Update on spreading climate sanity

Some important developments in the ongoing critique of the "global warming" craze are worth noting and adding to previous postings on popular and semi-popular expositions of climate and climate change. These Halloween specials are connected to the 18th Chicago Humanities Festival, held at various cultural institutions around the great city. The 2007 festival features as speakers two important long-time climate hysteria critics.

The first is astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. On November 10, she will be speaking on "The Long View of Catastrophes," a synopsis of how humanity has coped with overwhelming past environmental changes, like the Ice Ages.

Baliunas is formerly affiliated with the Mount Wilson Observatory in southern California and one of the world's experts on stellar variability, stellar magnetic fields, and Sun-like stars. She is the co-author of one of the decisive refutations of the "hockey stick," not by critique, but by positive counterexample of doing it right. Her awards include the Newton Lacey Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society, the Petr Beckman Award for Scientific Freedom, and the Bok Prize from Harvard University.

The second is applied mathematician Christopher Essex, of the University of Western Ontario. On November 3, he will be speaking on "Tales from the Greenhouse, or How I Stopped Overheating and Learned to Love Turbulence." He will also be speaking on the November 3rd Festival panel about scientists and communication with the public.

Essex is the director of the theoretical physics program, as well as a professor and the associate chairman, of Western Ontario's Applied Mathematics Department. He is also a member of the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Canadian analogue of the National Science Foundation. His major areas of research cover dynamical systems (including chaos), nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and the thermodynamics of radiation and radiation-matter mixtures (like the Earth's atmosphere).

Essex has appeared before on this blog as co-author, along with economist Ross McKitrick, of Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming. The original edition, in 2002, won a $10,000 Donner Book Prize, one of Canada's most distinguished book awards. A second, revised edition will be appearing shortly.

POSTSCRIPT: The second edition is out.

Now we know who's coming to dinner

Now I've done it: my Nunavut correspondent has decided to go all the way with polar bear meat. I feel somehow responsible - hope it was good :)

POSTSCRIPT: Bears hunting humans, humans hunting bears ... somehow, it all evens out. It's part of the circle of life :)

Mahmoud, we hardly knew ye

He stayed too long, but not long enough really ....

SNL does it again, this time with Andy Samberg's love-note music video to Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately, the video was yanked from the Web because of a copyright clearance snafu.

Ahmadinejad spoke in September at the United Nations and at Columbia University in New York in person and at the National Press Club in Washington DC by teleconference. See these summaries here and here.

Columbia, like so many universities these days, disgraced itself. Or maybe, it was a superb opportunity to let the students and New Yorkers off campus to show up the ridiculous administrators and faculty. The students and New Yorkers acquitted themselves well.

Not enough Said, I guess. For a wackily surreal sidebar on Ahmadinejad's visit and more evidence of the decline of American universities under the reign of political correctness, check this out. Anti-colonialism apparently now includes beating up gay men. I guess none of these bozos have ever read any medieval Arabic or Persian love poetry.

Is it just me, or is something completely off the rails here?

Which leads to the final comment, from funny man Andy Borowitz.

POSTSCRIPT: It's not all bad news from the Middle East. Some Israeli doctors are examining Iraqi children in Jordan for heart conditions that can be treated at the Wolfson Medical Center in Israel. See here.

Congratulations Sox!

One of us here lives in Boston and can't escape the euphoria. Seems less edgy this time, compared to three years ago, but still .... The thirty-six-month long curselet has been lifted!

POSTSCRIPT: Someone proposed to clone the Babe and make the Red Sox champions forever. My proposal is more ambitious: clone all of baseball's past greats from DNA and create the ultimate fantasy baseball team. They can play at ... Fenwassic Park!

Guess who's coming to dinner?

So here's the rest of the story about polar bears (ursus maritimus), the parts never mentioned on the boob tube.

A warming of the Arctic (at least a mild warming) would be a boon for the bears, since they range mostly over land and feed on aquatic creatures along the shore, like fish and seals. Less ice -> more food for the bears. The warming trends are ambiguous: no sign of ice loss or warming on the Canadian/Greenland/Atlantic/European side; some signs on the Asiatic/Pacific side.

The Inuit (Eskimos) of the Arctic are permitted by the US and Canadian federal governments to hunt polar bears, to an extent. Polar bears are not currently listed as endangered - for one thing, their population is increasing. It's not clear to me why that is. The Inuit population of the Canadian north is increasing rapidly. With more humans, there's a lot of trash 'n' stuff for bears to feed on, and they, like their more southerly brown and black bear cousins, have definitely lost their shyness around humans. They routinely come to town looking for, and finding, things to eat. Right now, there's no reason whatever to think that polar bears are in any long-term danger.*

Environmentalists and the media systematically ignore or hide the full truth about polar bears. They are incredibly dangerous to humans, and anyone living in the north is permitted to shoot and kill them in self-defense. Such shootings run at a few hundred a year. Unlike their temperate cousins, polar bears hunt humans for food. The reason is simple: polar bears hunt seals for food - seals are soft, hairless, and blubbery, and make a fine extended meal. Humans are soft, hairless (mostly), and blubbery too.** Not for nothing are polar bears referred to as "land sharks." (For an example, see here.) Read more about them here from a Canadian living in the Arctic.

