Hulleye Comes By!

indian highway road signs.

One of the fun things about The Adventures of Asterix comic books is its use of latin phrases. Here’s a website that collects Asterix latin sayings and their translation.

Acta est fabula: It’s all over (lit. the drama has been acted out)
Alea jacta est: The die is cast
Audaces fortuna juvat: Fortune favors the bold
Auri sacra fames: The cursed hunger for gold
Aut Caesar, aut nihil: Either Caesar or nothing
Ave atque vale: Hail and farewell
Ave Caesar morituri te salutant!: Hail, Caesar! Those who are about to die salute you!

How do moths stay aloft? With their antennae, of course. When your wingspan is just three inches across, the slightest breeze becomes a gale, and knowing which way is up becomes a matter of life and death. Now, a research team reports that moths stabilize their flight by using their antennae as gyroscopic sensors.

Rotational inertia keeps a spinning top balancing on its tip: If you try to knock it over, the Coriolis force pushes it to the side instead. The size of that force depends on how fast the top is spinning. Engineers measure the corrective force on calibrated gyroscopes to keep aircraft and ballistic missiles on a level course. And flies stabilize their flight by using their club-shaped hind wings to detect these forces. But no one suspected that moths use a similar strategy. Their antennae are primarily known as super-sensitive odor receptors–used to sniff out females and food from miles away–and researchers had hypothesized that they assist in flight only by acting as air flow sensors. That untested idea had “become part of the lore,” says biologist Sanjay Sane of the University of Washington in Seattle.

Over the past four years, Pakistan’s higher-education budget has increased more than sevenfold, to about $449-million. While that amounts to only 0.5 percent of Pakistan’s gross domestic product, it is a big improvement from the days of barely enough to pay “measly salaries and basic bills.” More than 800 Pakistani students, supported by the government, are working toward doctorates in engineering or the sciences in countries including Austria, Britain, China, France, Germany, and South Korea — up from about 20 in 2002.

A plan to attract expatriate professors and foreign faculty members back to Pakistan, with substantial research grants and salaries of up to $4,000 a month — about a third higher than the maximum pay for professors on the tenure track — has lured 350 expatriates, as well as 201 long-term faculty members and 88 scholars on a short-term basis.

Plans are in the works to start nine engineering universities across the country, in collaboration with Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and other countries, in order to fix the country’s acute shortage of engineers, at a cost of $4-billion to the Pakistan government. Five law schools and several medical schools are in the works as well.

So why are students and professors alike worried? The chairman’s many critics say the flood of money has led to corruption, plagiarism, and favoritism.

Keep reading.

The price tag for the Iraq War is now estimated at $700 billion in direct costs and perhaps twice that much when indirect expenditures are included. Cost estimates vary — Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts the total cost at more than $2 trillion — but let’s be conservative and say it’s only $1 trillion (in today’s dollars).

As a number of other commentators have recently written, this number — a 1 followed by 12 zeroes — can be put into perspective in various ways. Given how large the war looms, it doesn’t hurt to repeat this simple exercise with other examples and in other ways.

There are many comparisons that might be made, and devising new governmental monetary units is one way to make them. Consider, for example, that the value of one EPA, the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, is about $7.5 billion. The cost of the Iraq War is thus more than a century’s worth of EPA spending (in today’s dollars), almost 130 EPAs, only a small handful of which would probably have been sufficient to clean up Superfund sites around the country.

Keep reading for all the other analogies.

In addition to Valentine’s Day, today is the 18th anniversary of the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini, which called for the execution of Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. In The Herald:

SALMAN Rushdie says he still receives a “sort of Valentine’s card” from Iran each year on February 14 letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to kill him.

His comment came as the author of The Satanic Verses started a five-year appointment with Emory University, one day before the 18th anniversary of the death threat that catapulted him into worldwide fame.

Rushdie was forced into hiding for a decade after the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a 1989 fatwa, or opinion on Islamic law, ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie because the book allegedly insulted Islam.

In 1998, the Iranian government declared it would not support but could not rescind the fatwa. But the yearly notes continue. “It’s reached the point where it’s a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat,” Rushdie said.

The 59-year-old Rushdie is also donating his archive to the university, including a diary of his decade in hiding and two early, unpublished novels.