An op-ed guest writer for the New York Times opines:
SIXTY-FIVE years ago, in November 1944, the war in Europe was at a stalemate. A resurgent Wehrmacht had halted the Allied armies along Germany’s borders after its headlong retreat across northern France following D-Day. From Holland to France, the front was static — yet thousands of Allied soldiers continued to die in futile battles to reach the Rhine River.
One Allied army, however, was still on the move.
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.
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.
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?
Osama bin Laden is still at large.
The best work of art about September 11, 2001 is still John M. Ford’s poem, “110 Stories.”
Edward’s commentary, from 2004.
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.
I’m in Uganda this week, and thinking about demographics.
Uganda’s demographics are about as different from Europe’s as possible. Fertility is very high. Birthrates are very, very high. The median age is about 15 years old; most Ugandans are still minors. The “age pyramid” looks more like a Buddhist stupa. Uganda’s current population is just over 30 million, but by 2050 it’s expected to be more like 120 million. At that point Uganda — with a land area a bit smaller than Romania — is expected to have more people than Russia.
There are a couple of ways to look at this.
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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.
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As Andrew Sullivan has chronicled, it has been a couple of exciting weeks for those who hope technology will unleash a wave of democratization. Texts, tweets and technorati have surely played a role. At the same time, Marx predicted the railroad would lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and we all know how that ended.
Another factor that has clearly influenced events is the spread of education –in particular the number of college students. This recent paper suggests that educated people (Socrates aside) are far more likely to support democracy. But again, that may not be the full story. This paper suggests that there is no link between growing education rates and transition to democracy. Given the rapid global advance in school enrollments, alongside growth in access to communications technologies, that suggests we may see more and more dissatisfied democrats living in authoritarian regimes. And falling sales of hemlock.