Happy New Year to jolly Mensans everywhere.

For sheer fun and frolic, Mensa Calgary’s monthly schedule these days is tough to beat. Try our Second Tuesday, Hockey Night or beer evening, Science Café, Movie Matinee, Dinner Night, or any of the special tours and visits that mark our calendar. It’s an amazingly cheerful crowd you’ll encounter. Click on the Events Page to find more. You gotta love it. Mensa, my friend, is the in-place for 2010.

Click here to see the calendar of events for this month. Use it as a reference by rolling your mouse over the links or just as a reminder. Bookmark it today!

Science Café (November 24, 2009)(notes taken by Esther Huang)

On supernovae, dark matter, dark energy, etc

Guest speakers: Dr Christopher Pritchet from the University of Victoria, Dr Philip Langill from the University of Calgary. Dr Langill is director of research at Rothney Astrophysical Observatory. Dr Pritchet is involved in the Legacy Survey, the Galileo Lecture Series, and CANARIE (Canada’s Advanced Research Network).

The topics which they touched on included the arguments for and against dark energy and dark matter. You’d be at the cutting edge of astrophysics if you grasped these concepts. Einstein supported the steady-state theory, but this is rejected by most current thinkers. The notion of branes, multidimensional universes, and interface of cosmology and theoretical physics got a good working out at this session of the Science Café. See what you missed? You wouldn’t, for example, have to read Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages to see the current state of the standard model of particle physics.

Supernovae were discussed and related to great extinction events on earth. Is there a connection or isn’t there? The relative frequency and enormous brightness of these stellar explosions allow them to be yardsticks for cosmological evolution and a measure of expansion of the universe itself. In recent years, we’ve discovered that expansion is speeding up rather than slowing down. In the long run, this may be the single most important fact we’ve learned in the last hundred years.

The fabric of space itself is not energy-neutral, but rather contains a force or disposition which allows what we call matter to exist. Whence discussion of the Higgs Boson and the efforts at the LHC to discover same.

Dark matter hasn’t stopped the expansion of the universe, and dark energy isn’t necessarily speeding it up. The issues relate to cosmology, because at a very early age, the energy of the universe was so great that gravity was indistinguishable from electromagnetism, the weak force and strong force. The relative ubiquity of hydrogen would be very different – and we likely wouldn’t exist – if the early history of the cosmos had been even slightly different from what it was. We can trace cosmological history by studying particle physics and analyze the latter by examining the former. They all come together.

Learn more about all scientific subjects by turning up at the Science Café. Check our events calendar for date and time.

1) Here’s the scene. You and a math teacher face three wooden doors. Behind one is a valuable diamond bracelet. Behind the other doors are mud puddles. You don’t know what’s behind which door; the teacher does. You select a door, and the teacher – before opening the door you selected – opens another to reveal a puddle. The teacher offers you the opportunity to change your selection and win what lies behind the second unopened door, or stick to your first choice and win what lies behind that door. What should you do?

2) Every whole number can be obtained by multiplying a certain number of primes. For example, 48 requires 2×2x2×2x3, which is an odd number of primes. 49 requires 7×7, which is an even number. Every whole number is therefore odd or even in the number of primes required. By convention, 1 is considered even in this typology. As we rise through the whole numbers, do we encounter more even types, odd types, or are they equally balanced?

The answers to December’s puzzles were supplied in the December issue.

Here are the answers to this month’s puzzles:

1) The question is whether the odds are fifty-fifty that the bracelet lies behind one of the two unopened doors, and the answer is no. Work it through slowly. One time in three, the bracelet is behind the door you chose earlier. Two times in three, the bracelet lies behind the other unopened door.

2) The answer is peculiar. Except for #1, you find that you encounter either more odd types or an equal quantity of odd and even types. Until you reach 906,150,257. When for the first time you find that there have been more even types than odd. (We hope you didn’t test the numbers one by one.

The Iraq war inquiry began last week [near the end of November 2009] in a strange atmosphere of high civility, verbal trickery and obfuscation, yet already its revelations are damning.