Posters like this are common in Nunavut, the Canadian province newly created from the Northwest Territories for the Inuit. The strange symbols are a modern alphabet for the Inuit language. A polar bear wandering through town was recently shot dead in Cape Dorset (Baffin Island) by a teenage Inuit boy.

The Inuit are permitted to turn polar bear skins into pelts, blankets, and rugs. Hunting tags are free for them. For outsiders, they cost about $30,000. There's some trade in these items, although restricted by both US and Canadian law. A full polar bear skin costs about $20,000.
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* Endangered means population below a certain size and greatly shrunken habitat. The polar bears are not close to this. The doomsday scenarios are hysteria built on speculation built on hysteria. The "global warming" craze as a whole resolves down into many such deceptions and half-truths.

** Which just adds one more support for the "aquatic ape" theory about humanoid ancestors - even though most biologists don't like the theory or aren't even aware of it. Do polar bears know something biologists don't?

Enough geek humor ...

... for many months.

From the dawn of IT, here's the first help desk (YouTube). From Jonathan Coulton, a song for code monkeys everywhere (YouTube). And, for the really hardcore, good reasons to switch to Linux (Flash).

And remember, while uncontrolled approximations can be a source of major embarrassment, there's no shame in controlled ones :)

Update on the Iraq war

So how goes it?

Better, but still not great. The "surge" has worked as advertised, in a limited sense. But it remains a temporary solution and cannot be sustained beyond next spring. Chatter about the "surge" deflects attention from the fact that the US needs a longer-term strategy, and it's fairly clear what that is.

That strategy is reducing the troop level to something much lower (30,000 say) and reshaped for pure counterinsurgency, without the typically long and massive American logistical trail - the one that winds through the fast food joints in Kuwait and ends in a military warehouse back here in the States. The keys to successful counterinsurgency are:

• Using the minimal force necessary, not the maximum force possible
• Keeping the politics to the fore and the military aspect to the rear

The political constraints should be the following. It's not in American interests to intervene military in purely internal Iraqi conflicts. That's not to say the US can't do conflict resolution here; it just shouldn't involve military intervention. The reason is simple: get involved militarily in the Middle East and, no matter how hard you try, you'll end up being viewed as "taking sides" and "dishonoring" or "shaming" someone (viz. Lebanon in 1982-83).* OTOH, if something in Iraq involves al-Qa'eda, its affiliates, or their Iranian-Shi'ite counterparts, then indeed the US has a real stake in the regional and global implications and military involvement is absolutely justified - like in Afghanistan, in the same way and for the same reasons.

Al-Qa'eda's military and political fortunes in Iraq have plunged in the last year and a half. Whether this reversal will stick depends heavily on whether al-Qa'eda can regroup and regenerate itself, like in Afghanistan. That in turn depends on the presence of outside sponsors and sanctuaries - like the case of Pakistan vis-à-vis Afghanistan.

Supporters of the Iraq operation also need to face a by-now fairly obvious American political reality. Many of them have wrongly fused support for the Iraq war with support for Bush (or vice versa). In the last year, that fusion has become no longer tenable. It's not "Bush and Iraq," but "Bush or Iraq." The combination of Bush's "true believer" stubbornness and incompetence, his now-almost complete reliance on military people who understand things better than he does, and the remains of BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) among liberals and Democrats makes separating Bush from his Mess-o-potamia essential, if we're ever to straighten the latter out.** Bush will no longer be president after January 2009. The Iraq mess, and even more, the Iranian threat hanging over it all like a dark cloud, will still be there.

POSTSCRIPT: A politically- and militarily-savvy synopsis, and a somewhat different point of view, from the San Antonio Express-News.
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* Thus, under no circumstances should the US intervene militarily in a Kurdish-Turkish conflict. There's a lot of other things we can do to help stop or contain such a conflict; military intervention isn't one of them.

** This has a powerful added bonus for the 2008 Republican candidates. As Bush and Iraq are peeled apart, the powerful anti-Bush obsession among Democrats dissipates. There's little else to the Dems these days except BDS. They're still as bankrupt now as they were in 2004.

Shanah tovah in Baghdad

Yochi Dreazen is the Wall Street Journal's occasional Baghdad reporter. He spent Rosh Hashanah 2007 at a US army base near Baghdad and wrote this moving account. This version is published by Point of No Return, a very interesting blog about the forgotten Jews and Jewish refugees of the Middle East.

POSTSCRIPT: Here is an interesting article on that Iranian fictionalized television drama of the Holocaust, loosely based on the life of the Iranian diplomat Abdol Hossein Sardari. Several analysts reviewing the Farsi original have traced out clear anti-Zionist themes and several standard tropes of anti-Israel propaganda, and a disturbing implication of Jews as corrupt.

You might wonder where that "Zionism is racism" garbage, as well as the more subtle attempts to divide Jews from Jewish nationalism, come from. The first is a legacy of three+ decades of Soviet propaganda, unabashedly anti-Zionist and antisemitic. The second is a standard theme of both far Left and Islamic-oriented propaganda. An upcoming posting will explore the origins of these and other antisemitic concepts in the long, unique, and now defunct experiment of the Jewish diaspora, which created a distorted and untenable combination of simultaneous achievement and survival with exceptional powerlessness. Antisemitism and Jewish powerlessness coexist in symbiosis. But attempts to end that powerlessness and normalize Jewish life also provoke frenzied resistance from certain quarters, including some Jewish ones.

