In this occasional series on science, which started a year ago (2/06) with The Search for Dark Matter, I discussed Einstein's concept of special relativity last August in A Personal Journey Through Relativity.  Jack Wheeler provided an engaging account of it two years ago (2/05) in Aristotle, Einstein, and Ayn Rand. Einstein though did not have a Theory of Relativity  -- ‘a' as in one.  He had two.  His Special Theory is about the relativity of time.  His General Theory is about the relativity of gravity.  The puzzles and paradoxes of the first pale in comparison to those of the second. So much so that most anyone can visualize clocks telling time at different rates and astronauts coming back from another galaxy much younger than the people they left on earth.  The math and explanations may be hard but one can at least visualize the effects of special relativity. It seems well-nigh impossible to visualize gravity not as a force but as a manifestation of curved space.

The Mother of All Corrections issued by the Washington Post Saturday (2/10) illustrates what is wrong with our intelligence agencies, and -- especially -- with news coverage of them. The inspector general of the Department of Defense had been asked by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee (and now, alas, its chairman), to determine whether the intelligence analysis on Iraq done by the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans under then Under Secretary Douglas Feith violated the law. On Feb. 8, acting Inspector General Thomas Gimble issued his report.  Washington Post reporters Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith wrote a story about it, which appeared on the front page of last Friday's paper.  They managed to confuse the IG report with a press release sent out by Sen. Levin over two years ago.

I very much appreciated the responses and comments regarding The Fragility of Islamofascism posted in the TTP User Forum.  I also received requests to explain the Koran's "Satanic Verses" more fully. The saga of the Satanic Verses starts with the earliest accounts of Mohammed's life written by accepted Islamic scholars such as Ibn Ishaq (died 767 AD) and al-Tabari (d. 923). "Accepted" means by Islamic tradition.  Mohammed supposedly died in 632 and Ishaq wrote about him over 100 years later - so could not have interviewed anyone who knew him.  Yet we only know of Ishaq through quotes of him by Tabari, who lived 300 years after Mohammed. Thus the earliest source of Mohammed's life and the alleged founding of Islam was written three centuries later.  The saga of Mohammed is a myth for which there is no genuine historical evidence whatever.  I discussed this in The Myth of Mecca, written a few days after the Moslem attack on America of September 11, 2001. So we are talking "sacred history" here, not actual history. 

To say the earth is as warm as its ever been since the invention of the thermometer isn't as scary as alarmists think.  The mercury thermometer was invented by Gabriel Fahrenheit in 1714. That was in the middle of the Little Ice Age (AD 1350-1900). Of course temperatures are warmer now than they were then.  Dr. Bob Carter, a paleoclimate researcher at James Cook University in Australia, notes that for most of the last six million years, average global temperatures were as much as five degrees Celsius warmer than they are today. As each new piece of evidence weakens their argument, global warming alarmists try to shut off debate. They claim a consensus which does not exist.  The National Registry of Environmental Professionals took a survey last November, which indicated two thirds of its members think global warming is a serious problem.  That means a third do not. So much for consensus. Skeptics are, global warming alarmists say, a "fringe" who are paid by CO2-spewing corporations to express doubt.  But numbered among the skeptics are some of the world's most renowned climatologists, such as Richard Lindzen of MIT and Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia.  All have better credentials than does the divinity school dropout who invented the Internet and from whom alarmists take their cues.

What is a "hedge fund"? If you have trouble answering the question, you are not alone, because the term is commonly used to describe many types of pooled investments that may have little in common with each other. Yet despite the lack of agreement about what exactly are hedge funds, a host of politicians, commentators and financial regulators now advocate more regulation of them.  I am sure you are just so surprised.