Yet another satirical map

After the initial survey (http://what-s-next.blogspot.co.il/2007/11/world-according-to-americans.html) and the more recent addition (http://what-s-next.blogspot.co.il/2010/11/world-according-to-americans-redux.html), a friend at work suggested yet another satirical map, actually a parody of the seminal New Yorker cover: the Apple Maps' view of the World! :-)

©Mad Magazime

In ages...

Dear Readers,

I haven't written in ages... And yet so much has happened in my life! For starters, I've gotten married :-) So now it's two of us that make one.

Another thing I haven't done in ages: write a program, think of algorithms, use Scilab. I did all these three in the past week, after playing with this new popular toy called NeoCube / Buckyballs / Nanodots: they're really hard to put down and indeed they raise interesting questions of stable conformations in space.

In which directions are the poles of each ball aligned? That's what I want to know!

I looked up the magnetic field of a dipole, the potential energy of a dipole in a magnetic field and thought of how to implement the computation of stable conformations.

My script found the orientation of the poles in this 2D configuration...

For a start, I installed Scilab, which I hadn't used in years, and despite annoying bugs and crashes (version 5.3.3 wouldn't run on my Mac, I'm running 5.4.0-beta3) here are three results I eventually obtained that gave me comfort: I'm not entirely rusty yet and can still program something simple.

The next stages would be the have proper algorithms to compute stable conformations in 3D and I know that that is a difficult problem (e.g. protein folding...)

... and in this one (which I hadn't guessed)

And here, I'm sorry you can barely see the plot but it was really the first quantitative result of the algorithm that I couldn't have predicted with simple logic: at which angle exactly are the poles at the two bounds of this chain?

אשר לא קראתי בסידורים

אשר לא קראתי בסידורים ובמחזורים
אני קורא בהרים.
בהרים אומר אני
את כל התחינות והמזמורים.

מן הגיא העמוק למדתי
את הזעקה, כמו מכלא.
והרבה תפילות זכות
למדתי מן התכלת.

בראשי ההרים ראיתי חרותים
כל הפיוטים.
וכל הפסוקים חקוקים
במדרונות החשופים והמוכים.
וכל דברי הזעם
- בצוקים.

יצחק שלו

Why the past?

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.
~Pearl Buck

Tout y est

une triperie
deux pierres trois fleurs un oiseau
vingt-deux fossoyeurs un amour
le raton laveur
une madame untel
un citron un pain
un grand rayon de soleil
une lame de fond
un pantalon
une porte avec son paillasson
un Monsieur décoré de la légion d'honneur
le raton laveur
un sculpteur qui sculpte des Napoléon
la fleur qu'on appelle souci
deux amoureux sur un grand lit
un carnaval de Nice
une chaise trois dindons un ecclésiastique
un furoncle une guêpe
un rein flottant
une douzaine d'huîtres
une écurie de courses
un fils indigne
deux pères dominicains
trois sauterelles un strapontin une fille de joie
trois ou quatre oncles Cyprien
le raton laveur
une mater dolorosa deux papas gâteau
trois rossignols deux paires de sabots cinq dentistes
un homme du monde
une femme du monde
un couvert noir deux cabinets
deux petit'suisses un grand pardon
une vache un samovar
une pinte de bon sang
une monsieur bien mis un cerf volant
un régime de bananes une fourmi une expédition coloniale
un cordon sanitaire trois cordons ombilicaux
un chien du commissaire un jour de gloire
un bandage herniaire
un vendredi soir
une chaisière un œuf de poule
un vieux de la vieille
trois hommes de guerre
un François premier
deux Nicolas II
trois Henri III
le raton laveur
un père Noël
deux sœurs latines
trois dimensions
mille et une nuits
sept merveilles du monde quatre points cardinaux
1 2 3 4 heures précises douze apôtres
quarante-cinq ans de bons et loyaux services
deux ans de prison six ou sept péchés capitaux
trois mousquetaires
vingt mille lieues sous les mers
trente-deux positions
deux mille ans avant Jésus-Christ
cinq gouttes après chaque repas
quarante minutes d'entracte
une seconde d'inattention
et naturellement
le raton laveur

The World According to Americans, redux

Three years ago, I had a post "The World According to Americans". But time flies and creative people have kept working on the theme. Here are two newer versions. As usual, click to zoom and enjoy!

In the other direction, it appears that in 1976, the New Yorker had a cover which prefigured the style: "The World According to New Yorkers", I would call this:

Now, I have the case of this map which is called "Real Map of the World", but I highly suspect an American to be the author...

Sons of Terror

I recommend highly "Son of Hamas" by Mosab Hassan Yousef.

Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a founder of the Hamas, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, discovered when he was 17 that despite his loathing of Israeli occupation and despite his love and awe for his father, he could not allow innocent bloodshed and that Palestinians were not set free by violence, they were locked up by violence. The trigger to these realizations were both his reading of the Christian Bible and seeing in an Israeli prison how Hamas members could persecute and torture their own without an ounce of mercy nor justice. From around that time and for ten years, he collaborated with Israel to defuse Hamas's military actions - at the risk of being exposed and killed. Large parts of the book read like a thriller and all of it is compelling - a very instructive account of what happens behind the scenes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But I was also very interested in the father-son relationship. It is striking to see how Yousef the son describes Yousef the father: as a very sensitive man who would help his wife with the chores in the house, would be very kind with everyone and especially his children (he would never force them to pray, just give them desire to do so by setting the example himself, MHY explains).

In the epilogue, MHY explains that when he made public his conversion to Christianity after moving to the States everyone expected his father to "disown" him but he refused. "You are still my son. You are part of me, and nothing will change" he quotes his father as saying on the phone. A little bit later, MHY broke to his father the news that he had been collaborating with Israel. According to the book, his father remained silent. According to news report the father did issue a statement at that point in which he did disown his son but I was struck by the mild language (see here and here).

Separately, I read in the English Wikipedia article on Yasser Arafat,

Arafat's sister Inam, states in an interview with Arafat's biographer British historian Alan Hart, that Arafat was heavily beaten by his father for going to the Jewish quarter in Cairo and attending religious services. When she asked him why he would not stop, Arafat responded by saying that he wanted to study their mentality.

I was immediately reminded of the famous study by Alice Miller "Adolf Hitler: How Could a Monster Succeed in Blinding a Nation?" tracing back the roots of Hitler's violence in his father's "rearing":

The Führer once told his secretary that during one of the regular beatings given him by his father he was able to stop crying, to feel nothing, and even to count the thirty-two blows he received.
In this way, by totally denying his pain, his feelings of powerlessness, and his despair- in other words, by denying the truth - Hitler made himself into a master of violence and of contempt for human beings.

I thought about how Hitler and Arafat were compelled all their lives to pursue a destructive goal although they could have pursued a normal life and even protected human life. And I thought about the phrase from the Pentateuch "פֹּקֵד עֲו‍ֹן אָבֹת עַל בָּנִים", "making the sons carry the sin of the fathers": some children are compelled to do harm because of the wrong that their fathers did onto them.

Now a quote from Mosab Hassan Yousef's epilogue:

Delivered from the oppression of Europe, Israel became the oppressor. Delivered from persecution, Muslims became persecutors. Abused spouses and children often go on to abuse spouses and children. It is a cliché, butit's still true: hurt people, unless they are healed, hurt people.

So my advice to terrorists is: beat your children. If you treat them too kindly, you never know, they may turn their back on terrorism.