Renaissance artist Charles Alston, who also sidelined as a commercial illustrator for the leading fashion magazines of the day.

Alston quickly recognized Kirby's talent. Through Alston, Kirby was hired as a single-panel cartoonist by the Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate at the age of 19. Although the Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate soon folded, Kirby picked up work in the new format of comic books, where he began developing his distinctive style. At the same time, he also picked up a new nickname, from the initials with which he signed his work: JAK. It would last him a lifetime.

Now let me show you his work.

Kirby was not afraid to mine the memories of his violent teenage years on the streets of Harlem:

Like other African-American visionaries of his generation, such as John Coltrane, or his almost exact contemporary Sun Ra, Kirby was not afraid to include intimations of the cosmic in his art:

(Yes, he's skiing. He's the personifcation of Death, and Death skis.)

Still, it wasn't until 1961, working at Marvel Comics with his editor and collaborator, the Chinese-American cartoonist Stan Lee, that Kirby really hit his stride. But that's a story for another day.

Great moments in US duck hunting, part 1

On October 21, 1917, Wisconsin Senator Paul Oscar Husting was tragically killed in a duck hunting accident on Rush Lake in Winnebago County.

Support wildlife. Support Ducks Unlimited.

The National Museum

Visited the National Museum of Laos the other day.

If you find this sort of thing interesting, notes below the fold.

-- Laos has dinosaurs. Who knew? A French scientist named Josué Heilman Hoffet discovered rich fossil beds in the south in 1936. He was supposed to be looking for oil, but there was no oil. There were these cool rocks, though, and also fascinating plants and animals, tribes who had never seen a white man... it sounds like he had quite a time. An old-fashioned natural scientist in the broad sense, turned loose in one of the last places where a talented generalist could have all sorts of fun.

Alas, the Japanese occupation of Indochina cut his studies short a few years later. Hoffet joined the French Resistance in 1944 and died fighting the Japanese in 1945. That was the end of paleontology in Laos for fifty-some years. Digging didn't start again until 1993.

Anyway, dinosaurs.

-- The Plain of Jars. Holy socks. I vaguely knew about this, but I had no idea how weird it was.

See, in eastern Laos, a few hours drive from the capital, there are these stone... jars. Urns, if you like. They're huge, five or six feet tall and three or four feet across. There are hundreds of them, gathered into 50 or so sites. And they're made of solid stone. Most weigh two or three tons, and the bigger ones go over 10 tons.

Archeology can date the jars (they're around 2000 years old) but nobody has the faintest idea who built them, or why. "An unknown culture, that seemed to have access to metal tools, and that really liked big jars," is the best answer so far. It's a Stonehenge, Easter Island kind of thing, except that we know a lot more about those things than we do about the Plain of Jars.

The Museum had a single jar. It was quite something -- solid black stone, crudely worked, big enough to climb into.

If I ever get back to Laos... well. Maybe in a decade or so, when the boys are all at summer camp.

-- Fa Ngum. That was funny. See, we lived in Serbia for two years. And if you know anything about Serbs, you know that they're fascinated by their medieval history... a period of a century or so when Serbia was briefly the dominant power in the region, controlling an empire that stretched from the Adriatic to the Aegean.

Well, Laos also had a medieval empire. King Fa Ngum carved out a kingdom that included most of modern Laos plus a huge chunk of Thailand.

So... he has a huge exhibit at the Museum. Pictures, statue, maps showing his empire, a painting of him crushing the Thais. (I think I already mentioned that the Lao are funny about the Thais.) Clearly the Communists had accepted him as a national hero, feudalism notwithstanding. Was there ever a Communist country where ideology didn't eventually get hijacked by nationalism?

Anyway, the Fa Ngum room was uncannily familiar. It was like being back in Belgrade and looking at the Stefan Dushan exhibit. Convergent evolution in small-country nationalism.

Oh, and: if you ever visit Vientiane, Fa Ngum is the big golden statue on the way in from the airport.

-- Communism. That was interesting too, in a different way. Once you reach the French colonial period, the Museum settles into good old fashioned, no-kidding Communist propaganda. The French are brutal, greedy imperialists; the Laotian royalty and nobility were corrupt and selfish. It's all road gangs and shackles until, thank goodness, the Communist Party of Indochina shows up.

Bronze busts of Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, and Kaysone Phomvihan (the revolutionary leader and first Communist Prime Minister). Paintings, in primitive-socialist-realist style, of valiant revolutionaries defeating the imperialists. Captured American weapons (come to think of it, Serbia has those too). Black-and-white photographs or revolutionary heroes and martyrs. It's old school.

