Halfway down the Danube

Friday links

For the first time in a while, yeah.

The intersection of two sets.  If you recognize most of these (I did), take a drink.

There's a team in Austria that's been running the famous two-slit experiment for a while, but with ever bigger and bigger particles -- like, molecules.  It's tricky for a couple of reasons.  One is, the bigger the particle, the shorter its "wavelength" -- so you need ever narrower slits to get diffraction.  Another problem is, a molecule, unlike a single atom, can emit thermal photons.  If it emits those photons en route to the detector, that will give away its location and cause the wave function to collapse.  So it's very finicky work.

Unfortunately, firing a living organism through an interference grid is unlikely to ever happen.  That's because the wavelengths required get ridiculously shorter: to get diffraction of a bacterium would require a slit so narrow its width would be down around the Planck length.  Oh, well.

Awful library books.  Most of these seem to be just old, but a few are indeed awful.

South Sudan again

By an odd coincidence, this popped up in the news last week:

An international tribunal redefined the borders of a disputed oil-rich region between north and south Sudan on Wednesday. The ruling seeks to defuse a thorny issue in the 2005 peace agreement ending one of Africa’s longest civil wars by splitting the contested zone between the two sides.

In its ruling the tribunal, seated at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, overruled a decision by an international commission that Sudan’s government rejected four years ago.

The new ruling includes important concessions for both sides, giving the government in the north control of the region’s richest oil fields, but consolidating control of the remaining region under the Ngok Dinka, an ethnic group loyal to southern Sudan and likely to vote to join it in a coming referendum.

Both sides in the conflict...  said Wednesday that they would accept the ruling.

Okay, so.  Previously, a conflict in South Sudan was very, very likely in 2011.  That's because the folks who negotiated a peace settlement foolishly agreed to hold a separate vote for Abiye Province, which is mostly inhabited by the pro-Southern Ngok Dinka but which includes the region's richest oil fields.  The North was not going to let this go without a fight.

The new settlement divides the province so that most of the oil is on one side, and most of the Ngok Dinka are on the other.  It's an imperfect division, but it might be enough to prevent a war.

Nobody has been paying much attention to South Sudan.  Hell, I had only the vaguest idea of the place before I went next door to Uganda.  So it seemed all too plausible that it might be allowed to drift into another war.  Now, maybe not -- 2011 will still be very tricky, but it's no longer a certain date with violence and chaos.  The dog might not bark.  That's encouraging.

Uganda: 2011 and all that

Everybody here is worried about 2011.  Two reasons.

One, the next round of elections.  Uganda's president/dictator, Yoweri Museveni, has been in power nonstop since 1986.  He last won re-election in 2006; he's up for re-election in early 2011. 

Nobody thinks for a moment that this election will be free or fair.  The last one involved the arrest of the main opposition leader for treason and rape.  And Museveni has only become more authoritarian and assholic since then.  (And also Uganda has discovered oil, which is a powerful incentive to stay in office.) 

On the other hand, young Ugandans -- and most Ugandans are young -- are pretty sick of Museveni.  So when-not-if he steals the election, it's unlikely to go over well.

That by itself would be worrisome but, hell, obnoxious government steal elections all the time.  But then there's also Sudan. 

In Uganda

Really a placeholder post.

I'm in Kampala, Uganda.  It's another two-week assignment.  The trip down was pretty uneventful -- saw the Nile out the airplane window, which was interesting.  Bought a really horrible sandwich in Cairo airport, couldn't finish it.  Overnight flight from Cairo: five hours to cover what took Speke and Burton months of pain.  Oh, this century of ours.

The hotel is nice.  Had Indian food tonight.  Work starts tomorrow. 

More perhaps in a bit.