Politics, Religion

PAS claims “half-naked” female students at Universiti Malaya party. Does not deliver.

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Like any hot-blooded male, I thought that news reports that female students at Universiti Malaya had attended an event on campus “half-naked” would lead to some racy photos. So I was disappointed when the photos that eventually turned up depicted nothing that you wouldn’t be able to see on any ordinary day in Kuala Lumpur. The accusations were made by an MP for PAS, a Islamic political party, who objected to the students wearing such clothes for a Ladies’ Night event at the university. As any sane person can see, the wonder is that something so insignificant would create such a controversy at all. You can read a detailed chronology of the accusations and public relations mess this has caused in the Malay language here. It’s pretty sad that the deputy minister had to even concede that such attire should not be allowed in the university lecture halls.

As a poster on LYN, where I picked up this news from, commented, this is rather insulting to the female students who attended the event. If anything, they’re the ones who deserve an apology from that PAS MP. As a Malaysian, I’m convinced that PAS is a far better alternative than the ruling National Front but cheap shots like this for the conservative crowd are making the party lose points among moderates. There certainly are PAS politicians who sound intelligent, reasonable and can act as an advocate for Islamic values without coming across as a barbarian. Take this opinion piece by Khalid Samad, PAS MP for Shah Alam for example. He writes:

I remember Datuk Seri Tuan Guru Abdul Hadi Awang’s lecture where he told us of a case in the time of the Prophet. A man came and admitted to the Prophet that he had committed adultery and requested that he be punished. The Holy Prophet remained silent and turned away from him. The man came in front of the Prophet and repeated his admission and request. The Holy Prophet responded in the same manner, turning away from him. The man came in front of the Prophet again and repeated the admission and request for the third time. The Prophet then asked the companions who were there witnessing this incident to take the man away and punish him as he requested.

Later the companions returned and reported to the Prophet that the man, prior to being punished, had a change of heart and ran away. They chased him and meted out the punishment. The Holy Prophet looked at his companions and asked: “Why did you chase him? You should have let him go”.

From the short story it is clear that there is no zealousness in the meting out of punishment. The Prophet only consented when the man showed great remorse for having sinned and wished himself to be cleansed. However, if that was no longer the case, the need was no longer there. Note also how the man was not questioned who his partner was. No thumbscrews. No witch hunt.

Actually it is this kind of zealousness which the non-Muslims fear from Pas and this is where we must emulate the spirit of the Islam more accurately. We should not become zealous moralists who wish to enforce their moral code on others. As I always say, preach, reason and argue with them in the best of ways. Never give them the impression that we wish to impose something on them irrespective of how noble the intentions. That was the way of the Prophet and that too must be our way.

If only all PAS politicians would heed those words.

Politics

Are you responsible for trash dumped on your property without your permission?

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Just because I love pondering questions about personal responsibility, here’s the latest one that’s come to my attention. The Daily Telegraph has a report on an Earl, that is one those filthy rich heriditary nobles who make the U.K. look so anachronistic, who is being sued by his local council for having one million old tyres and over a thousand tonnes of shredded rubber on his land. The problem is that the tyres were dumped on the Earl’s lands without his knowledge or his permission. However, because the unscrupulous businessman who was responsible for dumping them and who  has already been convicted and jailed for two months back in 2002 doesn’t have the money to properly dispose of the tyres, the local council is forcing the Earl to pay to clean the mess.

It seems that the tyres were dumped there quite a while back and the council issued an order back in 2004 to the Earl to dispose of them in an environmentally safe manner and the deadline was set for 2006. Since then, the Earl’s estate has managed to dispose of two thirds of the tyres at their cost but with over 350,000 old tyres on the property, the council has threatened to prosecute the Earl for not complying with its order. As you might expect, dealing with this much trash costs a considerable amount of money. While it is true that the Earl can afford it, should he bear that cost when he was not responsible for dumping the trash in the first place?

