Elam

The civilization of Elam goes back to at least 3000 BC but lasted several millennia. During my recent trip to Iran I came across the site of an Elamite fortress in central Khuzestan called Cool Farah. From what I understood the guide explained that it had withstood an attack by the Persian king Ashurbanipal, so it existed during the so-called Neo-Elamite II period (c. 770 – 646 BC), although its initial construction could be much older. Here are a few photos of the site as it is today:

Indian and "Arabic" numbers

I just returned from a trip to Iran and Afghanistan, where the people read and write Persian. (In Iran it is called Farsi, the Afghans call it Dari. The two relate to each other like Australian English and US-American English; they are both Persian but have their own characteristics.)
Persian uses the same numerals as Arabic:
However, I discovered that the way numbers are written in Persian and Arabic gives a strong clue to their origin: While Persian, like Arabic, is written from right to left, numbers are written from left to right, even if they occur in a line of text. In other words, they break the flow of reading: The reader arrives at the number from the right, then has to take the number in against the flow of the text, and then revert to right-to-left reading.
It seems clear to me that the reason for this rather strange convention has to be seen in the Indian origin of the Arabian numbers. The Brahmi script, the first script used for Sanskrit, was written from left to right. The Indian number system was first developed in the Brahmi script. When the Muslim scientists learned about the Indian position value number system they introduced it into Arabic in exactly the form as they had found it: They used the Indian numerals and the Indian notation.
While the Persian script remained a mystery for me during the two weeks of my travels, I became quite adept at reading and "translating" Dari numbers, because they follow our way of writing, and in a decimal position value number system you only have to remember ten numerals.

The value of democracy

My discussion of the reasons for the demise of the Soviet Union in lecture 35 may be seen by some as an endorsement of the system of parliamentary democracy. Maybe it is important to emphasize that the principle of democracy, i.e. the exercising of power through the people, can take many forms but that the system of "parliamentary democracy" is not one of them.

Parliamentary democracy is the form of government during the period of fully developed capitalism. It serves the purpose to make the people think that they can exercise power and to hide the fact that the power is and remains in the hands of the ruling class and its agents in parliament. (This does not mean that every parliamentarian works for the benefit of the ruling class, but the system always makes sure that the majority does.) As capitalism matures the political parties become more and more interchangeable, and it becomes more and more difficult to influence future development of society through parliamentary elections.

Experience shows that in a capitalist society real progress does not come from parliaments. Real power by the people is usually exercised though actions outside parliament such as strikes, demonstrations and other forms of direct action. If you need proof look at my other blog, The Woolloomooloo murals.

Minor updates to the text of the lectures

Those who have seen the book version of the web site know that the book follows the text of the lectures. Nevertheless, some minor improvements in the presentation were made during the preparation of the book chapters. As a consequence the book presents some material in a clearer way, and some passages are easier to read in the book than on the web.

In the coming weeks I intend to remedy this and go through the text of the web lectures and associated material to bring them into alignment with the book version. Any changes will be very minor and not change the essence of the text. Amended lectures will be annotated with the date of the last update from now on.

Industrialization in the Soviet Union

In lecture 35 I said: "Supporters of capitalism point towards the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as proof that there is no alternative to capitalism. They ignore that socialism turned the Soviet Union from a backward feudal state into a superpower in a time span of less than 40 years." For today's generation it is indeed difficult to grasp the enormous achievement that the industrialization of the Soviet Union represents. Some figures can provide some background:

In 1923, when the internal enemies of the October Revolution had finally been defeated, "the national income was only one-third of its level in 1913. Industry produced less than one-fifth of the goods, the coal mines yielded only one-tenth, and iron foundries only one-fortieth of their normal output." Many city people were forced to live in the country just to feed themselves: "Russia's cities and towns ... had become so depopulated that in 1921 Moscow had only one half and Petrograd only one third of its former inhabitants." (quotations from David Horowitz: Imperialism and Revolution. London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1969.)

US president Kennedy described the situation in 1963 with these words: "No nation in the historic battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including two-thirds of its industrial base, were turned into a wasteland - a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago." (quoted in Horowitz, loc. cit.)

The bombing of Hiroshima

In lecture 29 I said about the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima: "Whether it was instrumental in bringing Japan to surrender is questionable. The Japanese forces were already exhausted, and surrender could not have been delayed much longer. There can, however, be no doubt that the second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki 3 days later, can only be classified as a war crime."

It appears that I was giving the US military the benefit of the doubt, and this quite unjustifiably. Others have been much more damning in their assessment. The nuclear physicist Patrick M. S. Blackett, who in 1947 received the Nobel price in physics for his work on atomic and cosmic-ray physics, "was the first to point out that the Atomic Bombs dropped on Japan fulfilled diplomatic objectives vis-à-vis the U.S.S.R. rather than military objectives which could not be accomplished by other means." (P.M.S. Blackett: Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy. London: Turnstile Press, 1948; quoted in David Horowitz: Imperialism and Revolution. London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1969.)

In other words, the sole purpose of the Japanese deaths in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki was to frighten Stalin and establish a position of strength for the Cold War. This would place not just the Nagasaki bomb but both bombs into the category of war crime.

Sonification of tides

To say that this post is relevant to the content of Science, civilization and society is stretching credibility, but it has some entertainment value and is related in some way to the discussion of tides in my blog "The tide predicter of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey" of 25 May. In that post I referred to a web page with an animation of Kelvin's Tide Predicter. The same page has a link to "Tidesounds", where tidal constituents are used to produce "musical scores." You can listen to some examples here: Miami harbour entrance, Daytona Beach, Florida, Cordova, Alaska.

