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History on Trial

On December 15, 2007

Deborah Lipstadt is one of those people whom I admire for their competence and tenacity but cannot quite bring myself to like because I’m still a bit of a lefty and they, well, they are not. However the feeling is quite arbitrary and in any case her work is quite important to one of my own interests; in my spare time I work for a non-profit called shoa.de that provides information about the Holocaust and the “Third Reich” and arguments against those who still (or again) claim that the destruction of the european jews by the nazis did not happen. Deborah Lipstadt is Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta. In 1993 she published Denying the Holocaust – The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Among those who bend the truth she counted David Irving who is mentioned on multiple occasions in the book.

David Irving is an english writer who for some 40 years covered mostly historical topics in his books. Some renowned historians hold him in high regard, although it is unclear why they would do so; from his first book on Irving made regularly claims that are either unsupported by evidence or supported only by evidence that has been purposefully manipulated and that try to exonerate Hitler and other leading Nazis. Also Irving regularly suggested that it was in fact Nazi Germany that showed restraint during WW II and that instead it were the Allied factions that had committed war crimes.

Lipstadts Denying the Holocaust was not primarily a book about Irving, but naturally she had to mention his wrong conclusions, distortions and lies. Although David Irving had denied the holocaust quite unambiguously (what with tasteless aperçus like more people “died in Kennedys car than in a gas chamber in Auschwitz”) in 1996 he still decided to sue Lipstadt. The case came under british libel law, which not only meant that Professor Lipstadt had to prove that Irving indeed was a holocaust denier, she also had to prove that his denial was done on purpose and not a result of mis-interpretation of evidence on his part. And the evidence had to be presented not to a jury of fellow scientists, but to a judge who was an expert on british law, not german history, and who could have easily given in to the temptation to render a “balanced” judgement when in fact a bias toward the truth was called for. Still, in the end Irving suffered a crushing defeat and his attempt to curtail Lipstadts right of freedom of speech failed.

This is a quite important bit. It is important because Holocaust Deniers now claim that it was Lipstadt who tried to silence Irving. So remember: It was Irving who sued Lipstadt and he lost, because she was right and he was wrong.

History on trial (Harper Perennial 2006) is Lipstadts account of the trial – a trial that took four years and millions of dollars in funds to prepare. The book demonstrates why it’s so hard to win against holocaust deniers. A denier can make up a lie in the spur of the moment. But if you want to prove him wrong you have to find the source he allegedly quotes, check the text, establish the proper context … and after you have refuted the lie the denier simply shrugs and tells another lie. And so it goes on, again and again, for some 300 pages.

Of course there are some benefits from the trial: The Holocaust Denial on Trial – Website has published the testimonials of the expert witnesses, that’s an interesting read, and there are also quite interesting fact sheets that refute some of the more notorious denial claims. And these days nobody could claim that he is a holocaust denier due to innocent errors or a lack of information – the trial presented the evidence not only to the judge but to the world at large.

On the other hand, after I had read the book I couldn’t help to think, what a waste of time and ressources. After some five years of preparation and in court we know exactly as much as before (to wit, the Holocaust really happened and David Irving is a liar). Professor Lipstadt could have done a lot more to further our understanding of the Holocaust had she had opportunity to proceed with her regular research instead of having to fight that twit. I would recommend to buy History on Trial to show support for the cause, but unless you want, through Deborahs Lipstadts eyes, a study on how the mind of a holocaust denier works (not something a sane person would want to witness from close up) it makes a somewhat depressing read. But at least there was a happy end.

In case you wondered

By Eike Pierstorff

On December 12, 2007

In Science

(Source: The slumbering lungfish )

Autumn Happiness

By Eike Pierstorff

On November 27, 2007

In Motorbike

This afternoon it wasn’t raining for a change, so I brought out the motorbike for a quick ride around the block. That proved to be so much fun that I went for a rather larger tour – which meant that I had all the wrong clothes, since it was several degrees centigrade below zero. When I came back home I was frozen blue, but it was worth it.

Brandenburg is not the best country to ride a motorbike – it can largely be described by the words “flat” (the country) and “straight” (the streets) and sometimes I find I miss the hills and small curved streets of southern Germany. But autumn in Brandenburg has it’s own kind of beauty, what whith the scarce landscape and the trees that extend their leaveless branches to the sky. And the autumn sun is fair and golden, even if it doesn’t warm you.

I suppose fun motorbiking is somewhat evil – I contribute to global warming and I do not even have the excuse that I urgently need to go somewhere. But man, do I feel alive now.

