taverns in ottoman empire

my dear ultra progressive friends were surprised to hear that alcoholic drinks were served in ottoman taverns.

i was telling them the story of the name tequila; tek-i-ala (the good single shot), from the mouth of a tavern keeper of a 17th century konstantiniyye (istanbul) from ihsan oktay anar's book, kitab-ül hiyel.

then they interrupt and ask me, "wasn't drinking alcohol forbidden?" and i responded "yes but do you obey every law?"

the point of my rhetorical question is not that apparent but i think it closely resembles the fact that we are still continuing to download and copy illegally, violating copyright laws. the state either gave up on trying or simply turning the blind eye. and i think the situation was similar in most of the ottoman history.

i did some fact checking and it seems non-muslims had the right to sell and trade alcohol in ottoman empire. and there were specific taxes for selling alcohol and owning a tavern which serves alcohol.

i admit that it is a valid question to ask, but still prohobitionism is such a hard state philosophy to maintain that it is almost absurd for me to think that there were time in the history in old turkey without the culture of drinking while eating.

was "whitey" really on the moon?

today is the day of the moon landing, but for some people the question still remains: were "whitey" really on the moon?

for the ones who are following my blog (who like 3 people?), remember that i mentioned the "whitey on the moon" by gil scott heron. who criticized the fact that scientific advance on space travel advanced despite and probably due to the inequality and poverty in U.S. (USSR also).

some are actually not even sure about that:



you probably heard the conspiracy theories that the apollo 11 mission is the greatest hoax in the history, because U.S. government taped everything in a stage.

well, while writing my last post i realized that the lunar laser ranging experiments that measure the distance between earth and moon makes use of the reflectors that have been put on the moon by apollo 11 mission.



sorry to disappoint the skeptics but scientists are using the machinery that is set up on the moon by the apollo 11 astronauts. to be fair, the signal that arrive from the reflectors are very weak. and it is very hard to precisely aim for the reflector, a lot of painstaking analysis goes into finding the exact photons that bounce off the reflector.

coincidentally i found this guardian article from last month, reporting the cancellation of funding of mcdonald laser ranging station at fort davis in texas. national science foundation apparently does not find the science case strong. apparently laser experiments will continue in the future at apache point in texas and observatoire de la côte d'Azure in france.

p.s. thanks to giulia for giving me the idea for this post, and claudia for excessive ranting about the most ridiculous things on the moon.

tolga yarman revolutions part 1

it took me a long time to answer dear professor yarman, but to be honest i did not expect an answer or a rebuttal of such a degree of psychosis going even to the extent that i am a personal enemy of his. presently i am feeling more and more like otisabi facing ajdar and saying "i wish you were acting, but i see now that you are real."

now i am really sorry from yarman that i have upset him and caused him personal agony to an extent that he felt the urge to give out his misinformed concept of what wikipedia is, and tell that i am manipulated by his personal enemies. i know turkish science politics are revolving around the insignificant prepherial scientific topics but i would never would have guessed i would be part of one. and i am so glad that i am far away from turkey and the social structure of the turkish university.

having said that he needs understand that he has the responsibility of a professor to uphold the ethics and behaviourism of what a normative scientific community expects from him, i.e. not to come out with borderline fringe theories in front of the turkish public and more importantly without international recognition or discussion. unfortunately i am the only physicist with half a brain to read his articles and commented on them publicly.

point 1: okan university press conference title read: "turkish scientist debunked einstein's theory(türk bilim adamı einstein’in teorisini çürüttü)"

are you aware of the press release that your university published, if yes why did you let them use this title? if you knew perfectly well that this sensational approach was taken, why are you commenting on my blog that you never intended to disprove Einstein:

"My aim was not to disprove Einstein, at all. It was, to understand his ideas and results... In fact, I have no problem with the Special Theory of Relativity) STR, to which, I hope, I contributed to some extent."

if you are honestly behind what you are saying, why are you manipulating the public, or collaborating with the manipulation of the public?