Another something very cool

That would be the Giza Archives Project, which is storing and making available tens of the thousands of documents from almost a century of archeology at the Giza Plateau, home of Egypt's pyramids. It's a joint project of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard University.

POSTSCRIPT: Are there too many amateur archeology crackpots out there? That's what Eric Cline of George Washington University thinks (requires registration). Amateurs can contribute a lot to archeology, as they still do to astronomy - it's not, and probably never will be, a fully professionalized subject. But there's no substitute for doing your homework - and eating your broccoli :)

A look back at Hopper

A short tribute to American artist Edward Hopper appeared in this space a couple months ago, following the opening of the retrospective exhibit of his work at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. The retrospective is now on the road, showing currently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, then moving to Chicago's Art Institute in January. Art and culture critic Martha Bayles of Boston College has written her own tribute to Hopper as a review of the exhibit.

The theme in her tribute is "painter of light," and that Hopper certainly is. Bayles' perceptive realization is that Hopper was a painter of light - the real thing and very difficult to capture on the canvas - and of not lighting. No one who has seen his paintings in the original can disagree. The origin of Hopper's early mastery of light is his native New England summers and autumns. This light is brilliant for a few months, but becomes unique in its mixture of shallow angle and distinctive landscape in fall and early winter.

The most common perception of Hopper's paintings is their strikingly absence of people in some cases, and their apparent alienation and lack of connectedness in others. All of them seem to be listening to something, but not to each other or to us. They also communicate a very American sense of transience and alienation. A sense of openness and possibility, but with people never seeming to quite fit in, is American as apple pie, although Americans often have a hard time recognizing it - Europeans and others usually sense it more quickly. It's a similar quality that Dvořák captured in the slow movement of his Ninth Symphony (From the New World). Amid the famous spiritual and Indian chant melodies, the movement unwinds into a musical "night on the plains," with its bright stars, distant lights and trains - and no one for miles.

If you're in Washington or Chicago during the Hopper retrospective, don't miss it.

Crochet the Lorenz attractor

Once an obscure diagram in dynamical systems, then the world-famous butterfly-resembling, butterfly-effect-causing Lorenz attractor - now you can crochet it. (Here's the original paper in PDF.)

About Lorenz and his attractor: more to come. Chaos: it's not just for physics nerds any more.

POSTSCRIPT: It's been pointed out to me that the crochet pattern is actually the Lorenz stable manifold, a two-dimensional reduction of the attractor. The attractor itself can't be crocheted. While the stable manifold is a reduction, it is nonetheless invariant under the flow. Trajectories don't cross it, and it encloses the full attractor in an invariant way.

Nobel committee lays another egg

Someone once called the era we live in the "age of inflation." For example, a million dollars isn't worth what it once was. Neither apparently is the Nobel Peace Prize. A science prize can't be awarded to something that pretends to be science but actually isn't - at least, not without completely destroying the worth of the prize. For the Peace Prize, the standards are evidently lower - much lower, we now learn.

By awarding Al Gore and the IPCC the Peace Prize, the Nobel Peace Prize committee has done it again, marking another large cut in the prestige, meaning, and value of what they're handing out. Not that they haven't done it before: they awarded part of the 1994 Peace Prize to Arafat. That decision was motivated by a mix of wishful thinking and opportunism, as was the awarding of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize to Jimmy Carter. What we've just seen with Gore and the IPCC is a case of political correctness run amok. It's not that different from the grade inflation and speech codes common on campus these days: administrators looking for a bandwagon to jump on or lacking the spine to stand up to fanatics. In a few years, it won't matter, since the "global warming" craze seems to be dissipating; the Nobel committee will simply look like idiots again.

This Nobel committee has also strikingly passed up in recent years far more worthy people who take large risks for peace and stay away from the temptation to violence: the Iraqi Shi'ite clerics (like Sistani) or the Burmese monks, for example.

But with all that said, it's still a scientific outrage - a blatant attempt to replace science with junk, following the pattern laid down for the last twenty years, short-circuiting scientific reasoning with credulity and obsession. It forces bad methodology and results on everyone else that, for any other scientific issue or topic, would be dismissed out of hand. Apparently, not when it comes to this issue.

The basic problem with the "global warming" crackpottery from the start has been preconceived dogma armed with political clout and media megaphones browbeating everyone else and demonizing rational critics and criticism. A Nobel Peace Prize just means another year or so of it. But many people are wise to official B.S. now: far from enhancing the stature of Gore and the IPCC, it simply cheapens the prize further.*

The timing of the prize is significant as well. A prize given in late 2007 is probably meant to influence the US presidential elections next year. It might mean a final attempt by Gore to run for president with his zany pet cause. If you're registered Democrat, you can vote in Democratic primaries. If you're not, you can change your registration. (Many states have open primaries in any case.) If you can, be sure to vote against Gore. We don't need a monomaniac of bad science or a Cardinal Bellarmino running for president or being president.

