A couple from the UK got married in Canada and then later decided they wanted a divorce. When it comes to divorce and other matters of legal consequence, though, it turns out that Canadian law requires that the couple’s marriage be recognized in their country of citizenship. A lawyer with the Department of Justice, arguing on behalf of the government, thus declared that the couple’s same-sex marriage is not legally recognizable in this case, and was therefore never valid in the first place. This, he extended, means that virtually all other same-sex marriages issued to foreigners are likewise invalid.
[. . .]
Now, I’m not at all fond of being in the position of defending Stephen Harper’s Conservatives (I find most of their policies indefensible and the others generally pretty sucky), but I truly think this whole interpretation caught them off guard. I don’t believe that the Department of Justice lawyer was arguing based on explicit instruction from the PMO, nor do I think Harper is actively seeking to end same-sex marriage in Canada. (He still does his best to prevent other advances in equality and protection; equalizing the age of consent and adding protections for trans Canadians comes to mind, but I sincerely don’t think he wants to take away our right to marry.)
At any rate, despite what you may read, there was no policy change here—just a lawyer making a foolish argument. Rather than side with the lawyer’s interpretation, the government has stated that they will remedy the situation the same way I would: Explicitly clarify the law to recognize marriages in legal matters, no matter what the legality of those marriages are in the couple’s home country.
In 1978, Edward Said defined orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” The Muslim world, he argued, is rarely seen as significant and complex in its own right, but derives its significance from its relationship with the West: a comparative framework that guarantees a delusory bias. The Orient is the West’s “surrogate and underground self”, an “Other” that allows the West to define its cultural identity while justifying its imperialist goals.
Though ostensibly meant to include the broader Muslim world, the theory of orientalism has never worked well with Central Asia. [. . .] Central Asia is “not the “other” but the other’s “other” — Russia’s orient, a region whose history and political complexities are poorly understood even by some who proclaim to be experts; a region whose best-known ambassador is Borat. Unlike the Arab world, Central Asia is not demonized and degraded in the Western public imagination: it is disregarded. The region connotes nothing – except perhaps obscurity itself.
There is a certain irony, therefore, in the new identity that has been forged on Central Asia since January 2011: that of the Arab world’s aspirational doppelganger. Since revolution first broke out in Tunisia and Egypt, countless analysts have speculated about whether unrest would “spread” from the Arab world to Central Asia. Never mind that comparatively little has “spread” from the Arab world to Central Asia in recent years (hyberbolic claims of Hizb-ut Tahrir domination notwithstanding), or that Central Asians sometimes take a dim view of these revolutions, or that the Soviet legacy shapes Central Asian politics far more than anything taking place abroad. Instead, Central Asia is often presented as a Middle East in training: they are Muslims, they have oil, they have dictators, so their policies and protests must have the Arab Spring as their guiding impulse.
Central Asia is not unique in this regard. Hundreds of riots, rampages, strikes, skirmishes and complaints the world over have been labeled “the next Arab Spring” by analysts eager to understand not only where the Arab revolutions are going, but how they spread in the first place. What differs is that the social, political and cultural conditions of most revolutionary contenders are analyzed, whereas for Central Asia, they are assumed. Occupy Wall Street, for example, is often said to be influenced by the Arab Spring — because the protesters themselves have claimed this affiliation. Russia, to name a closer case, is said to be entering a period of political unrest — and the complexities of this situation, as well as its key players, are thoroughly debated. In contrast, few Central Asians have predicted uprisings in their own region. Most claim the opposite. Yet nearly every story about Central Asian politics carries a perfunctory reference to the Arab Spring, with the result that protests and policies that emerge in reaction to domestic strife – as was the case in Kazakhstan – are assumed to reflect and respond to events abroad.
In this way, Central Asia is a region subject to a strange sort of “reverse orientalism” – a region deemed meaningful only by virtue of its similarity to the Arab world. This is particularly unfortunate because, as Rami G. Khouri observes, “the popularity of the ‘Arab Spring’ term across the Western world quietly mirrors some subtle Orientalism at work, lumping all Arabs as a single mass of people who all think and behave the same way.” Much as the mainstream Western press often fails to distinguish between individual Arab countries, it also fails to distinguish between the Arab world and Central Asia, emphasizing broad, sweeping similarities – religion, resources, repression – while playing down the sharp differences in politics, social life and history that determine the likelihood of political change.
The methane/ethane cycle we see on Titan is reminiscent of the water cycle on Earth, which is what people are really talking about when they refer to this frigid place as vaguely ‘Earth-like’ — this is not exactly a temperate climate! But we have a long way to go in understanding just how the cycle operates on the distant moon, which is why new work on Titan’s sand dunes is drawing interest. By studying the dune fields, we can learn about the climatic and geological history they depict and perhaps get clues about other issues, such as why Titan’s lakes of liquid ethane and methane are found mostly in the northern hemisphere.
What Cassini is showing us are regional variations among Titan’s dunes, a landscape feature that covers some 13 percent of the surface in an area roughly equivalent to that of Canada. But every time we run into an Earth analogue on Titan, we’re confronted with major differences. Titan’s dunes are made not of silicates but of solid hydrocarbons that wind up as tiny grains after precipitating out of the atmosphere. They’re also much larger than sand dunes on Earth, averaging 1-2 kilometers in width, hundreds of kilometers in length, and 100 meters in height.