The Tide Predicter page says that "the musical patterns were generated by Stephanie Mason at the University of Minnesota Geometry Center, who wrote C-code to generate predicted tides for these ports, and programmed a NeXT-MIDI interface to generate the corresponding soundtracks." You have to admit that the resulting sounds are more of educational/scientific than musical interest. I asked my son Sebastian, who studies music technology at the University of Adelaide, to produce a bit of sonification of some observational data from one of my field studies. He used data from an oceanographic data buoy that recorded (among other things) wind speed and direction, ocean current and temperature and conductivity at various depths in Thorny Passage near Port Lincoln, South Australia. Here is the result: Southern Ocean sounds.

Seb used the observed wind direction to set the rhythm and the battery voltage to control the loudness; he converted the conductivity at 2.5 m depth into marimba, the temperature at 2.5 m depth into soft organ and the salinity at 2.5 m depth (calculated from temperature and conductivity) into drums. As the water moves in and out through the Passage with the tide its salinity and temperature change slightly, so the up and down of the melody mirrors the tide. The variable speed of the rhythm is produced by the passage of atmospheric fronts that cause sudden changes in wind direction. It does make for more interesting music than just tidal heights from a tide table, don't you think?

You can find Seb's own blog here.

The beginning of marine science

In Lecture 26 I said that "the first of the great deep-sea expeditions was undertaken by the British naval vessel Challenger in 1873 - 1876. This was the beginning of the race for the last territories still available for colonization." This correct but somewhat general statement does not explain why research voyages to other continents had to start with the exploration of the greatest ocean depths. The 20-year birthday volume of Oceanography, the official journal of the international Oceanography Society, has just come out and supplies the answer:
The introduction to the "Summary Report on the Scientific Results of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Challenger" of 1895 says: "The desire to establish telegraphic communication between Europe and America gave the first direct impulse towards systematic exploration of the deep sea." (Briscoe, 2008) It appears that again science - in this instance deep sea science - develops only where there is a need for it.
The same Oceanography volume contains an article that documents in detail how after World War II physical oceanography was driven by the needs of imperialist navies to develop underwater warfare. (Munk and Day, 2008)

References:

Briscoe, M. (2008) Celebrating 20 years of The Oceanography Society. Oceanography 21(3), 12-13.
Munk, W. and D. Day (2008) Glimpses of oceanography in the postwar period. Oceanography 21(3), 14-21.

Science, Civilization and Society: the book is out

As announced earlier, the book version of "Science, Civilization and Society" is now available. It can be ordered by referencing the international book numbers

ISBN-10: 363906593X
ISBN-13: 9783639065930

It can also be ordered online from various sellers. Some are listed at the web site "World Civilizations"; just click on the title of this post. It may be worth comparing prices at other sellers - the steep price was set by the publisher, not by me. As of today the lowest price is only available in Europe, unfortunately.

Lomborg's new discoveries: Old wine in new bottles

In Lecture 35 I discussed Bjørn Lomborg as a practician of partisan science, of willfully deformed science designed to counter criticism of the activities of big business and its government associates. In his book The Sceptical Environmentalist" Lomborg tried (in the words of the advertising text on the book's website at Cambridge University Press) to "challenge widely held beliefs that the environmental situation is getting worse and worse". As "a former member of Greenpeace" he argued that the dangers of global climate change are exaggerated and that "there are more reasons for optimism than pessimism." Cambridge University Press even claims that his book "offers readers a non-partisan stocktaking exercise."

This was in 2001, when Lomborg was on his way to become director of Denmark's national Environmental Assessment Institute, a position he held until 2004. Now the world has moved on, and it has become impossible to close one's eyes before the evidence that global climate change induced by human activity will produce disastrous developments if we do not take correcting action very soon. Lomborg, now Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School, found a new platform in the Copenhagen Consensus Centre. Last year he published Cool It - The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, according to his personal website "a groundbreaking book that transforms the debate about global warming by offering a fresh perspective based on human needs as well as environmental concerns."

He continues, talking about himself in third person: "Rather than starting with the most radical procedures, Lomborg argues that we should first focus our resources on more immediate concerns, such as fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS and assuring and maintaining a safe fresh water supply - which can be addressed at a fraction of the cost and save millions of lives within our lifetime."

It is of course befitting for a Professor of Business to see the world exclusively through cost/benefit analysis. It is also not surprising that if you rank today's problems in order of their cost/benefit ratio, supplementing the diet of children in developing countries with vitamin A comes out on top, since some $20 - $30 are returned for every dollar spent, while the return on a dollar spent on greenhouse mitigation could be as low as 90 cents. But what can we conclude from such an exercise? That we should not spend our money on greenhouse mitigation but on vitamin supplements instead?

Lomborg should know - and being a trained academic presumably does know - that cost/benefit analysis does not help us much in the face of crisis if it is not combined with risk analysis. It is also not possible to analyze global problems such as vitamin deficiency in the Third World in isolation. If we ignore greenhouse warming today the children of developing countries will still be worse off in twenty years' time than today, because the entire ecosystem on which their food supply depends will have deteriorated dramatically. But Lomberg's book is not about scientific analysis, it is about selling old wine in new bottles.

The Weekend Australian of 2-3 August quotes Nick Rowley, former climate change adviser to the UK government, as saying that Lomberg is making a fundamental error of logic. "The level of risk we confront is a greater level of risk than virtually any other area. He views these as if they are mutually exclusive; they're not. They're intertwined and you can't see a scenario where under even two degrees of warming the most vulnerable people in the world are not going to be a lot more vulnerable. There are a lot of moral and ethical considerations that need to influence that process as well. It's not just a technical exercise."

As I said in Lecture 35: "It is not the observational evidence that makes Lomborg a partisan scientist, it is the ethical dimension of his science."