POSTSCRIPT: I was unaware of this, but the Nobel Peace Prize was not part of Nobel's original will. It was added somewhat later (in 1901) and is issued by the Norwegian parliament in Oslo, not by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm.
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* An appropriate response from the US government should be the complete withdrawal of government money, science, and recognition from the IPCC. The US can't by itself disband the IPCC, but it can press other countries to do so. It's the price to pay to free ourselves from the dangerous concepts of "official" and "consensus" science.

Hangin' in the Holy City

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

- Nietzsche

And there's no city more built for walking than Jerusalem.

I was experiencing less tension than I expected. Walking around Jerusalem proved easier than I had thought. The scene of the worst suicide-bombing campaign ever a few years ago (imagine a 9/11 attack every month) was remarkably calm. The tourists haven't returned to Jerusalem in quite the numbers you see elsewhere in Israel. And there's more self-segregation by neighborhood now than 20 years ago - religious Jews of different tendencies keep to their own neighborhoods, more liberal or secular Jews in theirs - all Jews on the western or "new" city side (or in the western suburbs) - and all Arabs on the eastern side ("east" Jerusalem), as well as the Old City in the middle. Jerusalem is an avocado with a Jewish half to the west, northwest, and north; an Arab half to the east, northeast, and southeast; with the Old City as the "pit" at the center. The Old City was the only part that survived for many centuries, until just before World War One. Its present walls were built in the sixteenth century by an Ottoman emperor.

It's also one of the most hauntingly beautiful places you'll ever see. It's a fragile sort of beauty, and elusive. Much of it has to do with the quality of its light. Americans living in northern California or northern New England (in the summer and fall) are a little familiar with this light. But in those places, it's connected with being on the water. Except for the Dead Sea off in the distance, there's no body of water here.*

I walked all over, mostly the Jewish western part, with part of one day in the narrow streets and alleys of the Old City. It was all familiar, since I lived for one summer in Jerusalem and visited twice again later. At the same time, much has changed. The arrival of the Russian Jews in the 1990s meant that English was no longer the unchallenged second language it had once been. You also don't have to listen for long to hear another second language, French, the product of a more recent wave of French Jews - some neighborhoods of Jewish west Jerusalem are now heavily French. The amount of construction was startling - new buildings, new and improved roads, new hotels, etc. The western suburbs have expanded, and the more modern parts of Jerusalem even have traffic jams now.

I didn't walk as much in east Jerusalem, but I did pass through it on my way out and around the Old City. It too has grown and modernized - new shops, new hotels, modern taxis and buses - very different from 20 years ago when I first visited. It makes you wonder about the radically misleading stuff you get on television. Free of context or accurate explanation, such experiences bring home how much television news is junk food. In the case of the 2001-2004 terror war (second intifada), you never see the ordinariness of life at all.

But there are reminders of the terror war here. Security is far more in-your-face than in Tel Aviv or Eilat. Restaurants, banks, and stores all have guards. The public buses spot check people as they board. The impressive new bus station also has very obvious security, although nothing onerous. Near the Old City, if you look out northeast or southeast, you can see the security "fence" or "wall" that divides Israel proper (more or less) from the Palestinian areas of the West Bank. The combination of this fence and the active security measures have prevented anyone from pulling off a suicide bombing here since 2004.

The combination of self-segregation, security, and residual fear has put a damper on the economy in and around Jerusalem. While the western edges and suburbs of the city are thriving, the Old City even now lacks the level of tourism it had before 2001. The security restrictions also dampen the Palestinian Arab economy in east Jerusalem and the West Bank. When I walked into the Old City, past the narrow market (shuq or suq), shopkeepers descended all with they claimed were great deals. The Armenian quarter (the smallest of the four) was quieter, with fewer shops and, I suspect, less economic desperation. The Armenian community here is small but old and has strong connections with both Armenia and the Armenian diaspora. Fundraising among Armenian-Americans had made possible a beautiful renovation of the Quarter's Gulbenkian library.

Around the "corner," past the Zion Gate along the southern wall, and you reach the Jewish Quarter. After the Jordanians captured the Old City in 1949, this quarter was demolished, only to be rebuilt after Jerusalem was reunified in 1967. It didn't look that different from the 1980s - until I reached the Temple Mount plaza. The plaza in front of the Western or "Wailing" Wall, the prime focus of Jewish worship as the last remains of the Second Temple, had been rebuilt, as well as guarded by an elaborate security gate. Up on the ramparts of the Temple Mount compound itself was the controversial new construction by the Muslim Waqf (religious endowment) that controls the compound itself and its buildings. This area (the Haram es-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary) is the site of the Dome of the Rock, once a mosque, now a museum (that's the gold-domed building) and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the silver-domed building on the southern end of the compound overlooking the new archeological park.