This ESA news release points out that radar data from Cassini have allowed researchers to see clear correlations between the size of Titan’s dunes and their altitude and latitude. The major dune fields are all found in lowland areas, with dunes at higher elevations much more widely separated and, judging from the bright radar echo Cassini detects from them, covered by thinner layers of sand. Titan’s dunes are also largely confined to its equatorial region, in a band between 30°S and 30°N. As we move north, the dunes become narrower and more widely spaced.
The key may be Titan’s weather. Seasons here are just over seven Earth years long, and the elliptical nature of Saturn’s orbit results in shorter, warmer summers for the southern hemisphere. The result: The wetness of the surface in the southern areas from ethane and methane vapor in the soil is reduced. Drier sand makes for easier dune formation. “As one goes to the north, the soil moisture probably increases, making the sand particles less mobile and, as a consequence, the development of dunes more difficult,” says Alice Le Gall (LATMOS-UVSQ, Paris).
[T]here are similar physical processes operating to create these landscapes. Rain falls out of the sky and flows downhill, collecting into streams that debouch into rivers and thence into lakes or oceans, whence it evaporates back into the sky. Scientists who study this process on one world have expertise valuable to understanding it on the other. On Earth, we call the study of this cycle (and related processes) hydrology, the study of water. On Titan, there's water present, but it's not running in the rivers; water, in its solid form, is the bedrock. It's methane and ethane that fall from Titan's sky, flow in its rivers, and collect in its oceans. On Pluto, it's theoretically possible that there's a liquid nitrogen cycle, at least during some parts of its year. What can you call a field of study that applies to similar processes of rainfall, runoff, erosion, sapping, and evaporation, in similar landforms of rivers, lakes, seas, and aquifers, when there are different fluids on different planets?
I posed this question on Twitter today and I got a lot of suggestions for neologisms, but that's not going to help me out; I need to call things by names that other people will understand when I use them. (Of these suggestions, my favorite was "humorology," referring not to the modern use as in "something funny" but instead to its original meaning of fluid or juice, as in the four humors of Hippocratic physiology, especially because it was followed by the suggestion of "cryology," not as in the thing we do when we're sad but as in cryo-, meaning icy or cold.) Several people suggested "fluid dynamics," but there's already a field of study called that, and it covers how things flow but now how they pool or evaporate or tumble rocks in streams to make them rounded or do all these other things.
Nearly every scientist who answered my question said that really it is "hydrology" that's in common use, even for these non-watery fluids. There are precedents of course. Although some people do talk about "selenology" and "areology" to refer to the physical histories and surface processes on the Moon and Mars, nearly everyone just uses the catch-all term of "geology" despite the fact that "geo" refers to "Earth." Using "hydrology" would make me feel less bad about also using "aquifer" when I'm talking about liquid methane flowing through Titanian sands or liquid nitrogen flowing under Pluto or Triton ices. But if we ever find a place where liquid rock occupies a similar role -- on an exoplanet, maybe, or on a slightly hotter Venus -- I wonder if we'd balk at calling the study of that "hydrology"?
I’ve been reading Robert Batterman’s Devil in the details, a book that packs a lot of punch in a relatively few pages. Among its themes is that of the universality of certain mathematical models. Universality is “the slightly pretentious way in which physicists denote identical behaviour in different systems” (Berry 1987:185, quoted in Batterman 13).
That requires some unpacking. Two systems exhibit “identical” behavior if that behavior can, under suitable redescription, be seen to instantiate the same mathematical system (I use the imprecise word ‘system’ rather than a more precise term because what is instantiated need not be, for example, the graph of a single equation). They are different if, as in the case of Berry’s own examples, they have different shapes, or if, as in some cases discussed by Batterman, they are made of different stuffs. We will see yet another sort of difference below.
Let me start instead with something simple: the directed graph or digraph. Family trees and citation networks instantiate that structure: draw an arrow from x to y if x is a progenitor of y or if y is cited by x. More interestingly, so-called “scale-free” networks, though arising in different real-world situations (different in the sense of being realized on quite different scales by quite different sorts of process), obey the same statistics (for example, the number of arrows entering a node—think of links to a site—obeys a power-law distribution): the probability of a node’s having n entering links is inversely proportional to some small power n k of n. Many nodes will have only a few entering links, and a very few will have many.
I would prefer to call the phenomenon “generality”. Not all networks, let alone all the things that can be modelled by digraphs, obey power-law distributions in the distribution of links; but those that do are expected to exhibit other similarities as well—for example, to have arisen by a “rich get richer” process wherein nodes that already have many entering links are more likely to receive new entering links than nodes that have just a few entering links. Were it true that scale-free networks could arise only by such processes, we might know this quite independently of knowing the physical means by which links are made, or the causes that lead, for example, one blogger to link to others. Scale-free networks or (equivalently, under the hypothesis just mentioned) “rich get richer” networks would be a genus of network, to which the mathematics of one kind of mathematical structure applied, and whose formation occurred by a process to which again the mathematics of one kind of structure applied. Not only the network structure but the process of its formation could be described independently of the stuffs and causal processes required in any instantiation of the structure. Universality or generality, so understood, offers, in Batterman’s view, a promising way to think about, among other topics, multiple realizability and emergence.
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