point 2: your papers are hard to reach

this is not a question of individual inconvenience but a problem of visibility and verifiability. if you are publishing your work in obscure journals and non peer reviewed conference proceedings how do you expect the scientific community to respond to your claims? i am not an individual but i work in a university institute and the university do not have a springer account to these specific articles and i don't blame them. since looking at your articles ignore the most basic principles of special theory of relativity (STR), one wonders how can these journals expect the institutions to pay for this kind of lack of quality.

and by the way i reached your most important articles as one can see in my sourtimes article and i was explicit in your mistakes.

anyhow according to this point i challenge you to submit your papers to the physical review letters, which i and honestly most of the community adheres as the reliable journal for physics even before approaching the high level of e.g. nature.

point 3: your papers have factual and computational mistakes

in your blog reply, you mention that i did not "pin down" your mistakes. it is simply not true, i don't know what did you read but in my criticism which was simply a click away (unlike your papers which are in obscure conference proceedings). in my comments in sourtimes (which is under the title görelilik ilkesinin çürütülmesi [the disproof of relativity]) your mistakes and more importantly how you did end up with correct results from wrong starting point was explained explicitly.

to make the point clear to the bystanders, yarman suggests that weak equivalence principle is not satisfied, which translates as a difference between inertial and gravitational masses. he further argues that this effect is due to the gravitational binding energy, which is the reason of the centrifugal acceleration. and the velocities induced by this acceleration translates into a "mass defect" as some misinterpretations of STR suggest (which lev okun talked wrote about how wrong this misconception is, extensively). from yarman's annales foundation louis de broglie (2004, v 29, no 3) article page 487:



in his "theory" due to the gravitational accelerations effect on the mass, the equivalence of these masses rather depend on the velocity and he proposes some ways to measure it.

i am really sorry Tolga but your "theory" is debunked just starting from your results, i.e. measuring the difference between inertial and gravitational masses. your predictions should have been observed since the reference you give Braginsky Panov experiment reaches the precision of $$10^{-12}$$ which is lower than what you propose $$2.6\times10^{-12}$$. even worse you suggest that only $$10^{-4}$$ precision is reached in the lunar laser ranging experiment while $$10^{-8}$$ is needed but unfortunately the precision of the lunar laser experiments to measure the acceleration differences of moon vs earth reach $$5\times10^{-13}$$ surpassing far above the limit you need to prove your theories. in your defense, i think you are confusing the weak equivalence with strong equivalence, that is applied for the gravitating bodies and related closely to the experiments which search for changes in gravitational constant $$G$$.

i encourage all the readers to check the williams, newhall, dickey, 1996, physical review d. article "relativity parameters determined from lunar laser ranging" abstract, which includes the summary of the results and is public.

without even showing the problems of conceptualizations and the absurdities of your reasoning, your theory already discredited.

i will return the conceptual misunderstandings of yarman, and his computational errors.

as a preliminary analysis, i don't want to personalize this case, i hope he doesn't take spite in what i present here, since now it should be clear that this is not a personal attack but rather based on facts. i took great interest in this case simply due to the fact that yarman by his actions constitutes what is wrong in science today. publicity without substantiality or verifiability.

note: i am sorry for the latex typesetting, i am in the process of installing mathtex.

physics of oppresion, an intro

this week was a strangely busy week with less science and more politics. we had, as astronomers, two evaluations in heidelberg. one for our relatively new astronomy institute and the other for the doctoral program.

what was amazing was the involvement of the students, while in once they had the urge to only nod, in the other evaluation people were more active.

yet again i am cryptic.

let's go back to the basics. everything started on last sunday, gisella called on my bullshit about oppression (based on my lord of the rings analysis), and then i had to really conceptualize.

the temporary employment of the science workers is the basis of the class struggle.