The Jewish western city is much more modern and secular. Although few countries recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, virtually all governmental functions have moved here from Tel Aviv in the last 40 years. It boasts the Israel Museum and countless other world-class institutions, including the two-campus Hebrew University. It even boasts real nightlife now - real nightclubs, as well as the famous Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall that comes alive after the sabbath ends Saturday evening.** Nonetheless, Jerusalem is a definitely more conservative, family-oriented place than Tel Aviv, which by default, is Israel's capital of commerce and secular culture. (Unlike Tel Aviv, Jerusalem has no nude beaches :) Given that Jerusalem's secular population is declining as a fraction of the whole and the city's evident self-segregation - religious versus secular, Jewish versus Arabic, "official" Jerusalem versus "ordinary" Jerusalem - it's a wonder that the city has flourished. But it has.

POSTSCRIPT: A Sunday afternoon trip (a work day for Israelis) took me to Abu Ghosh, a charming Arab town a little west of Jerusalem. Israelis are no longer comfortable walking around the Old City, so they flock to Abu Ghosh instead. Today it's all Muslim, but there remain two beautiful churches, both once Greek (Byzantine) sites, now controlled by the French Catholic order of the Lazarist Brothers. Although it was officially closed, the abbot of the lower one (Church of the Resurrection) let me in to walk around, both inside and out. He spoke no English, so we conversed in limited doses of French and Hebrew. Here is the sanctuary, an interesting mix of Byzantine architecture and Roman Catholic (western) art and furnishings. The acoustics are fantastic, and the sanctuary is home to frequent concerts.
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* The Dead Sea is an odd duck even among salt water lakes. Part of the Great Rift that runs up from east Africa, it's the lowest land point on the Earth's surface. The sea is so laden with salts that you can easily float on its surface; its name in Hebrew is Salt Sea. It's fed by the Jordan River, but there so much water being diverted now from this system, that the Jordan in places is more brook than river, and the Dead Sea has now shrunk to three separate puddles. See here.

** The most fun new nightclub in Jerusalem is The Lab, on the grounds of the old railroad station. It's complete with mosh pit and greeters at the door, in white lab coats, who hand out drinks served in beakers and testtubes. There are sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll in the Holy City; they're just more discreet. And getting wasted in Jerusalem is - well - different from getting wasted anywhere else.

About those crocs ... plus a Middle Eastern cup of joe

So I'd better clear the air about my feelings on crocs ... love 'em, hate 'em ... love the sinner, hate the sin? I don't hate croc-wearers. I just think they make adults who wear them look ridiculous, except maybe at the beach.

Were there crocs everywhere in the Middle East? Or just the desert? (Isn't it all desert? No, actually, it isn't.) They are comfortable in the desert. They protect your feet against burning sand, while still "breathing." So it's natural the Beduin would want them. They do what a good pair of sandals do, only better. I saw them in Eilat, of course, especially on and near the beach. But I saw them even in Jerusalem, and there they seemed pretty out of place. Maybe crocs just aren't respectful enough for the Holy City.*

BTW, click here to see what Manolo of shoe blogs fame thinks of crocs. There's even a "I hate Crocs" website.

On a happier note, let's talk about coffee. It started in that part of the world. Europeans and then Americans changed it, but Middle Eastern coffee is still special.

It goes like this. The more you roast the beans, the less caffeine per pound. So American coffee, contrary to myth, is the most caffeinated. We just use less of it to make a cup of joe. That's why Italians call the lighter, clearer coffee (more water, less bean) "cafe Americano." As you move eastward, towards the dawn of civilization, the more roasted the beans. But then again, Italians, with their espresso, use more coffee to make a cup: the caffeine is more concentrated, and even a small cup can give you a real kick. Finally, at the center of coffee culture, the Middle East, the beans are the most roasted and the least caffeinated. But they use a lot of coffee to make even a small demitasse. It's so thick, it's almost like sludge. Turks and Israelis call it "Turkish coffee," Arabs call it "Arabic coffee," and Greeks, of course, refer to it as "Greek coffee" - and don't try to argue with them.

The best coffee experience on my trip: I got better-than-decent espresso and cappuccino in Erice (Sicily). But nothing can top the Beduin coffee at the Aqaba-Eilat border crossing. The shop owner obviously lucked out with an exclusive concession. He had the usual tourist stuff - postcards, film, batteries, T-shirts, plus more of that old Ottoman bric-a-brac (non-functional rifle, Turkish sword, narghila or hookah for flavored tobacco). But in the back was the classic Bedu brass coffee pot over an open fire. The coffee had a slight hint of mocha and, most critically, was continually stirred and swished around - that way, it ends up thick but not sludgy. Served with a slight touch of lemony essence, no other coffee touches it. And a demitasse of it is enough to keep you going all morning.

Even with globalization and Starbucks, coffee like that is not something that can be mass-produced or packaged. This is one of the reasons we travel.**
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* Although entering a mosque, you're required to remove your shoes.

** Not that I'm one of those snobs who hates Starbucks. I'm not a big coffee-drinker, but Starbucks coffee is fine and, more important, reliable.

The lost city of the desert

Next stop after Tel Aviv was the twin desert cities of Eilat and Aqaba. They sit on opposite sides, Israeli and Jordanian, of the same harbor at the top of the Red Sea branch called - surprise - the Gulf of Eilat or Aqaba (depending on whom you ask). This tip of the Red Sea actually has four converging countries - Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia - within a small area. The Israeli-Egyptian border is marked by the small desert town of Taba, a gateway for tourists into and out of the Sinai peninsula. But not for me - my goal was across the harbor in Jordan - the lost desert city of Petra.

