A map regarding religious freedom

Razib Khan points to the U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report 2009 and extracts from it a list of the countries from their section titled “RESTRICTIONS, ABUSES, AND CONCERNS”.  I thought I’d take it one step further and present it in map form (countries listed as having noteworthy violations are red):

Obviously, if you want to know the exact reasons given by the State Department for their designations, you can read the report, but I think that a cartographic aid can be helpful in drawing out patterns.

A map of accessibility

In April, the New Scientist ran a gallery of maps produced as part of a research project by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and the World Bank.  The aim was to show travel time to a major city (defined as a city of 50,000 or more people as of the year 2000). This is the final product:

The brightest areas represent areas within an hour’s travel time of a major city (by ground or sea).  The darkest areas, found in Tibet and Greenland, represent more than 10 days travel from the nearest major city.  The blue lines represent the major shipping lanes.

One of the major findings of the report was that less than 10% of the Earth’s land surface is more than 48 hours travel from a major city, an impressive feat of human engineering.

To see the map in its full glory, go here.

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Unsurprising news: WordPress is blocked in China

If anyone was wondering why there haven’t been any of the updates I suggested in the last post, the answer is that I was unable to access WordPress from China and thus was unable to post any updates.

Trip to China

Despite my blog name, I, embarrassingly enough, have yet to actually visit China. That changes in a week, when I get on an airplane to Seoul and then another to Beijing. I’ll be in China for about a month and who knows? I may send in some posts while I’m there.

A pleasant surprise

I subscribe to the White House Blog RSS feed via Google Reader, but most of the time I only skim through the posts.   However, today there was a post that really caught my eye.

“A New Year, A New Beginning” is a post with a video message from President Obama marking Nowruz which is the Iranian celebration of the vernal equinox (which for those of you who like precision istoday at 11:44 UTC, 7:44EDT), which also serves as the Iranian New Year.

Why I’m glad Pluto’s not a planet.

This is a thoroughly stale topic, but it manages to come up again and again.  In 2006, through a perhaps rather questionable procedure, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) defined the word “planet” in such a way as to kick Pluto out of the category, which apparently struck a nerve with some people.  I have yet to hear a compelling reason as to why this struck a nerve (I suspect that it’s that people don’t like statements to contradict what they learned in elementary school), but it did.

Personally, I was very glad.  The more one learns about Pluto, the less one should really feel that it merits the same category as the eight now official planets.  The first point is that Pluto is significantly smaller than the big 8.  In fact Mercury, the smallest planet, is 25 times more massive than Pluto.

Now, it’s fair to point out that there is great variation within the ranks of the planets and that some body has to be the smallest planet and that Earth is 18 times as massive as Mercury, so it’s a pretty arbitrary lower bound.

Epic fail: Apple’s new shuffle lacks buttons, still no screen

Someone must have threatened Apple’s “smallest music player” claim for their iPod shuffle brand, because its hard for me to think up a justification for this new batch of idiocy they just cooked up.  This:

is the new iPod shuffle.

Now, to be fair, there are controls, but they are on the low-quality headphones that Apple provides and they seem to be more limited than the traditional controls, as they lack the ability to go backward on a playlist.

However, I will admit that they’ve added some features.  They have added a voiceover feature that tells you the music you’re listening to in a low quality speech synthesizer, which for some reason is male if your computer is a Mac and female if your computer runs Windows.

This feature, which would be pretty useless in and of itself, allows you to switch between playlists, which is necessary to justify the fact that it’s a 4GB MP3 player with no screen.

Now, the iPod shuffle already was the rip off in the world of MP3 players and to Apple’s credit they didn’t raise the price (though this is hardly admirable, given the price of flash).  So, as always, it would be advised to find another MP3 player…just about anything would be a better value.

The craziness is higher up

Apparently, it wasn’t only a Brazilian archbishop who thought that saving a raped nine year-old’s life by aborting two embryos that she was too small to carry to term was a reprehensible act:

A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication of the mother and doctors of a nine-year-old girl who had an abortion in Brazil after being raped.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Catholic church’s Congregation for Bishops, told the daily La Stampa on Saturday that the twins the girl had been carrying had a right to live.

"It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated," he said.

While this is an excellent opportunity to expose the stupidity of the pro-life position that the Church backs, it is yet a painfully stupid position, and is still a ridiculously powerful organization, that may be institutionally insane.

Brazil’s president is sane

But the high clergy of the Catholic Church there are not.  Apparently, they are upset over a recent abortion performed on a nine-year old girl who was allegedly raped by her stepfather.  In fact, they were so upset that they excommunicated all involved except for the girl.

Now, I’m not sure what sort of lack of self-reflection is necessary to actually hold the position that the Archbishop of Olinda e Recife, but it is a bit beyond my ability to comprehend.  This pregnancy was not only the result of a rape, carrying the two embryos to term would be life threatening to the girl who is, as stated above, nine years old, not to mention the additional trauma it would inflict.

Anyway, President Lula condemned the idiocy of the Archbishop, which suggests that indeed insanity is not endemic in Brazilian society and in fact may be limited to a few conservative members of the Catholic Church who happen to hold high positions.

Prediction: Obama will speak in Jakarta

One of President Obama’s campaign promises was to make a speech in “an Islamic capital” some time during his first 100 days in office.  Given the course of events, I strongly suspect that the intended capital is Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, which is the largest majority Muslim nation.

Of course, Indonesia isn’t an Islamic state legally, so it may stretch the parameter of being in an Islamic capital.  However, there are several signs that he has it under consideration.

Now the linked December NYT article dismisses it as “too easy”, being that he once lived there.  However, there is simply no ideal place for such a speech.  Cairo, the location suggested, is the seat of power of the unpopular dictator Hosni Mubarak, who was made less popular by the events in Gaza which, to be fair, occurred after the New York Times published the article.

There are similar image problems with other Arab capitals, where our affiliation is based on perhaps less than savory reasons.  If for instance, he spoke in Riyadh, it may highlight our country’s dependence on Saudi oil.  Baghdad is of course associated with our war in Iraq.  Countries where our footprint isn’t seen as a corrupt bargain tend not to be our allies.

So, Jarkarta being “too easy” isn’t necessarily the worst defect.  And given this exchange with a state department official on the second day of his Presidency and the fact that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Jakarta right now as part of her first major tour outside the U.S., I think a speech in Jakarta is very likely.

And while Jakarta is easy, that could be used as a benefit.  Obama has a connection there and could use that as a platform to reach out further, if he uses is as an opening act rather than an attempt to fulfill a promise in letter but not in spirit.

Certainly an adventurous speech in Damascus or Tehran or East Jerusalem would be nice from an idealistic standpoint of peace in the region and an easing of tensions, but I think that Obama is the type to use stepping stones rather than great leaps in his diplomacy during the first 100 days.

We shall see.