The Crossness Pumping Station

I spent many hours in pumping stations, in Israel and other countries, and never saw a more beautiful and inventive sewage facility. This Victorian station was a revolution in it design, in the enormous iron wheels and gates. I am a fan of everything related to the British industrial revolution, and could spend another week in the Manchester Industrial Museum and roaming the old factories and kilns of North West England. I for one think the Industrial Revolution had an important esthetic element, the machines were elegant and much decorated, their products useful, cheap and beautiful. I had a dream of renting a boat or barge, and to explore England's network of canals, but my wife and daughters are not interested. Well, some dreams have to be left for the next life, not that there will be one.

The Kingdom of David

Lately I am seeing ambitious maps depicting an Israelite kingdom with extensive (possibly imaginary) borders. Contemporary Palestinians (Plishtim in Hebrew = Invaders) negate even the historicity of David and Solomon, they definitely do not like this map. Just to make it easier to mentally overlay it on today's political division, put your finger on Damascus, the capital of Syria. On the hand, the Mediterranean coastal strips north from Haifa and in Gaza are not included in the kingdom, they are Phoenician and Philistine respectively. Regarding the Phoenicians, they were Hebrew speaking Canaanites, a brother nation, so we may be their legitimate inheritors. Regarding Philistines, they disappeared and the solution to this mystery is that they were absorbed in the Israelite nation. 

Iranians in Western China

The whole of Western China was peopled by an Iranian people called Saka. One of their branches was the Tokarian that had a developed culture (pic) and spoke an Arian language similar to the Persian. Yet from the Tenth Century AD they lost to competing Turkish tribes and disappeared. The only remnant are the Uyghurs, that are thoroughly mixed and look Asian. Only a few of them have clear eyes and semi-European features.

In the vast space of Central Asia where the Iranian race encountered the Turkish/Chinese race, the result was a steady advance of the Asians toward the West, encroaching on Iranian lands, a progress that only stopped on the Mediterranean coast. The Iranians have been retreating for a millennium, even their central homeland on the Iranian plateau is being colonized by Azeri Turks.

The Iranians have much to offer to humanity, it should be a pity if they were to follow their brothers the Saka of China.

Israeli Police Putsch Against Netaniyahu

The Israeli Police opened a fourth case against Netaniyahu (Tik 4000) and already have signed up a court witness, Shlomo Filber, former adviser to the Ministry of Communications. The accusation is, apparently, that the Prime Minister tried to convince the media to be a bit fairer towards his wife Sarah and himself. They were ridiculing them and Kaya (pic) too. The White bitch had bitten the American Secretary of State Kerry.  

P.S.: The Police has arrested dozens of executives and officers with the idea of identifying those who can be intimidated to testify against Netaniyahu. This is the typical Russian strategy: Arrest a million and some dirt will surface. Ugly.

Meeting the Effendi

Gas stations are required to submit periodically drawings and certificates to be granted permits. I submitted the required drawing of an existing gas station to the Ministry and the company submitted separately the certificates that had to be renewed each year. The submittal was rejected without giving reasons. After several inquiries they deigned to talk to me and understood that my drawing did not agree with the certificates submitted by the petrol company. Since I had not seen what they had submitted, and the Ministry did not condescend to let me see them, I had to ask the petrol company (my employer) to mail me copies and check the whole thing.

After I saw the certificates, I identified two of them pertaining to backflow valves but the third one referred to a nonexistent fixture. I went back to the Ministry and explained that there had been a confusion and the two valid certificates are all what is needed and nothing else. "Dear J, we already have sent the case to a higher instance, so please do not call us again because we are not dealing with it anymore. (... notice how generous we are...) we have not rejected it officially but just refused to deal with it."

I have large experience with these government official aka bureaucrats, locally called "Effendi" (a legacy of the Turkish Empire). They feel that talking to their "Clients" (their web site calls us, the public - "Clients") is below their dignity. The whole case reminds me of Theodor Herzl's trying to get a "Charter" from the Sultan. To be able to talk someone of the Divan, he had to find an intermediary. Armin Vambery, the Jewish-Hungarian genius linguist and Orientalist, who knew everybody in the Court while teaching French to the girls of the seraglio, facilitated the first contact. Then came a prolonged negotiation about the size of the bribe the Zionist Organization would deliver to be granted an interview with the Sultan. The gold was discretely delivered in a silk pouch with red cord.  As Vambery had vaticinated, the Turk resulted a greedy bastard who demanded more bribes and never delivered.

I am not suggesting that Israeli effendis and pashas may be softened by presents, anyway, I am in engineering and not in the effendi business. As Herzl learnt a hundred years ago, you cannot buy an effendi.  

Should we eliminate the concept of reality?

I am following a general discussion on the probability function, because probability fascinates me from very early age. How the space between 1 and 0 collapses to one or the other? Apparently it is all an illusion because in fact it does not collapse.

Mathematician (pic)  Ulrich Mutze wrote: "I don't advocate to eliminate the concept of reality but we certainly have to modify it in an intelligent way that allows it to coexist with quantum mechanics." Is he aware of what he is saying? Modify reality? I hate metaphysics but is it the real thing while physics is just an illusion created by our imperfect senses? I shall never solve this thing.

Why you should never cross a bridge designed by a Purdue U engineer

Donna Riley (pic), the head of the engineering department at Purdue, argues that academic “rigor” is merely a blind for “white male heterosexual privilege.”

“The term,” she writes, “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.”

There follows a truly surreal meditation on the existential and sexist depredations of slide rules—those hard, straight instruments that have traditionally been deployed by men—and periodic eructations like this:

Rigor may be a defining tool, revealing how structural forces of power and privilege operate to exclude men of color and women, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ [love the plus sign!] people, first-generation and low-income students, and non-traditionally-aged students.

Of course, it is not just rigor that upsets Professor Riley. There is also “Scientific knowledge itself,” which, according to Professor Riley, “is gendered, raced, and colonizing.” What should we do about this outrageous behavior on the part of nature? We must abandon the whole machinery of rigorous analysis for something freer, more “creative.” Engineering programs, Professor Riley suggests, should “do away with” the ideal of academic rigor. “This is not about reinventing rigor for everyone, it is about doing away with the concept altogether so we can welcome other ways of knowing. Other ways of being. It is about criticality and reflexivity.”

Her essay appears not in a science fiction journal or a publication intended for the denizens of a sanatorium but a journal concerned with science. This woman is the head of a department of engineering in an institution of higher education. The moral is that things are worse than they appear.

Lifted from: New Criterion.