It was still August and still very hot when I arrived in Eilat; the first day's high was 45 C or 114 F. Besides wearing a hat at all times during the day, you have to drink water constantly. You don't sweat in the desert. The water just silently leaves your body, and you don't notice until you pass out. So you just drink every ten minutes or so.

You can tour Petra in lots of ways, including on your own. But the more you leave in the hands of your tour company and guide, the less hassle you have. (It also helps to travel light.) Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994, and the growth of tourism and the growth of both Eilat and Aqaba as ports have transformed the border area between the two countries. Nonetheless, there are significant visa and crossing fee technicalities you have to take care of before crossing. For Petra itself, a guide is far better than trying on your own. Our guide was both excellent and easy-going. He even gave us a from-the-bus tour of Aqaba, before we headed north toward Petra, which is about half-way to Jordan's capital, Amman.

As we drove down the shoreline boulevard of Aqaba (almost everything you see is new), we passed that enormous Jordanian flag so large you can see it easily from the Israeli side. This flag marks the location of the old Ottoman fort, long since torn down, that once guarded the harbor with its powerful guns. In July 1917, Lawrence and his Beduin irregulars, after "doing the impossible" and crossing the desert behind Aqaba, took the fort from the rear (the Turkish guns couldn't be pointed landward!) and later met Feisal of Mecca, the first Hashemite king, at the shore. The Hashemites at that time ruled Mecca and Medina, the Muslim holy cities, but were kicked out by a Saudi-Wahhabi army from central Arabia in the 1920s. (Thus was born Saudi Arabia.) The British created from trans-Jordanian Palestine a new "Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan," the modern Middle East's oldest surviving government. They included Aqaba as Jordan's only seaport.

The Jordanians were friendly and completely fit the common perception of the desert Beduin as hospitable. There was a fair amount of border security crossing both ways; walking the fifty meters of no-man's land between the guard houses was a little unnerving. Large signs and billboards on the Jordanian side show the current king (Abdullah) and his father (Hussein) and remind you that you're now in a conservative monarchy, albeit a relatively benevolent one. Jordan has opened up to globalization in a significant way, with Aqaba forming (like Eilat) a tax-free zone to attract residents and investment. I heard that Amman has become very modern, with a new airport that even Israelis use (because it's cheaper than Ben Gurion airport, which itself has been completely and dazzlingly rebuilt), and new infrastructure was everywhere we looked. But violent incidents have occurred in Jordan: the 2005 Amman hotel bombings by an al Qa'eda affiliate (not long after similar bombings in the Egyptian Sinai) and, back into the 1990s, an attack by Jordanian border guards on a group of Israeli school children touring Jordan just after the peace treaty. Security was also very evident: civil policemen and army reservists, both prominent in Aqaba and in our destination of Petra.

After Aqaba came the long climb up the desert road (about 90 minutes) to the plateau over the Dead Sea. The temperature dropped to a more comfortable 32 C or 90 F. Funny how your perception of "hot" changes after a day in Eilat!

To see Petra fully, you need about three days - so says my book - but we had only about five hours, which was enough time to see the central part of the Petra site, now a royal Jordanian park. The town outside the park, Wadi Musa, has grown rapidly in recent years, as the government has tried to get the Beduin to give up their nomadic ways and settle down in one spot. The town features a mosque near the reputed Well of Moses (Ain Musa), the rock that Moses struck to get water for the complaining Israelites. As in Aqaba, we were not allowed off the bus; instead our guide got us water and fresh fruit while we waited, and we proceeded to the park entrance.*

You can look at a map and professional photographs of Petra here, or you can watch the third Indiana Jones movie, which was filmed at Petra. I'll just say that the site deserves its status as one of the "new seven wonders of the world." The city is located in a deep rock gorge (the Siq) of mainly sandstone. Except for some Roman-era improvements (like columns and stone pavement), the whole city was carved from this sandstone. It was created by the Nabateans, an originally nomadic north-Arabian people who settled down in this area around 300 BCE, not long after Alexander the Great conquered the area. They adapted a Hellensitic style for their main buildings, including the famous central building, the Khazneh or Treasury. No one is sure what its actual function was. Archaeologists (including T. E. Lawrence) have been working at Petra since the early twentieth century.

Around it are carved residential caves and tombs, and a carved Roman-era amphitheater as well. The innermost part of the Siq contains more Roman-era remains - a colonnaded Cardo (paved commercial street) and a law court. These were destroyed in late antiquity by earthquakes during the city's long decline. The site seems to have been abandoned completely after about 600 CE. It was rediscovered by the outside world in the nineteenth century.

Even the sand at Petra is memorable. It's red, desert-hot, crumbled sandstone, not beach sand. I was wearing sandals, wishing I had worn something more solid, since it burned my feet. Only the big Roman pavement stones were really comfortable to walk on. The Roman engineering was outstanding; sometimes it took a while to decide if I was looking at something modern or ancient.