(In more ways than one. Some of the exhibits don't seem to have been updated since about 1987. The photographs of a very young-looking Gorbachev, for instance... apparently he was the only Soviet leader to visit Indochina.)

Anyway. If you're ever in Vientiane, check it out. It only costs a dollar, and the building alone (an old French government building, surrounded by plumeria trees) is worth that. Recommended.

Clowns! Elephants! No, wait - school report

In Alan's school, a liaison book is a little booklet in which the teachers record what the children have learnt or will be learning about in school. Today, I found this:

7/2/06 Alan spent a lot of time, and had a lot of fun, making simple circuits with a battery, two wires and a light bulb.

Alan: How does this light go on?
Mrs D: We have to make a circuit, what do you think we need?
Alan: We need batteries and we need to put it together.
He connects the battery to the bulb with a white wire.
Mrs D: Now what do we need to do?
Alan: We need to wait.
He waits for a few seconds watching the light bulb.
Alan: Maybe we need the red one.
He replaces the white wire with the red one.
Mrs D: What will happen if we use two wires?
He connects another wire to the battery and bulb without help.
Alan: We have made a circus!
Mrs D: Well done, you have made a circuit.

He continued to play for another 5-10 minutes making more circuits.

When we got home, I gave him some of the chocolate cake I had made earlier that afternoon. He sampled (he's not a cake eater) and said:

"Mmmm! Mama, that is the perfect cake."

You gotta love this boy.

Minding the gap

Claudia's sick, Doug's in Laos, so I guess that leaves me to keep y'all amused. Anyone have a deck of cards? No? Then I suppose I'll fill the dead air with mindless chatter links.

My exgf, La Belle Dame Sans Culottes Pitié Loca, sent me this recipe for Vegan Twinkies. As many of you know, Twinkies were developed during the Cold War as a snack food that could survive a nuclear holocaust, like roaches. I have yet to try this version.

The good people at UbuWeb have put up a passel of avant-garde films, including Buñuel's Un Chien andalou and Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. In fact the whole site is filled with nuggets of good weirdness.

Finally, enjoy the saga of Terry Long. Very few things on the Internet make me "laugh out loud", since I am notorious for my humorlessness and general lack of levity. But this did.

Late Superbowl blogging

Saw the game at Scholastic Dave's apartment, which is largely organized around the watching of gridiron. Besides the regular crowd of Wisconsin expatriates, Colbert Report Rich was there, who is moving to Brooklyn now that the show has been picked up. Woo-hoo!

For a good breakdown of the game, see these posts [update: and this one too] by Jim Henley, one of the few libertarians that I don't want to c-punch every time I read him. (It's more like 20 to 30 percent of the time.) Onion John, who is now sports editor there, pointed out that it denied all the narratives leading up to the Superbowl. None of the spotlight players -- Hasselbeck, Roethlisberger, Alexander, Polamalu, or Bettis -- had a great game, and it turned out to be a defensive grind with few fast-moving interludes. (And there's nothing wrong with that.)

As a long-time Holmgren watcher, I am completely not surprised at his coaching meltdown. It brought back memories from his days in Green Bay. Bad ones.

Moment of wonder: watching football great Joe Namath coming out on to the field, totally shellacked. (For European readers, Namath was the long-haired 1960s gridiron star whose image inspired Homer Simpson's mother to become a hippie.) Another moment of wonder: seeing Mick Jagger's Lovecraftian life force re-enter his body during the final minute of his halftime set. Ia! A third moment of wonder: the Discovery Channel's Puppy Bowl. Awww. [And a fourth moment of wonder: congratulations to Pregnant Emma! who was at Dave's place for the game, and to Newborn Carter, who just missed it.]

Bruder Johannes

Today, the flags in Germany are on half mast as former president Johannes Rau is taken to his last resting place in Berlin. Germany mourns a popular president who had constant approval ratings of over 80% during his entire presidency.

The Deutsche Welle Radio had a good obituary:

The devout Christian was known affectionately as Brother Johannes, will largely be remembered for trying to make Germany, deeply traumatized by its Nazi past, a more tolerant nation that would be respected on the world stage.

"I want to be the president of all Germans and an interlocutor for all those who live and work here without a German passport," he said in his inaugural speech in 1999.

[...]

Rau was one of the Social Democratic Party's leading lights and dedicated nearly 50 years to serving the public as a political leader. For more than two decades he served as the premier of Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, before being named the country's eighth president.

