Tuesday, May 9, 2006
Letting Moussaoui Live

It's been about six days now since the jury in the trial of 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui decided not to hand down the death penalty. Time enough for me to calm down and write about it.The details of his trial are long, meandering and complicated and I won't go into them here. I'll assume anyone who has heard of him is also aware of the way he boasted of his involvement in the 9/11 attacks, his sneering derision of the victims, and his shouts of "You lost, America... I won!" after it was announced he would instead receive life in prison.

As a rule, I'm opposed to the death penalty. Not because I don't think some criminals deserve to die. Certainly some do. The defense called up a lot of witnesses detailing the abuse Moussaoui suffered as a child, but even that oft-used excuse does not justify sparing this monster. I'm opposed because this is a sentence that cannot be lifted if evidence comes to light that the accused was convicted of a crime he didn't commit. This happens moreoftenthan many people like to admit, and for me that is enough to use it only in cases where the accused's guilt is evident and irrefutable.

Of the 42 people executed during George W. Bush's two terms as governor of Texas, nine of them had evidence come to light after their execution that would have exonerated them, if they had not been put to death.

One reason Moussaoui had wanted to avoid the death penalty was because he hoped President Bush would exchange him for U.S. hostages taken during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hope some friendly individual happens to point out Bush's record in Texas if he thinks that might happen now.

I can understand some of the logic behind letting Moussaoui live. His role in 9/11 was actually very minor, as a replacement in case one of the other hijackers was intercepted or killed. However horrible he is, his actions did not lead to 9/11 directly. His courtroom theatrics and claims of importance are probably done inflate his own ego, nothing more than that.

I'm concerned aboutthe repercussions. Remember the firstWorld Trade Center attack, back in 1993, when the bombs went off in the basement? That was donein response to the U.S. capturing an al-Qaeda leader.Will the terrorists try another attack now, thinking they can scare the U.S. into freeing Moussaoui? It's doubtful for a minor player like him, I hope. However people like this, througha bizarre fascination some people have with killers, sometimes attract followers from their prison cells. Think of all the people who write Charles Manson every year. Could Moussaoui himself somehow orchestrate trouble from his cell, through letters and the internet, and God knows what else?

It's something we'll have to think about for the next several decades.

Posted by Robert Williams 2006-05-09 01:43:54

Thursday, May 4, 2006
Liars vs. Thieves

As I write this, the novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life by Kaavya Viswanathan is #9 on the Amazon.com bestseller list. Although its genre, lite chick-lit, is very lucrative, the book did not crack the top ten based on its literary merits.

Another interesting fact is that this book, which is now burning up the bestseller lists,was just removed from circulation.

Ms. Viswanathan is currently embroiled in controversy,as it has been confirmed that she plagiarized several other books in writing her own novel. Since this revelation, her book, which peaked at around #100 on the NY Times before the plagiarism controversy broke,has become front page news.

It's a situation ripe for media attention. Pictures of Ms. Viswanathan, a beautiful, wide-eyed, 19 year-old student at Harvard, have been posted all over newspapers, magazines and the Internet. Tales of her Ivy League education, her large book advance and the bright career ahead of her abound. Now many people have rushed to her defense, crying out how unfair it is to crucify this promising young author, and insisting that her detractors are simply jealous of her.

I'm reminded of James Frey. When it came out that some parts of his memoir were fabricated, he was also subjected to intense scrutiny and criticism. But you didnot hear anyone rushing to his defense. Even Oprah eventually turned on him.

If Ms. Viswanathan plays her cards right, she could use the attention this controversy has gathered to launch her entire career. So why it is thatone author, who afterwriting something untrue (but he did write it) is disgraced and humiliated, while another writer, after stealing the work someone else wrote, is raised into the national spotlight?

Difficult to say. One is tempted to point out that James Frey is a middle-aged, balding male, a former a drug addict, andKaavya Viswanathan is a beautiful, young child of priviledge. But that would be an oversimplification.

People had trusted Frey's book, as a memoir, to be fact. They had trusted Kaavya's book to be fiction. At the end of the day, Frey was the one who didn't deliver what he promised. The title of Kaavya's book ends with the widely-used qualifier: "A Novel." And that is exactly what she provided.

Even if she did steal it.

Posted by Robert Williams 2006-05-04 00:13:30

Wednesday, May 3, 2006
The Tenth Planet

After decades of speculation and false leads, it looks like astronomers might have finally discovered a tenth planet.

They have thought one might exist for centuries, going back to the discovery of Uranus by William Herschel in 1781. Judging from the path of its orbit, astronomers had judged there could be as many as nine or ten planets total in the solar system. In fact, mathematicians John Couch Adams and Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier predicted the existence of Neptune independently of each other in 1841 and 1842 respectively, before it was actually observed in 1846. Their ideas kept other people looking, until Pluto was discovered about 76 years ago, by Clyde Tombaugh.