For several centuries, a Beduin clan (the bani Bedoul) has been squatting on the site. The government has tried, without much success, to induce the Bedoul to leave and settle in Wadi Musa. The tourist trade is big business within Petra itself, and the Beduin living there apparently make a good living at it: tourists need water, batteries, film and camel and donkey rides. (There's even a donkey taxi down the Siq and back. No powered vehicles are allowed in the site itself, so animal power is it.) It doesn't require even reading and writing skills; many Beduin are illiterate. But they do have cellphones and some even wear those popular-around-the-world Crocs, which looked strange on people riding camels.**

The Beduin at Petra to some extent are in on the whole "noble savage" joke. One of their most distinctive activities is creating crafts from the desert sandstone, including beautiful layered colored sand creations housed in curvy-shaped glass jars. If you go to Petra, be sure to go to what I thought was the best craft campsite, which features a large, humorous Flintstones sign.***

I wanted to take a picture here, but avoided it - I avoided taking any pictures of people in Jordan, actually. There is a clear taboo on it, partly for security, but also for strong cultural and religious reasons common in the more conservative areas of the Middle East. Not wanting to play to the "ugly tourist" stereotype means learning where such lines are and not crossing them.

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* Originally, I thought such measures we designed to protect Jordanians from us - Jordan is a conservative place, although not radically reactionary (like Saudi Arabia). Later, I realized the isolation was more designed to keep us from mingling with Jordanians in a way that would make us easier targets for terrorists, like the mixed Muslim-foreign tourist situations targeted by the Amman and Sinai terrorists in 2005. When radical Islamic terrorists attack such mixed groups, they're "sending a message" - not just to outsiders, but also to Muslims who mix as equals with non-Muslims. Our group had some Israelis, with a mix of Jews and Christians; many outside groups at Petra were Christian. But a lot of tourist groups at the park were Muslim, mainly from the Gulf kingdoms and, if their dress was any indication, one from Saudi Arabia.

** Not that I'm singling out the Beduin in particular. Crocs look ridiculous on anyone over the age of about 10. Crocs do "breathe," though, making them both protective and comfortable in the desert.

Inside Petra park are also some projects sponsored by the current Queen of Jordan to help the Beduin raise horses and other animals and help the Beduin women in particular. As in any traditional and patriarchal society, they're completely dependent on men. If a woman lacks a husband, father, or brother to rely on, she's in serious trouble.

*** Yes, Jordanians watch television - the Flintstones are dubbed in Arabic.

The city that never sleeps

My next stop was Tel Aviv, Israel's largest city, and one of the largest Mediterranean metropolitan centers altogether. During my first few days in Israel, the coastal weather was hot and humid, but clear. The temperature ran around 38 C (98-100 F). The water was a spectacular green-blue. I walked down the beautifully cleaned up beach promenade toward the old port town of Jaffa. The fantastic economic growth of the last 15 years has given Tel Aviv a modern skyline and raised prices for coastal real estate to near-European levels.

Tel Aviv (Hill of Spring) was founded in 1909 next to the much older port city of Jaffa (Yafo). The Ottoman Turks ruled Palestine at that time. For a long time, it was the main center of Israeli government and what international commerce there was. In the 1930s, it was famous for its Bauhaus-inspired architecture. But after independence in 1948, Tel Aviv was swamped with immigrants, first from Europe, then from the successive waves of Oriental or "eastern" (Mizrachi) Jews from Arab countries. The city struggled, not helped by the largely socialized economy and perpetual state of war between Israel and its neighbors.

Twenty years ago, when I first visited Israel, Tel Aviv was much more of a diamond-in-the-rough. The beaches were often unattractive, and much of the city was run down, with that "instant slum" look familiar from other modernizing Mediterranean cities like Athens and Istanbul. The port area in the northern part of the city was polluted and not a place you'd want to go if you didn't have to. Israel's economy was heavily socialized and mostly closed.

Not now: as I walked around the northern and central part of the city my first day, I could see the effect of Israel's economic opening to privatization and globalization. While there is some exchange with other eastern Mediterranean countries (notably with Turkey and the Greek islands), the most startling sign of globalization is the presence of Asian businesses and workers, mainly from India and China, especially the latter. Northern Tel Aviv, once the unattractive port area, is now home to a fast-growing biotech industry around the university - plus an amazing explosion of nightlife. Israel is the practical, pioneering sort of society - early to bed, early to rise - turned globalizing and postmodern: Tel Avivis now stay up all hours with their Internet connections (Tel Aviv is the world's most wired city) and their cellphones (pervasive and always ringing). My first night there was with a friend in the biotech industry. It was my first contact with Israel's culinary revolution: "gourmet" and "Israeli" can now be used in the same sentence. In this case, it was a bit a falafel and shwarma. Anything you get in the States is a pale shadow of it.

The old port city of Jaffa and southern Tel Aviv still have a ways to go. The waterfront area of Jaffa has been carefully restored. I was amazed by the Jerusalem-like solid stone reconstruction and facades. Jaffa has been around for about 3400 years, since the late Bronze Age. It's well-known for its oranges and being the embarcation point for Jonah's strange journey and encounter with a whale. Speaking of whales, next to the old seawall in Jaffa harbor, is Andromeda's rock, which somehow became identified as the place where she was rescued by Perseus from the sea monster (Cetus or Ketos - a whale).