During his five years in office, Rau won the respect of a large majority of his countrymen. He made a name for himself as the moral and ethical voice of the country in times of heated political discussion.

[...]

As Germany's president, he urged the nation to open up to foreigners. During the dispute over the country's first immigration law, Rau positioned himself above the political fray and worked to promote better understanding between Germans and foreigners.

In February 2000, he delivered a historic apology to the Israeli parliament for the Nazis' crimes in a watershed moment in bilateral relations.

Rau was a frequent critic of human rights violations around the world, famously taking Chinese leaders to task on a state visit in 2003.

"The goal of my political career is to make human beings' lives in the course of their years a bit more humane," he once said.

I cried when I heard of his death. I have nothing more to add.

Laos, Day Nine

Bullet points about Laos.

-- Laotians are first cousins to Thais, like Spanish and Portuguese, or maybe even Swedes and Danes. But Thailand is a big country -- sixty million or so -- and quite wealthy by regional standards. Laos is much smaller, just six million, and much poorer.

You will be shocked to hear that Thais look down on Laotians as poor, backwards mountain cousins. And that Laotians look at Thailand with a mixture of one part envy, one part admiration, three parts resentment.

This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder whether immortality would be all that.

-- The most popular alcoholic drink in Laos is the national beer: BeerLao. But BeerLao deserves a post of its own. Wait for it.

-- Small, quiet, efficient Japanese air conditioners have colonized most of Southeast Asia. But not Laos. Most aircons here seem to be at least 20 years old, and I've seen a few units that must date back to before the 1975 Revolution. They're big, they're boxy, they're intrusive, and wow are they loud. I've had a couple of meetings progress in installments, because every few minutes the aircon would cut in and BRRRRRROOOOOOMMMMMM shut down conversation for a minute or two.

I know that Laos is the final destination for a lot of Asia's used cars. (Apparently about half the cars on the road here are secondhand from Korea.) I wonder if the same could be true of aircons. It is a little striking how there aren't any new ones.

-- Vientiane is about 18 degrees north latitude, which puts us firmly in the tropics. I knew that, of course, but little things keep surprising me. Geckoes skittering around on the walls. The first prickle and sting of sunburn. The familiar need to drink water and more water. The sudden swift onset of night after sunset. Canopus rising in the southern sky.

I lived in the tropics for seven years, but haven't been back for five. So this is a whole series of sensory taps on the shoulder and tugs on the sleeve.

-- Walking around in the evenings, I've been offered women half a dozen or so times, Marijuana three times, and opium once. This is totally normal in urban Southeast Asia, but it still seems striking in a nominally Communist country.

-- And speaking of sales and marketing, Laos also has the Southeast Asian thing where, as soon as you walk into a shop and look at something, however casually, the shopkeeper is instantly at your elbow. "Sabaidee... good evening... you like?"

This has always seemed counterproductive to me, as I end up either running away ("no, just looking, no, thank you, no, sorry...") or walking around with my eyes resolutely lifted away from the merchandise. Which does somewhat inhibit the shopping process.

But maybe it's just me.

Next: the Museum of the Revolution

Crazy medicine

Both Doug and I enjoyed John Burdett's recent Asian thriller Bangkok 8, set guess where. (It has weird sex, snakes. and revenge! What more do you need?) Anyway, one of the subplots in the book deals with the Asian amphetamine trade. This is not a matter of guys with bad teeth setting up trailers in the middle of nowhere. Well, OK, it is, but instead of manufacturing the crank from scratch, in Asia they extract a precursor from local Ephedra shrubs first. Which brings me to the real point of this post, phytochemistry!

The Ephedra are weird-looking shrubs, sometimes called the joint-firs in English. You can see why. Ephedra itself is a living fossil, one of only three (maybe four) surviving genera of the gnetophytes, until recently thought to be the closest living relatives of the flowering plants. Ephedra have been found from the Cretaceous period, over 65 million years ago. They also have a remarkably odd biochemistry: they produce cyclopropyl amino acids. This may require some explanation.

Amino acids are the building blocks of all proteins. There are twenty principal amino acids, which you can find mention of in all the textbooks, and a whole bunch more of modified ones, for which you have to dig around a little more.

Now, a protein is a polymer, like a plastic. Every protein molecule consists of chains of amino acids stuck together, like Legos. How do they manage this? Every amino acid has an acidic end and a basic end. During protein synthesis, the acidic end of one amino acid is made to react with the basic end on another, and voila! a bond is formed, and the protein increases in length by one more amino acid.

