Beware Americans Bearing Jokes

This joke is making the rounds on email lists:

The Iranian Ambassador to the UN had just finished giving a speech, and walked out into the lobby where he met President Bush. They shook hands, and as they walked the Iranian said, “You know, I have just one question about what I have seen in America.

President Bush said, “Well, anything I can do to help you, I will."

The Iranian whispered “My son watches this show 'Star Trek' and in it there is Chekhov who is Russian, Scotty who is Scottish, and Sulu who is Chinese, but no Arabs. My son is very upset and does not understand why there are no Iranians on Star Trek."

President Bush laughed, leaned toward the Iranian ambassador, and whispered back, “Because it takes place in the future."

I would council the mad mullahs of Iran that when Americans start making jokes like this, that means they’re thinking about the context the joke was made in.

We’re thinking about Iran and the threat it represents.

One way to eliminate the Iranian threat is to eliminate Iranians. This isn’t very likely, of course. But if we’re making jokes about that, the fact is that less, er, complete measures are becoming thinkable — when just a few months ago, for most Americans, they were not.

Watch your back, President Ammabammapajamahead…

Misplaced Concerns

These past few weeks have seen a lot of debate about how we will treat the prisoners we take in the war on terror. On one side we have those concerned that we’re torturing prisoners, with the concern stemming from moral issues or worry that it will endanger prisoners our enemy takes, or both. On the other side we have those concerned that we are endangering ourselves by not aggressively interrogating prisoners who may have valuable information.

This whole debate seems fundamentally crazy to me. I’m having trouble believing that the first side is even serious in their position…

The argument that Americans captured by the enemy would be endangered is easily dispatched: those Americans are quite likely to have their throats slashed or their heads cut off right now. Exactly how would they be more endangered? The concern expressed is that if we violate the Geneva conventions, then the bad guys will, too. But…the bad guys are already completely ignoring the Geneva conventions — how could they ignore them any more completely? And then there’s the pesky little detail that the lamestream media seems to totally ignore: the Geneva conventions explicitly do not apply to a non-uniformed enemy, or to an enemy that themselves ignores the conventions. What a dumb argument, McCain!

The moral issues are less amenable to logical dismemberment, as in the end they rest on the beliefs that individuals have. For me, this is very straightforward: my belief is that if an enemy vows to kill my country’s citizens, and uses any method at his disposal to do so, then we are morally obligated (not merely permitted) to fight back with any means at our disposal. So … if an enemy attacks us by flying airplanes into buildings, torturing and beheading our soldiers and citizens, using their clergy to whip up mindless and unfounded hatred amongst their faithful, then … I believe that we are morally obligated to fight back by any means we can. So I have absolutely no problem with using any interrogation method to extract useful information from prisoners we take from this enemy, and I don’t much care whether they survive the interrogation. I was furious at the recent reports that we refrained from killing over 100 Taliban and Al Qaeda because they happened to be at a cemetary — to me, that’s political correctness gone completely amok. Again, I think we are morally obligated to attack our enemy no matter where he happens to be — and that includes cemetaries, mosques, museums, and apartment buildings.

Can any of my readers make a cogent argument on the other side? Can you explain to me why we should show any mercy at all to our merciless enemy?

Dring & Fage

Recently I managed to acquire an old slide rule, made in England by the firm of Dring & Fage sometime around 1820 or 1830. Its construction is interesting — it’s made of boxwood, with brass fittings to hold it all together. The scales on the slide rule are hand-engraved; it must have taken dozens and dozens of hours to make them all. The one I bought is still in great condition, and works just fine.

But what has proven to be the most interesting aspect of this slide rule is its purpose. Most (though not all) modern slide rules are purely mathematical instruments — you can use them to multiply, divide, obtain logarithms, make trigonometric calculations, etc. The Dring & Fage slide rule can be used to multiply and divide, but its real purpose is to compute taxes and duties on alcoholic beverages stored in barrels. It was used by people who worked in ports, warehouses, and other facilities where barrels of booze were bought and sold.

The taxes were based on the amount of alcohol, which is a function of the total volume of liquid in the barrel (they were often only partially full) and the “proof", or percentage of alcohol in the liquor. So the tax assessors carried around a little kit, with a long ruler to measure the depth of the liquid in the barrel, a hygrometer (a set of glass balls of calibrated specific gravity) to measure the percentage of alcohol in the liquid, and a slide rule like the one I have. The slide rule was used to compute the volume of liquid in the barrel, then multiply that times the percentage of alcohol to get the total alcohol content — which gave you the tax basis for the barrel. These kits were called “proofing kits", and the slide rules in them were called “proofing rules”.

Calculating the volume of liquid in a partially full barrel is a non-trivial exercise in three-dimensional geometry. The barrels are not cylinders (that would be easy!) as their sides are curved outwards. It turns out that the barrels used back then all had sides that were, in cross-section, shaped like a small section of a circle. There were only a few basic shapes of barrels used, and they could all be characterized by the radius of these circularly shaped sides and the diameter of the barrel’s top and bottom. With a proofing rule, you could calculate the volume of liquid in a barrel with just a few quick movements of the slides, so long as you knew the diameter of the barrel’s top, the height of the barrel, the radius of curvature of its sides, and the height of the liquid in the barrel. The only challenging thing there is the radius of curvature, and this was handled by the barrel industry standardizing on just a few (about four or five) “varieties” of barrels, known as “Variety A", “Variety B", and so on. Each variety had a fixed radius of curvature. And the proofing rule has a separate scale on it for each curvature.

I was surprised how widespread such a sophisticated tax basis calculation was, so very long ago. So far as I know, the tax folks today don’t have to deal with things like this (though this could just be my ignorance)…