Mod Place Here – Minor Updates

By Eike Pierstorff

On November 18, 2007

In Joomla, Programming

I did some minor updates on the Place Here-module – partly just behind-the-scenes-bugfixing (including the issues in the comments 20 and 21 respectively) , but also two new parameters:

Link Titles – does of course what the name says and makes the title of an article a link if there is additional text (please note that articles displayed via the module will use the module settings, not the settings you make in the article edit view)
Hide current item – reads the article id from the url and hides the article with the corresponding id in the module, so you don’t have the same article twice

Available at the Download page. This is still marked as alpha but apparently a number of people already use it without problems (the alpha status is more due to the fact that a number of features are still missing as compared to the contentitem module for 1.0.x).

Edited to add: There are no special upgrade instructions. Simply overwrite existing files with the new ones.

Chris Heilmann: Seven rules of Unobtrusive JavaScript

By Eike Pierstorff

On November 13, 2007

In Javascript

Unobtrusive Javascript is Javascript that latches into a page without the need to mix javascript event handlers and HTML. Chris Heilmann has a good article about the “Seven rules of Unobtrusive JavaScript” – there is a short summary on his blog and an expanded version here. If you are not familiar with unobtrusive javascript this is a good start, if you use it regularly and want to spread the gospel this is a good list to prepare for a presentation, so you should read it in any case.

Sixty Days and Counting

By Eike Pierstorff

On November 4, 2007

In Books, Science, Science Fiction

Kim Stanley Robinson is a man after my own heart, and the Science in the Capital-Series deals with one of the most important topics of our days, so it’s a bit of a pity that I cannot praise him without reservations. But while the writing here is competent it’s never compelling, and for a book it’s not enough to deal with an important topic (not in fiction anyway), yet I found it not particularly entertaining or inspiring.

Sixty Days and Counting is the closing book in a trilogy about man-made global warming, after Fourty Days of Rain and Fifty Degrees below. The main story is about humanities (that is US-American with the Russians and Chinese on the sidelines) attempt to mitigate the consequences of global warming by large-scale carbon sequestration projects and other terraforming stuff. And then there are a few subplots that do not seem strictly necessary, like about rogue Black Ops and wisdom-dispensing Bhuddist immigrants.

It might be that I missed some important parts though – the books violates quite gratitously what I’ll call for the moment “Eikes law of typesetting” which dicates that italics are strictly for emphasizing words, so don’t use them on whole chapters if you actually want somebody to read them – anybody who can read ten pages of 10 point italics has clearly better eyes than me.

The whole shebang from 40 to 60 is not bad, it’s just that it’s boring, which might as well be a matter of taste, so you might give it a try. As for me I rather watch An Inconvenient Truth on DVD to learn about the global warming thing. But I’m still going to try Robinsons Mars-Trilogy because – did I mention it? – as far as his politics and general Weltanschauung are concerned he seems to be pretty much a man after my own heart.

Avoiding tables with the Place Here Module

By Eike Pierstorff

On October 30, 2007

In Programming

The module uses tables in two places: a) as a wrapper to arrange content items – ‘articles’ as they are now called in Joomla 1.5 – in columns, and b) in the template file to format the articles.

As for a) I added a parameter “Output mode” with the values “table”,”div” and “raw”.

table – just works like before
div – wraps the articles into div tags. The divs around “leading” articles have the class “mod_placehere_leading”, following articles the class, you guess it, “mod_placehere_following”. No CSS is delivered with the module, so you can/have to style the divs on your own (for example set a width and use a float on “following” articles to get a column effect for the articles)
raw just prints the content items on the page, without any additional markup

To get b) rid of the remaining tables you will have to fiddle with the template file. Unlike in the module for 1.0.x the module does not use the content componentes template but has its own template file in modules/mod_placehere/tmpl. Change the HTML but don’t mess with the PHP Code. In time I will attempt to provide a tableless template.

Tested with 1.5 RC3 on PHP 4.4 / Windows XP Home. Available at the download page .

To the moon!

By Eike Pierstorff

On October 26, 2007

In Programming, Science, Space

Autumn is killing me (metaphorically) – with shorter days and the lack of sunlight I’m continually tired, an at the moment I’m glad when I finish paid work in time, so I would ask the people who asked for held for a little more patience (I know I make these excuses quite often, but there you go).

So while I can’t provide an update on the module I can at least give you a small update on what’s happening in space, because these last few days have been a good time for space exploration.

At Oktober 21. a soyuz capsule returned to earth from the ISS; part of the crew was Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, the first astronaut from Malaysia. I was actually a little annoyed that his religion was so much a matter of public display – but then it’s probably just fair, Christians did it before with bible readings from orbit, and one has to commend Malaysias religious authorities that they managed to reconcile not religion and rationalism, which I think is impossible, but at least religion and pragmatism in such matters as prayer times and such. But as a life long Saganite I’m much more pleased with international cooperation.