Sounds complicated? It is. But it's a precise and accurate and surprisingly robust system. However, there are certain points where it can be jammed.

Somewhere along the line, Ephedra evolved the ability to synthesize amino acids that contain carbon rings with only three atoms: cyclopropyl groups. This is weird, because this stresses the chemical geometry of the carbon atom almost to its limit. It's not particularly easy for organic chemists to do. And Ephedra does this on a bulk basis.

It appears that Ephedra has evolved this as a form of chemical defense. Large amounts of these variant cyclopropyl amino acids are produced, up to 0.5% of the plant's dry mass. These amino acids are taken up by organisms that use the plant as food. But these variant amino acids, similar in affinity but crazily different in structure to everyday amino acids, gum up the parasite/herbivore's amino acid metabolism, in effect poisoning them in the midst of plenty. They die. Oh the embarrassment.

(In fact, one species of Ephedra is called Ephedra antisyphilitica, although its anti-spirochete action has never been confirmed.)

Except that's not all. Because evolution reuses its biochemistry, it turns out that the common amino acid glutamic acid (or glutamate, same as in MSG) is also a neurotransmitter. Would it surprise you that Ephedra also synthesizes cyclopropyl analogs to glutamate? While they jam up very specific glutamate receptors in vitro, the neurological effects of these chemicals on humans are unknown.

As a completely separate matter, some species of Old World Ephedra also can also be up to 2% its dry mass in ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, compounds chemically very similar to methamphetamine. Hence their use as starting material in illegal synthesis.

However, in New World Ephedra, those compounds are barely detectable in the plant, thus the different style of trailer labs alluded to above.

However (again), a common name for North American Ephedra is "Mormon tea" [1], which suggests some sort of stimulant action is going on, which brings us back to the unknown neurological effects I mentioned before.

Finally, going back to my previous post on paleoecology, the gnetophytes were once much more common than they are now. The genus Ephedra itself dates back to the Cretaceous. It seems likely that its peculiar biochemistry dates back that far as well. What I'd like to know is, what were the selective pressures which caused Ephedra to evolve this complicated biochemistry in the first place? Or, to put it another way, was Ephedra originally dinosaur crank?

[1] This may require some explanation for those three eastern European readers who have read this far. The Mormons are a religous group, mainly found in the American West, who abstain from all caffeinated beverages!!! Apparently, some of them were willing to drink tea made from a living fossil instead. Many Mormons also believe in something much like the first series of Battlestar Galactica, but with Jewish American Indians taking the place of Lorne Greene and killer robots. I don't say it's related to their abstention. I don't say that at all.

Warning! You are reading an international blog...

... or, wait. It is a blog on a US server, so it's a domestic blog. No, no, it deals with international issues, so it's an international blog. Furthermore, two of the contributors are residing outside the US, and one of them even is of foreign nationality! And they log in from Romania! You know, the country with no CIA prisons!

That's not spying! That's just protecting you!

If you got a little confused on the definition of domestic versus international, just read the very informative news release of the White House:

# Domestic Calls are calls inside the United States. International Calls are calls either to or from the United States.
# Domestic Flights are flights from one American city to another. International Flights are flights to or from the United States.
# Domestic Mail consists of letters and packages sent within the United States. International Mail consists of letters and packages sent to or from the United States.
# Domestic Commerce involves business within the United States. International Commerce involves business between the United States and other countries.

All clear now? If your reading comprehension isn't quite up there, you may want to watch this little instructional video which explains the White House release in easily understandable words for you. With graphics!

Don't tell me I didn't warn you. It's your own damn fault if you are reading this.

[You have to open the video in Internet Explorer, I'm afraid. Microsoft is evil.]

Daddy Ravioli

You know how kids have imaginary friends? It seems a perfectly normal thing. The funniest essay I ever read on this topic was by Adam Gopnik, about his New York daughter Olivia and her imaginary friend Charlie Ravioli. (We have this essay in a New Yorker collection.)

My daughter Olivia, who just turned three, has an imaginary friend whose name is Charlie Ravioli. Olivia is growing up in Manhattan, and so Charlie Ravioli has a lot of local traits: he lives in an apartment "on Madison and Lexington," he dines on grilled chicken, fruit, and water, and, having reached the age of seven and a half, he feels, or is thought, "old." But the most peculiarly local thing about Olivia's imaginary playmate is this: he is always too busy to play with her....

It's a great essay. Read it, if you can find it.