PhD students and postdocs are the workforce of the professors and directors of institutes who are more involved in delegating work, administrative efforts and fund finding.

i first enunciate the problem with the analysis that is the directors do not directly own the means of production, but the access to the means production. computing facilities, high quality data, access to collaborators and most importantly the credibility embedded inside the community or the specific "highly regarded" institute.

before i become highly relativist and holistic, i just say that the increase of huge project demands the employment of the low level scientists to do the fordist production line type of work like coding data analysis pipeline, building instruments and varying the physical parameters of a code for specific problems.

this industrious productive nature alienates the majority of the young researchers from physics and/or astronomy. whom work with the desire that one day they will be professors and good scientists, and the only reason they are disillusioned with their work is that they are not smart enough they are not hard working enough. post-docs/proletariat live with the dream that one day they will become professor/bourgeois themselves.

the simple statistics show that there is not enough permanent position for each post-doc. hence we move with the mobility scheme (again one of the aims of the bologna process) from one job to the other, so that the our bosses can tap into the competitive international market of educated workforce. and we "the educated" don't even have the collective bargaining rights of a common factory worker, because science is such a fucking individualist/competitive enterprise. the nature should be investigated via collaboration, not by competition. that's why our papers are publicly accessible, unlike the patents of the pharmaceutical companies.

the point was, is and will be raised that as the educated class of the society with relatively high wages we can not be oppressed. i will make a loop argument, pointing out the comment i face everytime i propose change:

"our director cannot change anything because it is university rule."
"the university cannot do anything because it is national policy."
"the ministry cannot do anything because it is a european policy."

this kind of empathizing with the position of power really pisses me off. especially if it is argued to curb the action for demanding the rights, no matter how trivial this may look to "the hunger of manual laborers."

i will rather prefer if freire finishes instead of me by the pedagogy of the oppressed:

"The “fear of freedom” which afflicts the oppressed, a fear which may equally well lead them to desire the role of oppressor or bind them to the role of oppressed, should be examined. One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription.

(...)

"The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion."

-Paul Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter 1

tolga yarman reloaded

with my utter inexperience in blogging i haven't noticed dear prof. Yarman's comments in my blog. even worse i had the nerve to edit the wikipedia article about him. of course he needed to fix my "utterly biased" edits, which weren't my words but doç. dr. cesimcan delidumrul's.

you will remember Yarman from his fringe theory on gravitation and relentless publicity stunts, moreover my former article on him.

here is parts of what he left in my talk board, named "ANSWER, TO PARTICULARLY, THE PERSON HIDING HIS NAME, AND CALLING HIMSELF FERAYEBEND, by Prof. Tolga YARMAN, July 13th, 2009." the "open letter starts out with "dear editor:"

Some people seem to be carried away so much to imagine that, I or my students, have started out this page. As you know, this is not true at all. In fact, I found it out, totally unexpectedly... I was flattered and happy, of course, when I crossed it... Chiefly, to convey as briefly and clearly as possible, the peculiarities of the approach, I have developed with my Colleagues, only then, I was indeed enthusiastic to add few lines to the text, thus already, so skillfully prepared by Wikipedia.

(...)

Ferayebend continues on saying

- I have added this criticisms into the article however I believe that mention of such a disregarded press conference by the scientific community is undue weight in the article, and should be taken out completely. The lack of international interest on Yarman further shows that this biography article is more appropriate for Turkish Wikipedia and not the English version. Ferayebend (talk) 17:18, 4 July 2009 (UTC).

What is this? Who is he? He does not even have the courage of revealing himself. Who does manipulate him? We talk about experimental factualities (and even we may not have, were we proposing merely a novel theory, this would have been quite fine, but we do present sımultaneously experimental results), and this person, considers him, as a universal arbiter, having no respect to other stand points, no respect to hearing, no respect to defense, no respect to trial, no respect to appeal, to establish about our work, and more audaciously, about our personalities, such an absolute outrageous verdict.

Moreover, I was not even alone (I could of course be, but I was not), when we conveyed our results to the public. Why then, according to him, I self publicize, and not the others?.. To me, clearly, Ferayebend’s behavior is just not normal. He is so much carried away with malice that, finally while linking his behavior to his earlier paraphernalia, he could not avoid, but makes the channel leading to his headquarter caught, red-handed.

There are thousands of statements processed by Google, on our work, and he thinks, his ill and only judgment, must take place alone, in the page, Wikipedia kindly offered to our work...