The article could do with some additional details but there seems to be plenty of blame to spread around and no easy answers. My gut instincts are that the council should pay the costs of cleaning up the tyres but should try to recover money from the parties actually responsible for creating the mess in the first place. Even if the actual businessman who dumped the tyres doesn’t have the money, it’s obvious that he was paid by someone to dispose of the tyres. It’s likely that he snagged the contract with an unrealistically low bid without having any intention to do the work in the proper way and the company or companies involved accepted his bid and paid the money just to make the problem go away. If this is the case, it might be possible to sue those companies for hiring an unlicensed contractor in the first place. If no money is forthcoming, then some jailtime, considerably more serious than a mere two months, might be in order for all those involved in the dumping.

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (February ’09)

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I’ve only noted one science article of any interest this month. Perhaps the financial crisis is taking its toll on scientific research as well? This one is from The Economist and covers how social animals make collective decisions. One study by Christian List of the London School of Economics and Larissa Conradt of the University of Sussex examined how bees choose a site to migrate to and start a new nest. As described, scouts are sent out to find suitable locations and when they get back they perform the bees’ infamous waggle dance to tell the rest of the hive what they’ve found out. The longer the dance goes on, the better the site. The entire hive needs to sort out which site is the best one and make a collective decision to move the queen and the worker bees to it.

The scientists found that the hive manages to make extremely reliable decisions even though there are only minor differences in quality between the sites. In order to find out how they did this, they created a computer model to simulate the results from different variables. They found that two aspects of their decision-making process were crucial towards correctly determining the best course of action: one, freely sharing information between the scouts and the rest of the hive and two, the independence of other bees to confirm the scouts’ findings by following their routes, checking out the site for themselves and then confirming the results to the rest of the hive by performing waggle dances of their own.

The implications for human behavior are obvious, though I think that the attempt by The Economist to link this to the theories of the 18th-century philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet, who believed that decisions taken collectively by a large group of people are more likely than those taken by a select few, is a bit of a stretch.

Fun

Can you hear this?

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A while back I wrote a post on how shopkeepers in the UK were using a device that continuously emits a high-frequency whine to deter youths from loitering near their business, while being inaudible to older adults. Someone on QT3 recently posted a link to a website that allows visitors to download and play something similar, so that you can hear for yourself if the sound is audible to you. It turns out that despite being 33 years old, both my wife and I could hear this sound, and, yes, both of us find it extremely unpleasant and annoying.

Someone else then posted that students in the UK were using similar sounds as the ringtone of their mobile phones, allowing them to ring in class while being inaudible to their teachers. I can only imagine the barely suppressed glee in the classroom as all the students are able to plainly hear something that the teacher can’t notice at all. You can download these ringtones here and see at what frequency your ability to hear the sound stops. Both my wife and I could hear only up to the 15 kHz version which is consistent with the website’s claim that it can only be heard by those aged 40 years and below.

Try it for yourself and let me know your results.

Games

The Dark Heart of Africa

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I’ve been looking to play something a little more actioney and a little less cerebral after finishing Space Rangers 2 earlier this month. Ideally, I’d be playing either Grand Theft Auto IV or Saint’s Row 2 right about now, but the PC ports of both of these games turned out to be nothing short of awful. I’ll probably break down and get one or both one of these days anyway, but not right now. Far Cry 2 wasn’t a game that was originally on my must-buy radar at all, but it generated some very interesting and conflicted discussion on QT3 and Tom Chick named it as his best game of 2008, so that’s how I found myself in the dark heart of Africa.

My first impressions of the game after its version of the introductory tram ride: man, is this game hard or am I just getting old? As per standard procedure when playing any type of shooter, I’d turned the difficulty level up one notch from normal. This is a habit I’d developed as shooters have become more and more mainstream and consequently easier. But at hardcore difficulty Far Cry 2 was kicking my ass without breaking a sweat. I’d be minding my own business in the jungle, come under fire and end up dying in short order while I’m running around like a headless chicken trying to see where the hell the bullets are coming from. I’m not ashamed to say that I quickly dropped back to normal difficulty. Things are much more manageable now, but still challenging enough that  get killed regularly if I’m just a little too reckless.