What have we learnt so far, then, locked inside a small room in the blandly hideous Queen Elizabeth II conference centre in London, where the chairman of the Iraq inquiry, Sir John Chilcot, has, with exquisite politeness and even deference, been interviewing the highborn civil service mandarins who assisted the government in its decision to invade Iraq?

They wander inside each morning at about 10 o’clock and sit themselves down facing the panel. In his short opening address, Chilcot expresses a wish that they will be open and candid, and sign a transcript at the end to this effect.

They are not always open and candid, though; some of them, so far, have been closed and downright obfuscatory on certain matters, employing all those linguistic tricks and sleights of semantics that made Yes Minister such a pleasure to watch. But we have still learnt plenty, along the way, since the inquiry opened on Tuesday.

First, the government knew all along that there was no evidence whatsoever to suggest Saddam Hussein had any links with Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden or international Islamic terrorism in general, contrary to what was said in America — particularly by Dick Cheney, the vice-president — at the time.

Second, as a perceived threat to the West, Iraq came a long way behind Libya, Iran and North Korea, according to intelligence reports. The government knew in 2002 from these reports that Saddam’s nuclear programme had been destroyed a decade previously and that Iraq had been “effectively disarmed” by sanctions and the threat of military pressure.

Third, while the US and Britain insisted that Iraq posed a “clear and present” threat to its neighbours, none of those neighbours was audibly desirous of an invasion of the country, and most were audibly opposed.

Fourth, the government included details in its infamous “dodgy dossier” of September 2002 that implied Iraq might be pursuing a nuclear programme when it had not the slightest evidence for this, simply an absence of evidence to the contrary. Which is not quite the same thing, is it?

Fifth, the foreword to the dodgy dossier, written by the prime minister at the time, Tony Blair, was an exercise in hyperbole and scaremongering from which the mandarins arraigned in the QE2 centre could not distance themselves more quickly if they tried. In particular, Blair’s assertion that Saddam had “beyond doubt” continued to manufacture chemical and biological weapons was a statement that was “impossible to make”, according to not only Chilcot but two of his interviewees. In other words — to use an appropriate iconic phrase — the document had been sexed up.

Sixth, an intelligence report in March 2003, shortly before the invasion, suggested Saddam had no chemical weapons whatsoever; they were all long since disassembled and useless. This report was taken by the government to imply confirmation that Iraq actually had chemical weapons, even if they were unusable, and the invasion proceeded.

Seventh, Britain was set on course for an illegal war against Iraq when the prime minister signed up to the notion of “regime change” after an agreeable private meeting with George W Bush in the middle of 2002, despite insisting all along to the public and the House of Commons that war could be averted. It is clear from the evidence so far that Britain was signed up to war at an early stage and (unlike America) merely wished for the military action to be sanctioned by the United Nations.

Eighth, Saddam’s perceived threat to the West was predicated entirely upon his behaviour towards neighbouring countries a decade or so earlier, and ignored the extent to which he was constrained by both sanctions and a no-fly zone.

Now, I think that’s not a bad haul of newish information from less than a week of gentle and almost genteel crossexamination. It may merely confirm what we already knew or suspected, but it is nice to have it on the record.

There’s other stuff too, of course, to pique the interest; the inquiry panel also wished to know if Jack Straw was too thick to understand the intelligence reports he was receiving, and two former mandarins — Sir William Ehrman and Tim Dowse — believed he did understand them, and later signed their names at the bottom of a transcript of their testimonies to this effect.

In a way, it is remarkable that so much has quietly emerged, given the tenor and tone of the inquiry and the sorts of people being interviewed and, indeed, doing the interviewing. This whole procedure is a little like a very upper-class version of the Channel 4 series Come Dine with Me, with charming, learned and polite knighted people asking the gentlest of questions of charming, learned and polite knighted people, before breaking for lunch.

Ehrman, for example, is our current ambassador to China and back in 2002 was the director of international security at the Foreign Office. He makes Sir Humphrey from Yes Minister appear a model of candour and directness.

