Grimsvötn takes a smoke

It's not very well known that volcanic plumes disrupt climate locally (as well as globally, as we know
from Eyjafjallajökull last year, or further back Krakatau and Tambora).

This spectacular video demonstrates how Grimsvötn is doing the job
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmoaoOg8MQ8



(Smoking and lighting at the same time, try and say that to Mayor Bloomberg ...)

unraptured

The time has come and gone, and Mother Nature has not served as God's scourge, but instead regaled us with a beautiful Plinian could out of a pronouncable, and more importantly, benign Icelandic volcano.

It was easy to poke fun at the followers of Harold Camping who, the day after, found themselves still subject to mundane gravity. Today, it would be cruel.

The psycho-sociological implications that the question of how such gullibility can arise in the age when science and technology appear in firm control of reality are fodder for many a PhD theses.

However, some observations can be made with little dissertation. This prophecy, like many of its predecessors, was based on biblical numerology. Mankind has been fascinated with numerical codes recondite within the fabric of reality at least since Pythagoras. Perhaps because of their abstract and seemingly atemporal nature numbers, and more generally mathematical structures, appear to encode the fabric of reality. Plato conferred a hyper-real status to mathematical objects well before hypertext ....

For millennia, arcane numerology coexisted in the same minds that argued in terms of Euclid's Elements. However, with few practical exceptions (e.g., accounting) mathematics remained the topic of philosophical thought just as what we call now science was Natural Philosophy. Eventually, the scientific method sanctioned math as the language to analyze and quantify Nature.
Scientific and technological advances likely reinforced the fundamental equivocation that math is the language of reality, if not reality itself rather than a human tool to investigate reality (as well as itself).

Curiously, some of the most formidable advances in technology (computer science's reduction of information to bits) and math (the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorem) can be considered as going in the opposite directions: transforming language to numbers.

pig risk

Early this year a fellow mathematician and I started collaborating on a research project that aimed at applying the theory of dynamical systems to the present sovereign credit crisis in the Eurozone. I soon dubbed this project PIIGS Risk, after the acronym that encapsulate the countries currently on the black list of bond vigilantes (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain).
Little I knew that he who rescues the PIIGS was to become, allegedly, a pig.
I am of course alluding to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the now former head of the IMF, who was embroiled in a sexual assault affair just as all international monetary authorities were priming their resources for a second Greek bailout. 
Little I knew that the next chapter in this crisis would spring out of a suite in an almost inconspicuous (boy, the French may take it personally! Sofitel having originated in France and now part of the much larger Accor. But being conspicuous near Times Square is a tall order) hotel I have been walking by for years. Such is the nature of risk, it pops up unforeseen. And yet pig risk was not totally unpredictable, since DSK, as the person of interest has been quickly dubbed, had some troubles containing his sexual exuberance within the confines of ethical and professional standards.
Interesting curio: DSK rhymes with JFK, also a notorious womanizer who, thanks to the ease of cover-up afforded by different mores, was able to continue his momentous career. DSK's, at least for now, appears to have ground to a screeching halt at ... JFK airport.

He's Bin

On Sunday night the fi rst two headlines on Wikipedia front page read

U.S. o cials report that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is dead. 

Pope John Paul II is beatifi ed at a ceremony in Vatican City.

The two ends of the moral spectrum. While I was reading this, crowds assembled in front of the White House and at Ground Zero chanting USA! in a state of elation similar to stadium cheering.

I belong to the few  whom those chants reminded of the Palestinians who danced and rejoiced on September 12, 2001. To be sure, I am not making a moral equivalence. I am making a socio-political one. Now we understand, or are reminded why one behaves so: revenge.

Revenge is precisely the dynamics of destruction that legal systems of organized nations set out to supplant. From Hammurabi to today's constitutions, the Law charges the State with the responsibility of punishing crimes with appropriate penalties. An eye for an eye belongs to the secular as well as religious Old Testament.

Absent the Law, there rules the Feud. The Greeks understood this archetypal transition best and represented it in the Oresteia.

In the XXI century we, Westerners, deem ourselves superior to the Palestinian who danced on September 12, and one of the main reasons is that we honor the Rule of Law. However we believe no less in revenge. And alas, I am afraid that while only few chanted for the death of Bin Laden, many demand an eye for an eye

in their daily lives. 

I found the reaction of all survivors of the victims of September 11 most digni fied and exemplary. They pointed out that no additional death could bring back the beloved they had lost. The death of Bin Laden a fforded them some incremental closure, but no satisfaction. Justice had been served. At a high price. And Justice comforts the human spirit.

The Greek Tragedy's maxim that through suff ering you attain wisdom (πάθει µάθος), how true!