Other than being difficult, the game is also incredibly immersive. I’d followed the prevailing advice on QT3 and turned off music in the game to enhance the effects. I’ve actually been in Africa before, and I agree that this game nails it. Claustrophobic jungle trails that force you to rely on audio cues to know if any enemies are nearby. The overwhelming hugeness and openness of the savannah, so vast that it seems land and sky are joined and the world is a bubble around you. The graphics are quite Crysis level quality, but the fantastic environmental effects, day-night cycles and far greater variety in landscapes more than make up for that. So far, it also seems like it’s going to be quite a bit longer than Crysis or most shooters, so it’s looks like I’m going to be stuck in Africa for a while.

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Personal Life

WordPress.com Stats tells me humanity is hopeless

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I’ve been pretty lazy about checking my site’s statistics for a while now. As such, I’ve found the new feature that automatically shows you the most popular plug-ins for WordPress and installs them automatically if you like them to be very useful. One of these plug-ins shows me some basic statistics on how many visitors have stopped by my blog and what they’re reading right on the Dashboard. Now, I know that my blog will never grow to have much of a readership, but I do like to know at least some people are reading my stuff and I’m curious about how often people find some of my old stuff and dig them out to read.

Unfortunately, what the stats tell me is pretty depressing. Over the last two days, nearly forty percent of my traffic is to just one page: Sex Cards in The Witcher. Now I know sex sells, but this is rather more skewed than I’d expected. One thing I am glad of is that my review of Irrational Man continues to get a steady dribble of readers. It’s probably one of the best pieces I’ve ever written and I’m rather proud of it. Other than that, I seem to have hits on my reviews of the newer games. Good to know the truth I guess.

News & Politics

Why is the U.S. so reluctant to nationalize its banks?

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I’ve posted about this on QT3 before and I’m saying it again. If the U.S. government is going to be bailing out its banks with public money, it might as well go ahead and nationalize them. But despite calls to do so and on again, off again speculation, that’s not on the cards. Now, I’m a libertarian, so the idea of nationalizing industries that should rightly be in private hands usually doesn’t sit well by me. In this case, however, it’s a straightforward matter of calling a spade a spade. If the banks in question are insolvent and are being kept in business only through public funds, then they’re already nationalized whether you want to call them that or not. After all, U.S. politicians and the general public certainly feel like they have the final say on how the banks should operate and how they should spend their money, exactly as if they were owned by the U.S. government.

The stated reason for not going the nationalization route, that the economy usually works better when the banks are in private hands, makes no sense here either. This statement is generally true and it is true only because private parties, acting for their own interests, are usually better at judging risks and prospects than government bureaucrats. However, they can do this only if they are free to make decisions as they see fit without having their hands tied by the government. In this case, they’ve had their shot and they spectacularly failed to manage the risks. Their shareholders and creditors, having made poor decisions, should be punished by having their investments wiped out. If other banks don’t have the ability to step up to fill the vaccuum , the U.S. government should go ahead and just do it. If the argument is that the government doesn’t have the human expertise and experience to run the banks, well, there’s plenty of unemployed bankers to pick from.

The current setup is the worst of both worlds. The private banks are kept in business through public funds, which is like rewarding the losers and punishing the winners, in this case the many perfectly healthy smaller banks in the U.S. who were wise enough to stay out of the subprime mess and could stand to gain new business if the big banks went bust. At the same time, the banks are private in name but in reality are obliged to act according to the whims of government officials. Like all industries, banks should be either all private or all public. These public-private hybrids are just asking for trouble by creating moral hazards left and right. My own suspicion is that the U.S. government, knowing the true size of the big banks’ toxic assets, is afraid that they might be big enough to bring down even mighty Uncle Sam if the government were to explicitly take on all of their liabilities. That would truly be a nightmare scenario but obfuscation serves no one interests. The sooner the true extent of the damage is revealed, the sooner we can all start rebuilding.

The unexamined life is a life not worth living