Now, my kids don't really do imaginary friends. They do imaginary monsters, oh yes. They talk with people on the phone - but those people don't have names and lives of their own. They are just people on the phone. Oh, and David likes to pretend he's a dog - or sometimes, that he's an octopus. I don't know whether that is healthy but it sure is cute.

But today, today he had me worried.

He was playing hide and seek with himself. Ah - I know what you're thinking - neglected child! Call CPS! Danger!

Not.

We had been playing hide and seek with him for about half an hour. It's sort of boring because he always hides in the same place (a large wooden box in the dining room), and he always crows, "Mommy, I'm here!" After a while, I chose dinner preparation over play time and left him there.

When I came back, I saw him hugging himself and saying, "I love you, David. -- I love you too, Daddy."

"Are you talking with Daddy?" I said, curiously.

He held out his palm and said, "Here's Daddy. Here on hand. Always with David."

It stung. I'm still not sure whether to cry or to laugh. And then - can you just imagine all those shrink bills?

Have you seen my train tracks?

And here's something that all of Germany is laughing about: 5 (five!) kilometers of train tracks were stolen last week near Lohra in Northern Hesse.

Yes, you read that one right. The thieves first sent letters to the neighbors, assuring them of their proper intentions. When the mayor of Lohra got suspicious, he called the Deutsche Bahn and promptly got lost in voice mail hell. The thieves worked on the tracks for some days, ripping them out of the beds with heavy machinery. They subsequently hired a local transport company to ferry the tracks to a scap dealer - the estimated worth about 200,000 Euros.

The people living nearby even made photos of the whole operation:

Private picture, via Oberhessische Presse

No, the tracks weren't in use anymore. The Deutsche Bahn was about to sell the tracks to the city of Lohra. But now the tracks are gone and the sale is off. (Btw, and the thieves never did pay their bill from the transport company.)

If you saw something like this in the movies, you'd say this could never happen in real life... Oh, mein Vaterland.

Justice or not?

Discussing an issue that touches sensitivities is always risky. The signal to noise ratio suddenly drops considerably (see the comments on my earlier post on the VanGoethem trial). But maybe we can try to discuss this topic without losing basic civil behavior.

The problem I have with the VanGoethem trial is the really weak performance of the prosecution.

Let's recapitulate some facts:

The US authorities disregarded the local authorities, namely the police. VanGoethem was brought out of the country under diplomatic immunity, even though there was enough evidence that he had been driving under the influence of alcohol and this alone consitutes a felony under Romanian law (Romania has zero tolerance). The alcohol test performed by the Embassy medical officer showed a blood alcohol level of 0.02. (The breathalyzer test of the Romanian police performed hours before showed a level of 0.09.) It is undisputed that VanGoethem caused an accident in which a taxi was squashed. Teofil Peter died that night. Teofil Peter was cut out of the taxi by Romanian fire fighters. This is in the police protocol.

Here's what the defense did:

For the negligent homicide charge, [Defense lawyer] Stackhouse argued that “there was no evidence presented at all that anybody was even in that taxicab, let alone Mr. Peter.” [Taxis drive by themselves all the time in Romania, everybody knows that.]

Examples of witnesses the prosecution could have presented but did not, Stackhouse contended, include a Romanian police officer who was on the scene of the accident, or the firefighter who helped free Peter’s body from the wreckage, or the ambulance driver. [Why?]

“There could be stronger evidence” to show Peter was in the cab, [Judge] McConnell said after hearing Stackhouse.
Stars and Stripes

Hm. I have to wonder why those witnesses were not presented. It seems rather odd to me. Unprofessional, to say the least.

Let's go on:

To counter the negligent homicide charge, the Marine’s defense team is contending that the traffic signs and the configuration of the Bucharest intersection where the collision occurred are so confusing that even the most competent driver “stood no chance” of avoiding the crash, chief defender Marine Maj. Phillip Stackhouse said during his Tuesday opening statement. [I drive this very intersection almost weekly. I drove there at night, in the rain, in snow and ice. I've never been confused and I never caused an accident.]

Some pivotal elements of that argument include what a flashing yellow light means in Romania as opposed to in the United States and what role the intersection’s multiple stop signs have in relation to the flashing yellow.

VanGoethem’s defenders have hinted that Romanian traffic law and U.S. law differ when it comes to reacting to flashing yellow lights. [As in how? When a traffic light flashes yellow, the traffic signs become effective. VanGoethem ran three stop signs. He had been driving in Bucharest for about 1.5 years by then. How stupid is this man?]