Here he is talking about the “threat” from Saddam: “There was also the fact that he was supporting terrorist groups, Palestinian terror groups, and although we never found any evidence linking him closely to Al-Qaeda and we did not believe he was behind, in any way, the 9/11 bombings, he had given support to Palestinian terrorist groups . . .”

Translation: “Yes, it’s a thin straw I’m clutching at here.”

And: “We never assessed it [Iraq] as an imminent threat and that was never stated. What we said was that there was a clear and present threat. But we never said there is an imminent threat.”

Translation: it is untranslatable. How can something be any more “imminent” than “present”?

Then there’s Dowse, who was formerly the head of counter-proliferation at the Foreign Office, talking about the dodgy dossier: “It is good that when one puts one’s assessment in the public domain, it is always preferable for them to be based on accurate information.”

Translation: “I suppose, looking back, it would have been better if that dossier we released to the world had contained even the slenderest element of truth.”

And: “We had not concluded that the aluminium tubes were definitely not for a nuclear purpose.”

Translation: “We knew Iraq’s nuclear programme had been utterly destroyed years ago, and we knew there was not the slightest evidence that the aluminium tubes we found lying around in the desert had any nuclear-related purpose. But hell, who cares, the public don’t know that, so we put it in the dossier anyway.”

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, our former man at the United Nations, suggested that he had threatened to resign if Britain succumbed to American pressure to attack Iraq without a UN resolution. But did anyone back home understand him?

He recalled: “I decided to say that if it happened to become UK policy to go along with abandoning the UN route and go to the use of force without a further resolution, that I would have personal difficulties about that. Maybe I thought that I should be clear about that. Maybe I thought that that was a stiffener for London on what I thought should happen. But I thought it was a clarifying thing to say that there were limits in what I as a permanent representative could do in New York in terms of what was going on.”

Maybe he should stop saying maybe.

The mandarins’ interrogators are themselves mandarins par excellence. Sitting alongside Chilcot are a former ambassador to Russia called Sir Roderic Lyne, the eminent historians Sir Martin Gilbert and Sir Lawrence Freedman, and a lady called Baroness Prashar, who does not say very much but just sits there looking sage and concerned and sometimes bored.

It will give you a flavour of the whole thing if I tell you that the sharpest questions from the panel last week, those with the vague and distant whiff of controversy, came from Freedman — who was a policy adviser to Blair, which makes you wonder if he is an entirely disinterested party.

Chilcot, who also served on the previous Butler inquiry into Iraq, has already decreed that this inquiry will not be a court of law and that its job is not to apportion blame, nor does blame seem to be implied in any of the questions. Chilcot even prefaced one question to Ehrman with the observation that it was a “parenthetical question” that he really didn’t need to answer if he was not of the mind to do so. This is an unusual tactic for someone whose job it is to elicit straight answers, I reckon.

On Thursday morning, Sir Christopher Meyer, the former ambassador to Washington, grew so bored of the delicacy of the questioning that he began, instead, to ask questions of himself, having first cleared with Chilcot that it was constitutionally right and proper of him to do such a thing. Meyer’s questions to himself were more penetrating than any of the questions asked by the panel, which sat there nodding appreciatively.

Meyer — a classy, colourful and candid act among the monochrome and weaselly mandarins — identified the early date at which Blair first started to talk about regime change for Iraq. This apparently followed a convivial supper discussion with Bush, to which Meyer was not privy.It is difficult to believe that from this moment henceforth, Britain was not committed to an invasion of Iraq, no matter how often Straw told the parliamentary Labour party — and, of course, the general public — that war could be averted. The only question that remained was whether or not the United Nations would sanction an invasion; and in the end, even that did not matter to Britain. You wonder how much any of this matters any more. By the second day of evidence at the QE2 centre, the members of the public wishing to observe the inquiry had dwindled to precisely six, and the media room was looking a bit thinner too.

Even back in 2005, when it became patently clear that the government had misled parliament and the public over Iraq, and soldiers and civilians were dying by the hour in Basra, only the chattering class and a few of the broadsheet newspapers cared terribly much, to judge from both the opinion polls and Labour’s general election triumph.

