My trip to London/UK

The trip was December 1–8.

Here is a link to all 373 pictures I posted on Kodak Gallery.

The short version (102 photos)

Mini version (61 photos)

I lost the 12-word-novel contest

My favorite of the winners: “There are no atheists in foxholes,” said the chaplain. “So get out.”

My letter to a torture supporter

What the supporter had written to the Philadelphia Inquirer on 11/16/07:

On the subject of torture, Gloria Gelman suggests that "our behavior is being judged by the rest of the world" (Letters, Nov. 9). The rest of the world and especially the terrorists are mocking us because we have become politically correct when it comes to terrorists. Does anyone actually believe that if we treat them with dignity they will tell us where their bombs are located? Waterboarding is a form of torture, but if it can save people from being killed or maimed, it is necessary.
Does it take another 9/11 for people to stop worrying about the welfare of terrorists? Let us be more concerned about the welfare of our children, grandchildren and all Americans who might be killed. We have to face reality when it comes to terrorists.

Elaine Lyons
Glassboro

My reply the same day:
It seems to me that your letter rests on two false assumptions. The first one is that torturing will be more efficacious in obtaining information. At least according to the many interrogation experts I have heard or read of who have written or spoken on the subject, this isn’t true. In fact, they say that developing a rapport with the captives can often extract information from very bad people, and that torture will often yield false information. (Obviously, this is also a risk of obtaining information in other ways, but the point is that torture is not a truth serum.) The second fallacy is the assumption that the prohibitions against torture primarily relate to the welfare of terrorists. The question is not simply whether we are prepared to torture terrorists. The question is whether torturing innocent people, as will inevitably happen, is an acceptable price to pay for any information that will come from the people who are truly terrorists. (There is also a third category of people, those who are not terrorists but may be sympathetic to them and/or have information that will be useful in identifying them.) I believe we prohibit torture to protect the innocent, just as we require search warrants and trials for criminal suspects.

For myself, I believe that torturing an Osama bin Laden might be morally acceptable if it would certainly save the lives of innocent people. However, the possibility of torturing an innocent person is so abhorrent to me that I don't believe it should be allowed as a matter of policy. The experience of other countries shows that allowing torture will inevitably lead to its use among people who turn out not to know anything. (To use an American example, it is clear now that large numbers of people transferred to Guantanamo Bay were not actually involved in terrorism or even insurgency, but it would not have been clear which ones those were when they were first picked up, and when the information they had would have been most useful. Could anyone have then reliably decided who to torture?) I tend to believe the experts that torture doesn't work well, and certainly not better than other methods. I remember hearing one (sorry, forget who, but he had decades of experience) on the radio say that the “ticking time bomb” scenario used to justify torture had never occurred in his experience. Thus it’s my belief that such a situation is so rare, and the possibility of torturing the wrong person so much more likely, that any interrogator who wants to torture should be so certain of guilt, and so sure it’s the best way of obtaining valuable information, that he should be prepared to accept legal consequences if he is, in fact, incorrect.

If you truly support torture and do think it is valuable, then you should be prepared to say that torturing an unknown number of innocents is worth that value, just as I will accept that there is an unknown possibilty that a particular piece of information that could be gained by torture will not be gained, and that therefore some other innocents will suffer.

She didn’t reply.

My 12-word novel

The NPR program On the Media has a Novel Challenge in which participants are invited to submit a “novel” in twelve words or less . This was my entry:

My life as a movie: childhood, 80 minutes; adulthood, 20; ambiguous ending.

Candy corn

Candy corn is the fruitcake of Halloween.

I Fail a Self-Devised Dexterity Test

So I’m walking home and I find some cents on the ground. There is always something pleasing about finding money on the ground, so much more pleasing than earning it. Or maybe that’s just me. I am listening to my iPod, but that alone is not enough to entirely distract me from noticing that I am walking alone, which I find boring. So I begin to manipulate the pennies in my right hand, and tried to count them. I found that, without looking at them, letting any out of my hand, or using the other hand, I couldn’t do it, although I could have guessed there were about twelve. An interesting experiment to try sometime.

I saw a black and white kitten too. It is the first time I have seen a cat on the street in Center City, at least without an apparent owner.

Safari Browser

I just switched to the Safari 3 Beta browser and it is, as promised, much faster. Not only that, it solved a problem I had whereby I was unable to send an attachment to an e-mail. I had a problem at work that no one could solve, and upgrading my browser solved that too.

Riddle

A husband and wife were born an hour apart. The husband was born an hour later than the wife but celebrates his birthday the day before. How is this possible?

Answer (highlight to see): The husband was born on the US West Coast at 11 pm, when it was 2 am the next day on the East Coast, where his future wife had been born an hour before at 1 am.

Changing minds, changing bodies

This week’s Newsweek has a letter responding to the previous cover story on gender identity. This person’s reaction was that the very idea that there were not two distinct sexual categories was “bone chilling,” a “grievous commentary on the fall of American morals. Have we strayed so far from the Bible that we have forgotten God created Adam and Eve?” Meanwhile, whereas the article largely concentrates on people who think they have the wrong equipment, the previous letter points out the reality that some people are born with both sets of equipment, or something in between. When your religious faith starts requiring you to deny actual reality, you need to get a new religion.

The same woman’s letter concludes, “Please don’t ask me to rethink gender.” This seems like the real crux of the issue. Even the nonbelievers like me don’t like having to rethink things we thought we knew. On gender identity, the Jeffrey Eugenides novel Middlesex is compelling, but for people already familiar enough with that issue to fling about expressions like “LGBT,” a documentary I saw on cable called Whole presented a rarer phenomenon. It dealt with people who wanted to become amputees, in some cases so desperately so that they’d resorted to home surgery or shooting off the offending limb (it was always a particular limb). Before you go dismissing these people as sick twists who need therapy, which was my initial reaction, listen to their stories. I remember one guy wore some kind of harness sometimes to feel like an amputee. Another had struggled years and years with his desire, therapy and all, but then found someone to operate on him and had no regrets about the surgery except not getting it earlier. If surgery immediately made him happy, and nothing else did, was it unethical for the doctor to operate?

There’ll probably never be enough of the wannabe amputees to constitute an identity group like transgendered people, but the idea does raise the same issue as people who want to alter their gender, about what is normal and whether it even matters if it’s normal. An Atlantic magazine cover story a few years ago, though largely sympathetic to the idea of people wanting sex changes, raised the idea that perhaps some people would not have felt themselves to be members of the other sex had they not known that there was a possibility that it could be done. In the future, technology will allow us even more new ways to make all sorts of changes to ourselves. Which of those changes will people begin to want when they learn about these possibilities, and which will become “identities”?

Adage

Regard lightly any advice offered by someone who stands to profit by your taking it.

Hollywood Squares (crossword puzzle) answers

For the puzzle, see 6/30/08 entry.