Perusing Wikileaks’ Cables

Wikileaks’ recent leak of U.S. State Department cables offers the student with a politics/geography interest an amazing glance into the role of U.S. diplomats. There are however, a lot of cables.

The Atlantic magazine has come up with an interesting way of perusing the information. Their Cablegate Roulette webpage puts up a random cable every time you press the “Load a new story” button.

What’s also nice is that they provide a sentence or two that gives the context of the cable so you don’t have to puzzle it out on your own.

The cable excerpts are brief, well written and quite informative about the political goings-on in different parts of the world. They could make an interesting supplement to the geography curriculum. The self-motivated student with a geography interest would find these quite fascinating because you have to have a basic knowledge of the world and recent history to understand what’s going on.

An example:

An executive with Kazakhstan’s national gas company has dinner with the U.S. ambassador at the Radisson hotel in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan.

FROM: ASTANA, KAZAKHSTAN
TO: STATE DEPARTMENT
DATE: JANUARY 10, 2010
CLASSIFICATION: SECRET
SEE FULL CABLE

ΒΆ7. (S) The Ambassador asked if the corruption and infighting are worse now than before. Idenov paused, thought, and then replied, “No, not really. It’s business as usual.” Idenov brushed off a question if the current maneuverings are part of a succession struggle. “Of course not. It’s too early for that. As it’s always been, it’s about big money. Capitalism — you call it market economy — means huge money. Listen, almost everyone at the top is confused. They’re confused by their Soviet mentality. They’re confused by the corrupt excesses of capitalism. ‘If Goldman Sachs executives can make $50 million a year and then run America’s economy in Washington, what’s so different about what we do?’ they ask.”

Building characters

Answer survey questions to better understand your characters in these Character Tests by R.J. Hembree as part of the online Writers’ Village University project (found via GalleyCat).

Sample question from the Character Builder Test (Hembree, 2010).

Building realistic characters is an essential component of writing fiction. The Character Tests are a part of a Character Building Workshop page, which also contains Character Building Tips, character archetypes, and a set of character disorders that help define them.

The challenge that comes with working with something like this is that following archetypes too closely has the potential to lead to cliched writing. This site could be very useful if used with caution. From the site’s creator:

The Character Building Workshop is an independent study of your characters using these online questionnaires. The process of filling out the forms will help you, the writer, learn about your characters on a more in-depth level. Once the questions have been answered, you will know more about the roles your characters play in your story. No longer will they be names on a page; they will become living, breathing beings as you continue writing your story.
—Hembree, 2010)

Water for life; for civilization

The Nile and its delta (image from NASA).

This nighttime photograph of the Nile River and its delta from the International Space Station beautifully illustrate the importance of water for life and civilization. The city of Cairo is at the neck of the delta; the brighter spot where the distributaries diverge.

Spaceflight Now has other really cool photos. Bad Astronomy has an interesting post on the logistics of this particular photo, while Heather Pringle has a very interesting post on how the desert may have aided the ancient Egyptian’s civilization.

Finding science fiction online

Free Speculative Fiction Online is a great, centralized source for tracking down science fiction online. It links to online repositories and the websites of a wide variety of authors: from classics like Asimov to stalwarts like Gaiman. There are hundreds of authors, short stories, and novels (including any number of Hugo and Nebula Award winners), and all of them are free.

Rearranging the map

What if you exchanged countries based on population for land area? So China, which is the most populous country would take the place of Russia, which has the largest area. It would create the intriguing map below (from the wonderful blog, Strange Maps).

World Map if the largest countries had the biggest populations. Map by Frank Jacobs.

Exploring Space: Extrasolar planets

Notice the planet in the lower right corner? (Image from the Hubble Space Telescope via Wikipedia).

One of the neatest developments in recent space exploration has been the accelerating discovery of planets orbiting other stars. Other stars are just so far away that it’s insanely difficult to see anything orbiting them. Also, the stars can be much brighter, a billion times even, than the planets. So, in the beginning, they could just identify the largest of planets, Jupiter sized and bigger, because of they way they make their stars wobble, but this and other techniques have gotten better and better and now we’re looking at smaller and smaller planets, getting down to Earth sized objects.

Methods for detecting planets orbing other stars. Image by M. Perryman.

One of my students, in investigating modern space exploration, found The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia, which is pretty sweet because it keeps a running tally of planets found outside our solar system. When he found it last week the number was 502, now it’s 504. The site also has a long list of the ground and space based projects looking for extrasolar planets, which demonstrates how active the field is today.