Now, it would seem, even the chattering classes have grown a little bored of it all, given that there are MPs’ expenses to rail about, and the banks, and of course Afghanistan. But you would hope the distance of time might loosen tongues a little and that the full extent of the government’s chicanery, long assumed but unproven, might be quietly revealed over the next couple of months, half by accident, through these polite interlocutors.

Distorted truths

The Iraq inquiry seems to be an exercise in exquisite emollience and obfuscation, while the manifest contradictions in the various testimonies are never touched upon.

For example, both Sir William Ehrman and Tim Dowse addressed the question of Saddam Hussein’s missing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) such as stockpiles of chemical warheads.

WMD, if you exclude nuclear weapons, has long been a most misleading term. Chemical and biological weapons, terrifying and vile though they are, tend to kill far fewer people than the expensive conventional weapons deployed by the rich western states.

It is simply a term used to punish countries we do not like and in Iraq’s case it was broadened to encompass your humdrum, everyday ballistic missiles — a redefinition that renders the term effectively meaningless but was crucial in linking Saddam to WMD, as Ehrman and Dowse made clear.

They argued that a country such as Iraq, with a well developed petrochemical industry, was easily able to create chemical weapons in a very short space of time and had little need to stockpile them.

So Saddam had no chemical stockpiles. But he did have plenty of ballistic missiles which would be needed to deliver the chemical devices (that he didn’t have).

Iraq had ballistic missiles and the means to create chemical weapons. Ergo, Iraq had WMD: fabulous reasoning.

Ehrman and Dowse admitted that Iraq was not in the first league of states to be terribly worried about, because it was not developing a mature nuclear programme, nor did it have close links with international Islamic terrorism.

However, they later argued that Iraq was “unique” because Saddam was a nutter and had previously behaved aggressively towards neighbouring states.

The fact that his aggression had occurred more than 10 years beforehand, when he had invaded Kuwait, and had subsequently been easily contained through sanctions, no-fly zones and suchlike, was not dwelt upon for too long.

(by rod liddle, The Sunday Times, 29November2009)

In 1999, National Geographic magazine announced the discovery of a remarkable fossil. Archaeoraptor, as it was named, was claimed to be a dinosaur with feathers, a missing link of evolution that showed these long-extinct creatures were the ancestors of modern birds.

A year later, however, the magazine was left with a dinosaur-sized portion of egg on its face. Scientific investigations revealed that Archaeoraptor was a fake — a composite of dinosaur and primitive bird fossils that had been glued together.

The episode was seized upon by creationists, yet it has done nothing to dent the fundamentals of evolutionary theory. It survived this fraud — as it survived others such as Piltdown Man — because it is far too broadly attested to be threatened by a single piece of dodgy evidence.

Research in dozens of disciplines — including genetics, anthropology, palaeontology, geology and medicine, to name but a few — shows evolution to be a scientific fact. It is hard to credit the view that all are wrong.

This is worth remembering in the context of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) hacking scandal. For even if the stolen e-mails are shown to reveal scientific misconduct and data distortion — and the out-of-context remarks they contain have so far demonstrated nothing of the sort — they would do little to undermine the broad sweep of climate science.

As with evolution, the case that the world is warming and that human activity is at least partially responsible, does not rest on any one observation that if refuted would collapse a house of cards. It has been built from compelling multi-disciplinary science, with many strands of data that all point the same way.

As the journal Nature put it in an editorial this week: “Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.”

First, the CRU database that global warming deniers now claim to be discredited is not the only one of its kind. Historical temperature records have been compiled independently by Nasa and the US National Oceaonographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and they match the CRU’s figures so closely they are statistically identical.

What is more, such temperature data are far from the only evidence for the human-induced warming theory. Polar ice and mountain glaciers are retreating in line with the predictions it makes, or if anything even more quickly. Observations of sea level rise, animal migrations and plant germination match the models, as do changing patterns of precipitation. The oceans are warming and becoming more acidic as they absorb more carbon dioxide.