It was probably the same whale making his rounds and showing up in all the stories.

A walk outside Jaffa port led me past the restored Ottoman clock tower into the emphatically unrestored neighborhood. This is a mainly Mizrachi (Oriental) Jewish area and lacks the resources of Tel Aviv's northern neighborhoods or the expensive northern suburbs beyond. The first set of streets made up Jaffa's famous flea market. Some people think it's just scuzzy, but it has a firesale charm to it. There's a lot of junk for sale, but now and then you see something worth a long look: some preserved old furniture, an old Beduin rifle, and quite a few nicely kept Turkish swords. This is one of the places where the remains of the Ottoman Empire ended up. Many of the old Ottoman countries have experienced a wave of nostalgia for those days recently. Looking at a pre-1914 samovar set, restored to luster and functionality, got me to thinking.

I walked a circle around the Mizrachi area, had lunch at one of its famous restaurants (Doctor Shakshuka), then walked back through the older, original part of Tel Aviv back into the newer and more modern center. A few buildings remain from the old Ottoman days - a mosque here, a church there - that once sat alone outside the protective walls of Jaffa port. The modern city has grown up around them. Directly to the south of Jaffa is the neighborhood of Bat Yam, Tel Aviv's only Arab neighborhood proper, although there are some mixed areas along the Jaffa-Tel Aviv line (which is no longer official, since the two cities make a up a single municipality). There was no sense of tension. Although Tel Aviv was the scene a few years ago of some terrorist attacks (including the horrific Dolphinarium massacre in 2001, along the beach promenade), there's only a weak sense of politico-religious rivalry. Tel Aviv's modern and secular character reinforces that.

Arrivederci Sicilia!

Binah, your faithful traveling correspondent, recently took a big trip to the Mediterranean. His first stop was Sicily, the Mediterranean's largest island. It sits just west and south of the Italian "boot."

I stayed my week there at the small mountain town in Sicily's northwest called Erice, overlooking the western sea. A group of us attending a scientific conference were whisked from the airport at Palermo (on Sicily's north coast) on an hour-plus drive to the west, the final part being a steep climb into the coastal mountains. The scientific center at Erice, home to conferences, workshops, and summer schools, is named after a young Sicilian science prodigy, Ettore Majorana, who mysteriously disappeared in 1938. (He made a small number of highly important contributions to the then-burgeoning science of elementary particles and forces.)

This southwest-facing coast is not as famous as the Greek-influenced southeast corner and lacks its own Mount Etna. But you've heard of some of this part of Sicily, although perhaps not with that association. It's a part of the island first colonized by the Carthaginians around 800 BCE, itself a North African colony founded in 814 BCE by the Phoenician city of Tyre back in what is today Lebanon. Sicily is three-cornered, with coasts facing north, southwest, and southeast. The northern coast was originally the least developed part, the home of a mysterious people the Romans called the Siculi, for whom the island was named. Over the millennia, Sicily has been ruled by Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Greeks again, Arabs from North Africa, the Normans, the Spanish, and finally by the modern Italian republic.

August in Sicily is hot, tending toward the humid, with strong sea breezes. But Sicily is also subject to the powerful north African scirocco wind, headed northward from the Sahara in the late summer and loaded with atmospheric dust, and we had three or four days of it later in the week. Erice boasts a mountain cable car both exciting and useful. It runs up and down the mountain all day and well into the evening, acting as Erice's main public transportation to the port city of Trapani - unless the scirocco shuts it down. It did for part of my stay.

In spite of the heat, I walked all around our mountain town of Erice every day, enjoying the amazing Sicilian food, and took a part of day to hike down to Trapani. Next to Trapani is the better-known city of Marsala, home of the famous wine, salt, and chicken. Salt has been harvested there from the sea for almost three millenia, starting with the Phoenicians. Marsala wine (fortified and aged like port) was invented by English wine merchants in the late 18th century. A later wine merchant, Joseph Whitaker, bought the island of Mozia in Marsala harbor. He started excavations there just before World War One. While the island was donated by the Whitaker family to Sicily about 30 years ago, the excavations continue, and what's been dug up is now preserved in a museum at the site.

For Americans, Sicily brings up a cluster of outdated stereotypes of organ-grinders, heavy tomato-based cooking, and the Mafia. (Most Italian-Americans are of southern Italian extraction - Sicilian and Calabrese - because the south was and is the poorest part of Italy.) The Mafia is a leftover of the days when Sicily was ruled by foreigners. Most of its power has been broken in a campaign that has gone on in fits and starts since the days of Mussolini. I didn't see any organ-grinders, but the cocina Siciliana (like the architecture) shows an interesting mix of Greek, Arab, mainland Italian, and French influences. Couscous with local fish is a regional signature. Tomatoes are still ubiquitous. Erice is famous for its ultrasweet marzipan and mustazzuoli.

Much of the island's infrastructure is new. Sometimes I thought I was in California. The regional and Italian governments, plus the EU, have clearly been at work. Modern industries like wine and food export and tourism have also made a large mark. Sicily is still poor compared to northern Italy, but the gap is much smaller than in centuries past.