correcting a past post

I've corrected a post, "Clueless and Bible Blind", based on an email from someone associated with the Loudoun Independent.  Turns out javasaurus was right and the "dc" was that Chiropractic Doctor from Leesburg.  The email also states they print "all letters" which has me wondering if there's a shortage of well-reasoned rhetoric coming in forcing them to print any old tripe just to fill the page.  I guess my expectations for an editorial page are a little to high, even for a free paper...

South Dakota wasn't the only one...

Voting for Judicial Independence - New York Times:

Published: November 2, 2006

Nearly obscured by the struggle for control of Congress, there is another important battle in a handful of states over measures aimed at punishing judges for their official rulings and making them more captive to prevailing political winds. These measures all hide behind the superficially appealing but profoundly misleading banner of judicial accountability. And, taken together, they add up to an assault on a fair and independent judiciary.

The others include

• Colorado - put a 10 year term limit that's retroactive, kicking out a lot of qualified judges very quickly
• Oregon - a redistricting that would give a backdoor "excuse" to ousting judges from Portland
• Montana was going to have a means of "Recalling" judges, but the state court there discovered that the signature gatherees responsible for getting it on the ballet were all out-of-state and were filled with fraud

Plus, the South Dakota measure wasn't even proposed by someone from South Dakota - It was a Californian, Ronald Branson, who wrote the proposal.

a little musical science

Mixing Memory : Music Is Visual Pattern Recognition and Language To the Brain:

Norton et al. didn't find any neural, cognitive, or motoric differences between the students beginning music lessons and those who weren't, but they did find something else. The scores on the visual pattern recognition -- a Raven's Progressive Matrices test, which involves presenting the kids with pictures that have a piece missing, and then having them choose the piece that will complete the picture from a group of 6-8 pieces -- and the phonemic awareness test -- the Auditory Analysis test, in which the kids are presented with words, and asked to repeat them in full, and then to repeat them with parts (e.g., the first letter or syllable, or the last letter or syllable) missing -- were correlated with music audiation, or skill in perceiving music (this was measured by having children listen to a bunch of pairs of rhythms and tone sequences, and asking them to make same-different judgments).

Norton et al. argue that the correlation between visual pattern recognition and music audiation scores indicates a relationship between visual pattern recognition and auditory pattern recognition, and that the correlation between phonemic awareness and music audiation reflects a relationship between language and music (a connection supported by previous neuroimaging studies). Now, what do these relationships mean? I don't know, really. But I thought they were cool enough to write a quick post about anyway.

Iraq: history repeating itself...

NYTimes Select has an article yesterday from columnist David Brooks that basically shows that all of the problems in trying to "leave" the mess that is Iraq have already been encountered over 60 years ago as the British Empire was dissolving in the years leading up to WW2.  It's a summary from an essay, “The Kingdom of Iraq: A Retrospect.” by Baghdad-born Jew, Elie Kedourie, from his essay collection, The Chatham House Version: And Other Middle Eastern Studies.

Choice cuts:

Same Old Demons - New York Times:

In 1927, a British officer asked a tribal leader: “You now have a government, a constitution, a parliament, ministers and officials — what more can you want?” The tribal leader replied, “Yes, but they speak with a foreign accent.”

The British tried to encourage responsible Iraqi self-government, to no avail. “The political ambitions of the Shia religious headquarters have always lain in the direction of theocratic domination,” a British official reported in 1923. They “have no motive for refraining from sacrificing the interests of Iraq to those which they conceive to be their own.”

At one point, the British high commissioner, Sir Henry Dobbs, argued that if Britain threatened to withdraw its troops, Iraqis would behave more responsibly. It didn’t work. Iraqis figured the Brits were bugging out. They concluded it was profitless to cultivate British friendship. Everything the British said became irrelevant.

The Iraq of his youth, Kedourie concluded, “was a make-believe kingdom built on false pretenses.” He quoted a British report from 1936, which noted that the Iraqi government would never be a machine based on law that treated citizens impartially, but would always be based on tribal favoritism and personal relationships. Iraq, Kedourie said, faced two alternatives: “Either the country would be plunged into chaos or its population should become universally the clients and dependents of an omnipotent but capricious and unstable government.” There is, he wrote, no third option.

Those who ignore their history...