So now we have planet number ten, which many people claim to have discovered but no one has had any proof of until now. It's rather like a Sasquatch of the Solar System. It'sa little overtwice as far from the Sun as Pluto, anda little bigger. Like Pluto, it also has a moon. Right now, the planet has the uninspiring name of 2003 UB 313, which is just a designation until the International Astronomical Union decides on a name for it.

Why does the IAU get to name the planet? Beats me, but I think it's for practical reasons. William Herschel originally wanted to name Uranus George, after his benefactor, King George III. (If I say this to people who are otherwise mature adults, they will exclaim, "He wanted to name my anus George?!?") Anyway, nobody wanted to have a planet named George, so a bunch of astronomers stepped in and named the planet after the Greek muse of astronomy, Urania. (There is also a sky god in Greek mythology called Uranus, who is the first son of Gaia and the father of the Furies.)

But what should the name be? The guy who discovered it wanted to call it Lilah, after his daughter, which is very sweet, but not in keeping with the Greco-Roman tradition of the planets, unless there is a demigoddess out there by that name that I am not aware of. Isaac Asimov, when speculating about a tenth planet had suggested calling it Persephoneafter the goddess abducted by Hades,known to theRomans asPluto. So travelers leaving the Solar System would pass by Charon and Pluto, and then pass lonely Persephone held prisoner in Pluto's realm. Not bad at all. However, I believe there is now an asteroid named Persephone. They might also call it Proserpina, which is the Roman name for Persephone. Others have taken to calling the planet and it's moon Xena and Gabrielle. To quote Dave Barry, I am not making this up.

So I suppose I'll toss my suggestion into the ring, for what it's worth. Why not call the planet Morpheus, after the god of dreams, and the moon for his brother Phantasos, since the planet has been the dream of so many for so long?

Post your own suggestion if you like. It would be fun if someone chooses the same name that the IAU does, assuming this thing is real of course.

Posted by Robert Williams 2006-05-03 03:08:15

Monday, April 24, 2006
Riding the Glory Train

If you'll turn your headslightly to the left, you'll see Ijust posted my second story on sffworld.It's called the "The Glory Train," and it's about a Depression-era wandering boy who gets the ride of his life on a most unusual train. I guess you could call it historical sci-fi, also known as steampunk.

Take a look. I'd love to hear what everyone thinks.

Posted by Robert Williams 2006-04-24 23:49:32

Thursday, April 20, 2006
The Enigma of Alan Turing

Right now I'm reading David Leavitt's The Man Who Knew Too Much, a biography of the mathematician Alan Turing. I've always been fascinated by Turing. His work in computer science and cryptography have had an enormous impact on Western civilization,yet very few people, at least in America,have heard of him.

I first heard of Turing in an anthology of great scientific writings edited by Timothy Ferris, which contained Turing's own fascinating article "Can a Machine Think?" In it, Turing lays out his method to determine whether a computer can achieve human intelligence. I was so impressed by it that I read the biographical article on Turing included in the same book. This article was by Andrew Hodges, and it was an excerpt from his book Alan Turing: The Enigma. In the article, Hodges describes how in the last years of his life, Turing was placed under house arrest, subjected to electroshock and hormone treatments, and finally committed suicide to escape persecution. His crime? "An act of gross indecency with another male person."

By the time he was arrested in 1951 under England's antihomosexuality statutes, Turing had already established himself in mathematics. He had virtually invented the science of cryptography, and laid out all the mathematics that underlies computer science. During World War II, the Nazis hadused a machine, called the "Engima machine," to createsecret codesthat were widely thought to be unbreakable... until Alan Turing broke them. Themethod he developed to crack the Nazi codes was essential to the Allied victory.

Turing got his start by solving the decidability problem, one of thefundamental problems in mathematics. Along the way, he came up with a little device called a Turing machine, which could be used to solve an endless number of mathematical computations. Eventually, people gave the Turing machine a name once used to describe a person: a computer.

When he was arrested with a lover of his named Arnold Murray, he cheerfully admitted to being gay. The detectives were struck by his lack of shame, and stated "he really believed he was doing the right thing." Turing cared nothing for the opinion of society, and had no desire to be accepted or respected as someone he wasn't. His psychiatrists tried to "cure" him through psycho-analysis, and failed. One can only imagine Turing's amusement at the efforts of these small-minded men to outwit him.

In the end though, ignorance won out. Turing chose an exit inspired by his favorite film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: he took a bite from an apple dipped in cyanide. Years of persecution had finally worn him down, and for a time it was considered rude to discuss him in polite society. Now Turing's legend is experiencing a comeback, with some new biographies being written and Turing's name cropping up in novels like Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Still,there is always some outraged mathematician going on about how unfair it is to "tarnish" Turing's legacy by bringing up his homosexuality. Which goes to show how farsociety has to goin solving someof its own fundamental problems.

Posted by Robert Williams 2006-04-20 01:25:13