During their testimony Tuesday, the State Department security officers who were VanGoethem’s bosses at the Embassy both said that the Marine did not receive training in local traffic rules when he took his post in June 2003. [Is this a mandatory training? If so, why didn't he receive it? If not, why not squash this argument?]
Stars and Stripes

Can you see where I'm going? The performance of the prosecution was really weak and here in Romania, the people on the streets are wondering. How can this be? How can these ridiculous claims not be refuted? Why were there no Romanian witnesses present?

Romanian prime minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu called the sentence “astonishing and bizarre” and announced that he would financially support the singer’s family to file a civil lawsuit in an American court to ask for moral amends.

The media in Bucharest have had a strong, negative reaction to the sentence, too.

While some journalists put the blame on the authorities, saying that they should not have signed the agreement with the U.S. government that allowed the Marine’s immunity to be revoked, others think the prosecution did not do a proper job.

“I believe that my brother’s killer would have been punished if the prosecution hadn’t been so weak,” said Dorin Peter, in an interview aired by a Romanian private TV station.
Stars and Stripes

VanGoethem, btw, was merely reprimanded. This means that he doesn't get stripped off rank or payments and he can continue his tour which lasts another year. He may not re-enlist but, let's face it, that's not so bad for causing the death of a human being.

Looking at other recent cases of rape, robbery and killings committed by US service personel, one sees a similar liability to protecting the perpetrators rather than supporting local authorities in their work. I just don't like the impression this leaves. Am I being a bit paranoid by thinking that Abu Ghraib might have sent the wrong signal to the troops? Is this a trend or just a statistical quirk?

I'm wondering. And you?

[Btw, Stars and Stripes is the only primary news source on this topic.]

The Mekong, halfway down

The Mekong is low.

It's a bit spooky. Vientiane sits right on the Mekong, and you can see that it's supposed to be a serious river, like the Mississippi or the Danube. It's like a mile wide.

Except it isn't. From the shore -- or where the shore should be -- several hundred yards of dry, bare ground stretch to the water's edge. You have to walk for five or ten minutes before you reach the actual river, huddled mournfully against the opposite bank. At a guess, I'd say half of the Mekong's bed is bone dry right now. You can see that this is a recent thing, because no ground plants are growing on the bare mud flats yet.

Is it normal? I have no idea. It's the dry season now, and in monsoon countries rivers go up and down a fair bit. Maybe this happens every year.

On the other hand, it seems a bit much. Imagine looking out from New York and seeing the Hudson two-thirds dry. It's that level of odd.

Googling shows a lot of "low Mekong" stories from 2004, but nothing more recent. So maybe it's normal.

One fact which may or may not be related: holy cow, there are a lot of mosquitoes in this town. They're everywhere. In my hotel room, in taxis, in the meeting room at the World Bank. Aircon doesn't seem to stop them. They're not overly aggressive -- I've been bitten worse in Maine -- but they're totally omnipresent.

Is it because of the mud flats? Or, again, is this just normal? No idea. That's what it's like sometimes. You come into a country for some short time (two weeks), you spend most of your time in meetings or working in your hotel room, you leave with a lot of unanswered questions.

Oh, well.

[Update, a bit later:] Apparently it's all normal. And when the Mekong gets really low -- which it isn't now -- a determined traveller can wade across; the main channel goes down to just four or five feet of depth.

Cool.

Another nail

Reader Ciprian beat me to it - I was composing a post on the VanGoethem trial yesterday but didn't finish it. Now this:

QUANTICO MARINE CORPS BASE, Va. — A seven-member court martial board on Tuesday found Marine Staff Sgt. Christopher VanGoethem not guilty of the two major charges in the traffic death of Romanian rock musician Teofil Peter.

The board found VanGoethem not guilty of negligent homicide and adultery, but guilty of two lesser charges: obstruction of justice and making false statements.
Stars and Stripes

Picture via Daily News.

This is ludicrous and shameful. I can't find the words to express how I feel about this. This is driving yet another nail into the coffin of what once used to be a positive image of the US in the world.

I need to take a deep breath and step back for a day from this subject, otherwise I will drip sarcasm and derisive comments about the US military judicial system all over the place. I will have a complete post on this tomorrow, complete with inside information from the US Embassy.

(Besides the fact that his affair with Wentworth was blown out of proportion -- what is it compared to killing a human being? - it was an affair and not his first one. It was also not his first accident while drunk. He had a crash in May 2004 which was hushed up by the Embassy. I think VanGoethem got hurt in that accident but I need to check my sources on that one.)