While natural climate variation is almost certainly a factor in these trends, it cannot explain them entirely. Only when human-induced forcing is included is it possible to account for all these effects.

The underlying physics of climate change is also robust. Nobody disputes the reality of the greenhouse effect, by which gases such as water vapour, methane and carbon dioxide keep our planet at least 30C (58F) warmer than it would otherwise be. When atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased in the past, so have global temperatures. And ice cores show that current carbon dioxide levels are unprecedented for hundreds of thousands of years.

The idea that global warming is an elaborate hoax suffers from the fatal flaw that afflicts most conspiracy theories: the alleged conspiracy is simply too huge and all-encompassing to be taken seriously.

It is possible that a few scientists might have faked or manipulated evidence, like the fossil-maker behind Archaeoraptor, though there is no proof of this in the CRU emails. But the notion that so many different branches of science have all connived undetected to manufacture a falsehood defies belief.

(mark Henderson, Times Online, 4December2009)

It is hard to be optimistic about the outcome of President Obama’s troop “surge” in Afghanistan. The additional forces sound large in headlines, but shrink small in the mountains. The commitment is intended as an earnest indication of America’s will. But neither the number of troops nor the timeline that mandates a drawdown in less than two years is likely to impress the Taliban, who think in decades, or for that matter the Afghan people.

Most decision-makers on both sides of the Atlantic now privately believe we are in the business of managing failure, and that is how the surge looks. The president allowed himself to be convinced that a refusal to reinforce NATO’s mission in Afghanistan would fatally weaken the resolve of Pakistan in resisting Islamic militancy. Meanwhile at home, refusal to meet the American generals’ demands threatened to brand him as the man who lost the Afghan war. Thus the surge lies in the realm of politics, not warfare.

As the president said, the usual comparisons with Vietnam are mistaken. Today’s United States Army and Marine Corps are skilled counterinsurgency fighters. Their commanders, especially Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, are officers of the highest gifts. Combat and casualties are on a much smaller scale than in Southeast Asia four decades ago.

The critical fact, however, is that military operations are meaningless unless in support of a sustainable political system. One Indochina parallel seems valid: that war was lost chiefly because America’s Vietnamese allies were unviable.

If we lose in Afghanistan, it will not be because American soldiers are defeated, but because “our” Afghans — the regime of Hamid Karzai — cannot deliver to the people honest policing, acceptable administration and visible quality of life improvements. I’m hardly the first to say this. Yet the yawning hole in Mr. Obama’s speech at West Point, and in American policy, is the absence of a credible Afghan domestic and regional strategy.

It would be hard to overstate the cultural chasm separating Afghans from their foreign allies and expatriate returnees. Scarcely a single Western soldier speaks their languages. In the entire country there are only a few hundred competent administrators, and most of them are corrupt. Last year, I met an Afghan minister who had spent more than half his young life as an exile. He spoke and acted like a Californian. To Pashtun tribesmen, he must seem like a Martian.

“Democracy has been a disaster for our country,” an Afghan businessman once told me, in tones of withering scorn. Like most of his kind, he may live in Kabul, but he has one eye on the airport.

In Pakistan, there is great uncertainty about the impact of the surge. The West’s purpose is not to remake Afghanistan, an impossible task, but to promote regional stability and encourage the Pakistanis in their struggle against militants.

The strategic importance of these objectives is not in doubt. The question is whether they are attainable, and whether an increased troop commitment in Afghanistan will do much to advance them. The Islamabad government sincerely, even passionately, wants the United States and its allies to continue their Afghan campaign. But among Pakistan’s vast population, the West is much more unpopular — indeed, hated — than it was in 2006 or, for that matter, 2001. There is a danger that the surge will intensify that popular alienation, further fueling Islamic extremism and thus terrorism.

Little progress can be made toward regional stability without reducing tensions between Pakistan and India. India’s dalliance with the Afghan government, which has been given hundreds of millions of dollars in Indian aid, has increased the deep paranoia of the Pakistani Army and intelligence service. The status quo will only lead powerful elements of Pakistan’s security forces to continue to support Islamic militants as proxies against India.

