Category Archives: Europe and the world

Twice as Fast

Posted on by
25

Four years ago, I was boggled to realize that astronomers had been finding planets around other stars at an average rate of one per month since the first exoplanet around a main-sequence star was discovered in 1995.

On Monday, scientists from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced that they had found 32 new exoplanets in recent work. Moreover, that brings the total found to roughly 400. Instead of discovering a new planet every month, the average is now much closer to every two weeks.

What is the goal? The astronomers announced their findings at a conference titled, “Towards Other Earths: perspectives and limitations in the [Extremely Large Telescope] era.” The ESO instruments have led to the detection of 24 of the 28 known exoplanets with masses of less than 20 times the earth’s. The technology to spot earth-like planets around other stars is either on the drawing board or under construction. Key puzzles are now in how to characterize atmospheres around exoplanets, and how to deduce other characteristics of earth-like planets that the astronomers expect to find.

And in two weeks, astronomers will likely have found another planet around a different star.

Obama. Nobel.

Posted on by
29

Holy smokes. What will the man do for an encore?

From the BBC:

US President Barack Obama has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

The Nobel Committee said he was awarded it for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”.

Reuters quotes from the citation (The Nobel servers are slammed and super-slow just at the moment):

“Very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” the committee said in a citation.

Wow.

The Fistful Option

Posted on by
1

So, the planned ballistic missile defence installations in Europe have been cancelled, and the US is looking instead at deploying ships with an upgraded version of the Aegis air-defence missile system in European waters, backed up with mobile and airborne radars. (There’s a lot of detail here.) This is sense. It’s sense for a number of reasons:

Firstly, the GMD system that was originally proposed has a famously poor track record, so the concrete advantages to be gained from it were dubious. The SM-3 missile and the Aegis radar/computer complex have done much better, and have the huge advantage of being useful in other tactical roles. And they have significant scope for further improvement.

Secondly, it’s much more likely that any threat to NATO with missiles would involve short- or intermediate-range missiles rather than ICBMs – they are easier to make, more available, and more usable in the context of “not triggering a nuclear strike from the Americans or Russians”. The Aegis system was designed in large measure to deal with precisely these threats; the GMD was designed to intercept intercontinental missiles on their way to the US, and would have been vulnerable to shorter-ranged rockets. However, Aegis does have the potential to engage longer-ranged missiles early in their flight as part of a boost phase defence.

Thirdly, it doesn’t involve stationing a very long range radar very close to the heartland of Russia.

Fourthly, it’s actually in production now, and therefore represents technology under active incremental development rather than an experimental job.

Taken together, you have to wonder who would have ever thought the GMD installation was a good idea. The answer was, roughly, “neocons”; to a large extent, the fact that it pissed off the Russians was a feature not a bug. The cattle-market between Poland and the US over the issue also demonstrates that even the Poles were a lot keener on the side benefits of the deal – i.e. US security guarantees and a great deal of modern equipment for their armed forces – than the actual rockets themselves.

After all, as the system didn’t really protect Poland, it was a pretty weird way to signal Atlantic solidarity and deterrent support. For all these reasons, we blogged back in June, 2007, it was an awful idea and the seaborne option was far better.

End of the Line?

Posted on by
3

From the New York Times:

Ertugrul Osman, who might have ruled the Ottoman empire from a palace in Istanbul, but instead spent most of his life in a walk-up apartment in Manhattan, died Wednesday night in Istanbul. He was 97. …

Mr. Osman was a descendant of Osman I, the Anatolian ruler who in 1299 established the kingdom that eventually controlled parts of Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Mr. Osman would have eventually become the Sultan but for the establishment of the Turkish Republic, proclaimed in 1923.

He is survived by his second wife, and had no children.

Born in 1912, Mr. Osman was the last surviving grandson of an Ottoman emperor; his grandfather, Abdul Hamid II, ruled from 1876 to 1909. …

As a young man, Mr. Osman ran a mining company, Wells Overseas, which required him to travel frequently to South America. Because he considered himself a citizen of the Ottoman Empire, he refused to carry the passport of any country. Instead, he traveled with a certificate devised by his lawyer. That might have continued to work had security measures not been tightened after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In 2004, he received a Turkish passport for the first time.

Is there a pretender now?

No law beyond the twelve mile limit

Posted on by
8

This morning the BBC had news that the MV Arctic Sea may have been hijacked in the Baltic and sailed through the Straits of Dover before vanishing. There is probably less to this than meets the eye – for all the speculation of pirates and illegal arms transfers, this looks like a commercial dispute being solved using Russian traditional law and custom. But it raises a more general point.

Continue reading →

Two Tetris’ Worth

Posted on by
Reply

Over at another blog, I was asked what I thought about Obama’s visit to Moscow, how it was playing in Tbilisi and what it meant for Georgia. Here are my two tetris’ worth:

Saakashvili is pleased that the only explicit area of disagreement mentioned between the US and Russia was Georgia; Obama made time in his statement to reiterate that the US supports the territorial integrity of Georgia. Obama also said that his discussions of Georgia with Medvedev had been “frank,” the next best thing in diplo-speak to “full and frank,” which generally indicates thrown crockery.

On the other hand, Obama also clearly indicated where Georgia is on the US list of priorities in his administration: after nuclear disarmament, Afghanistan, non-proliferation in re Iran and North Korea. Much as I like Georgia, that’s a sensible set of priorities for the US. I hope that Georgian authorities will have read Obama’s signals the same way.

Interestingly, there are some signs of Abkhaz discontent. Russia has apparently been high-handed in setting up the details of guarding some of the self-declared external Abkhaz border, and is also presenting a different version of where the notional Russian-Abkhaz border lies. (Not surprising, all things considered.) Anyway, not everybody who’s anybody in Abkhazia likes that approach. And as I read through the history of the region, I find that Abkhazia in particular has made its way by cozying up to one side of regional power struggles and then shifting a bit when the embrace becomes too close, eventually changing partners. I don’t think that a new dance is about to begin, but complete subservience to Russia is not necessarily what all of the Abkhaz had in mind.

The Glorious Fourth

Posted on by
Reply

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Continue reading →

Iranian elections, with SCIENCE

Posted on by
6

Georg Hoffmann of PrimaKlima has turned away from climatology for a moment to carry out an interesting statistical analysis of the Iranian election results. Bizarrely, the percentage split between the incumbent and the closest rival remained entirely stable throughout the count – an R2 value of 0.999. But even more bizarrely, the lead for Ahmadinejad doesn’t correlate with anything – as if the uniform national swing beloved of psephologists was real, or for that matter, as if someone had simply shifted the numbers across the board. For comparison, he ran the same exercise for the 2005 German elections, which shows a wide scatter of points with a concentration of big CDU leads in the south.

Then, however, comes the genuinely scientific bit. What would Benford’s law, the principle that in most data sets there is a large excess of numbers that begin with low digits, and that therefore fake data can be identified by its divergence from this, make of it? (The data, by the way, is available here.) Well…it turns out that the results pass the Benford test, which may mean that they are honest or possibly that the Iranian Ministry of the Interior reads blogs, too.