I am afraid, his behavior is not even honest, for while he cites a criticism, he seems to forget about our replies to it, and more importantly, he does not even refer to our response to his own criticisim (http://marxistsinspace.blogspot.com/2009/05/intoduction-to-tolga-yarman.html). He behaves as if, there is no such reply.

Wikipedia, should not allow such a misconduct...

In case that link’s content is lost, I will be happy to provide the copy I have of it. It may in effect not stay there for long!..

It is sad that, a singular pathological behavior, such as that of Ferayebend, can spoil, the flattering text, Wikipedia team originally prepared, which unfortunately now is mostly plucked. The family feelings are gone, the tonalities are gone, the original beauty is gone, and basically the essence of the work we achieved is gone.

The reply I have sent to Feraybend's criticism (http://marxistsinspace.blogspot.com/2009/05/intoduction-to-tolga-yarman.html), I hope, will allow Wikipedia team to judge things better.

Let me state one last thing, as now the professor of many dozens of full professors, with regards to Ferayebend, who presents himself as an astrophysicist. Let him detach himself at once, from his malevolent manipulator (and I am afraid I can guess who he is), and considers seriously our work. He may very well pin down that we are mistaking. This would not constitute any problem for us, scientists… We extend our gratitude, to anyone showing righteously that we are mistaking... But if Ferayebend cannot say anything concrete against our work, and results, then I should like to invite him, and people like him, no matter how biased they may be at the beginning, to contribute to the line of research we have so painfully drawn, over the years.

(...)

I can understand envy. I can understand jealousy. I can understand hard feelings. I can understand regret, for what we have done could have been done by many, throughout the passed very many decades … But pathology should be avoided.

(...)

I would like to be accorded by Wikipedia, the possibility of adding references to our work, that has appeared in respected journals, and substantiate the text with regards to the explanation of our work.

But first of all, I would like to ask Wikipedia team, to please reorganize this page, considering first the very original lovely text, they have so kindly offered, and the few additions and citations I made to it, and to protect it from, shameful, unscientific attacks.

Note please that even sentences related to my beloved parents, family, and son, and furthermore now, the names of my collaborators, had been utterly chopped.

I thank anyway, the Wikipedia team, with all my heart, for having considered my biography and work, seriously.

Tolga Yarman, Ph.D., Nuclear Engineering, 1972, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor, T.C. Okan University, Istanbul, Turkey

so it gets better and better. i owe him a response yes, but before that i need to convey in english what were my criticisms, which he failed to reply.unfortunately on saturday.

black powa

after getting into the black power "spoken word" beginnings of hip hop, i became obsessed with the movement. it is very instructive, not only to investigate the marxist roots of a racial based movement but also the propaganda strength of the art that derived from it.

here is the current marxist brothers, the coup. i am happy because i never was able to get into public enemy, so 80s.



and 5 million ways to kill a c.e.o. must be the marching song of the masses:

"black powa to the motha-fucking people" - sara suten seti

the song feraye

the people who are reading my blog (who like two?) may still be wondering what is this song feraye?

it is the name of the girl who is the daughter of the leader of the nomads (yörük). feraye and the son of the patriarch of the nearby city have this thing going but the nomads don't like this idea. finally to be with the man she loves she runs away to the mountains but her brother finds her and takes her out.

the lyrics of the songs are written from the perspective of the son of the patriarch.

ferayedir kızın adı feraye
yar yandım aman esmer yarim de
haydi yandım feraye
türkmen de kızı katar etmiş mayayı
yar yandım aman esmer yarim de
haydi yandım feraye

rinni rinna rinni rinna
rinanay rinanay da
aman da yandım feraye

demirciler demir döğer tunç olur of
yar yandım aman esmer yarim de
haydi yandım feraye
sevip sevip ayrılması güç olur of
yar yandım aman esmer yarim de
haydi yandım feraye

rinni rinna rinni rinna
rinanay rinanay da
aman da yandım feraye

i want to translate but it only has nice imagery of how much he loves the dark haired, turkmen girl feraye.



in the final analysis, the song is terribly misogynist and male oriented as my favorite turkish news portal bianet points out. nevertheless the song i love, the descriptions are vivid, and the culture is something you never run away from, it is a curse and a blessing.