A new crew member and new equipment is on it’s way to the International Space Station with STS-120 and the Orbiter Discovery. Shuttle Commander Pamela Melroy and her Crew deliver a new module – Node 2 a.k.a “Harmony” – to the station which will mainly serve as a connection point for other modules, including the european Columbus. Speaking as a european I can hardly wait. And it’s time that a bit more science happens at the ISS.

The International Space Station has been pretty much a failure so far, and I think this can be largely attributed to the fact that construction lags so far behind the planned schedule – Russia had a delay in manufacturing station components and there was another shuttle accident and the thing is by now much more expensive than planned (I nearly wrote “as expected”) and generally things haven’t been going to well. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy fame hinted somewhat subtle (and a number of commenters brought the point home quite bluntly) that the station should be dropped althogether (if this were possible). I usually agree with what Dr. Plait says, not so much because he’s an expert but more because he is an expert who will happily eat his own words if it turns out he was wrong. But I still think the station should be finished, because if we – and it’s “we”, this is an international project – can’t even finish a project more or less at the front door then how can we ever think about building more ambitious projects (like e.g. interplanetary spacecraft) ?

But maybe there should be a lesson learned for later projects. I’m all for international cooperation (that Sagan thing again), but if possible partners should contribute complementary, not interdependent parts, so that a mission can still be sucessful when one piece is delayed or even fails.

Of course some people try to do things on their own (especially since they were obviously shunned from working on the ISS, I hadn’t been aware of that), which makes for the most exciting news – China has sent the Chang’e 1 probe to the moon, and that is only the first step in an rather ambitious space programm that is supposed to sent a man to the moon in the next 15 to 20 years. I guess by now a manned flight to the moon is not so much a matter of available technology and more a question if you are willing to spend the ressources (I’d venture that a moon base would be less expensive than the US war in Iraq…), which makes China the best candidate for a return to the moon – the Chinese seem to only ones willing to pull this off. Perhaps if we ask nicely they will sell us some tickets 😉

And speaking of the moon, Japan Kaguya probe has now reached an orbit from which it can start scientific observation – it’s a pity I don’t speak japanese (or ‘scientese’ for that matter), but I expect sooner or later some bits of data will trickle down to us english-speaking laypersons.

As I child I used to watch Space 1999 on television and being a child an sometimes unable to distinguish fiction from reality I was convinced that there would be a permant presence on the moon by the time I would grow up and I could buy a ticket to get there. Most annoyingly this hasn’t happened. But even if I can’t go there I hope somebody will.

Not a fan yet

By Eike Pierstorff

On October 11, 2007

In Science Fiction

Heroes premiered tonight in German television. Overall a good show, but there were one or two things I didn’t like. I mean, young people who suddenly discover special powers that set them apart from the rest of humanity? I heard something like this before, only I guess when the idea was originally conceived in the 1960s it propably made more sense.

At the beginning of the show there is a professor blathering away how evolution will bring forth special powers like telekinesis or teleportation. Hell, no. We live in 2007, and everybody knows (or should know) that there is no plausible or even possible mechanism for psychic powers – it is much more likely that the woman of the future grows a botox gland, or even that men will aquire the missing take-the-trash-out gene (after all this would possibly help their chances with reproduction). I do not as such have a problem with reel science but frankly I had hopes that such a highly acclaimed show would come up with some new ideas. But then I hope that they used a weak idea to get the show started and won’t get back to the mutant thing as the plot develops, especially since the show has some good characters (“Super-Hiro !”, naturally).

In other news, I worked all afternoon to trim my proposal for an essay in a planned SF anthology down to the requested maximum of 750 characters before I realized that I had misread the specs and that they were really asking for 750 words. This is a little embarassing, and usually I would consider it a waste of time, but to bring down a full page to a super-condensed three-liner was in a way a brilliant excercise and so I’m not too sorry. Overall the restored proposal may be too big on words and too weak on theory, so I might have made a fool of myself, but then I loose nothing by trying.

Okay, so this just doesn’t work

By Eike Pierstorff

On October 6, 2007

In Joomla

I was looking for a workaround for the Itemid-issue for Joomla 1.0.12 (and for those who cannot use the compatibility setting in 1.0.13) and have to report that there is none.

The idea of of the content item module was to mimick the mainbody-call als closely as possible by using the core functions to display items. The Itemid is calculated in these core functions and unfortunately there is no way to override this (short of modifying core files which would defy the purpose of a plugin API). So I have to say sorry, there is nothing I can do about that.