Few responsible participants in the Afghan drama, even the most pessimistic, urge a precipitate withdrawal. We are too deeply committed for that. What seems important is to recognize that politics and diplomacy are the fundamentals, though they cannot progress unless security improves. Even the most limited stabilization program will founder unless all the regional powers, including Iran, become parties to it. It is difficult to imagine that the Karzai administration can raise its game sufficiently to gain a popular mandate strong enough to stop the Taliban.

President Obama said on Tuesday, “Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.” Yes, the Taliban command limited support, and have relatively few hard-core fighters. But many Afghans, especially Pashtuns, unite in dislike both for the Western “occupiers” and the Kabul regime.

Progress depends, as General McChrystal seems to recognize, on reaching accommodations with the tribes from the bottom up, not the top down. The smartest surge will be one of cash payments to local leaders. You can buy a lot of Afghans for a small fraction of the cost of deploying a Marine company.

Perhaps the greatest problem for Western policymakers is that Taliban leaders watch CNN and Al Jazeera. They know that the British public has turned against the war, probably irrevocably, and that American opinion is deeply divided. They believe they have more patience than us, and they may be right.

The president’s troop surge was perhaps politically inescapable. But any chance of salvaging a minimally acceptable outcome hinges not on what American and allied soldiers can do on the battlefield, but on putting together a coherent political strategy. Mr. Obama’s speech represented a gesture to his generals rather than a convincing path to success in Afghanistan.

(max hastings, New York Times, 3December2009)

In July 1799, during Napoleon’s brief occupation of Egypt, Captain Pierre-François Bouchard, an army engineer supervising the reconstruction of the Ottoman fort near the port of Rosetta, extracted a lump of dark granite from under the crumbling walls, covered in ancient writing.

The first sight of the Rosetta Stone was so remarkable that the Napoleonic Army, it was said, immediately snapped to attention: “It halted itself and, by one spontaneous impulse, grounded its arms.”

An edict in honour of Ptolemy V, the Macedonian-Greek Pharaoh, written in three scripts, deciphered by a British and a French scholar, the stone not only unlocked the written secrets of Ancient Egypt, but stands as a vivid symbol of how intellectual changes move with physical artefacts, by conquest, colonisation and trade, but also through the free, borderless exchange of ideas.

This object — partly Hellenic in origin, Ancient Egyptian in provenance, the subject of Anglo-French scholarship and an object of universal reverence and importance — is now the focus of a furious repatriation debate.

The celebrated Mr Belzoni Zahi Hawass, the formidable secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has demanded that the stone, which he calls an “icon of Egyptian identity”, be returned from the British Museum to Egypt. “We own that stone,” he told al-Jazeera television recently. “The motherland should own this.”

For Dr Hawass, and many others in so-called “source” countries, this is a simple issue of restoring looted cultural property: “For all of our history, our heritage was stolen from us. They [the British Museum] kept it in a dark, badly lit room until I came and requested it.”

There are several objections to this, beginning with what he means by “we” and “the motherland”. Modern Egypt did not exist in 1799, let alone in 196BC, when the stone was carved. Unlike some controversial items in Western museums, the stone was not smuggled away, but handed over to the British as part of a legal treaty, signed not only by the French and British, but by the Ottoman Government in Egypt.

As for the absurd notion that it was undervalued and poorly exhibited: the Rosetta Stone has been on almost continuous, prominent display since 1802, the single most visited object in the entire museum.

But more than that, the Rosetta Stone is an emblem of universality, and a product of the multiple cultures that existed in the 2nd century BC, in what we now call Egypt. Dr Hawass, a brilliant and inspiring defender of the past, has selected the wrong object over which to fight a narrow, nationalistic political campaign for “repatriation”.

If ever there was a genuinely global object, deserving of a place in a world museum, it is this: the text itself is insignificant, and very boring. Its importance lies in how it was moved outside Egypt, and deciphered: a chunk of builders’ rubble that changed the way we think.

The Rosetta Stone describes a tax amnesty for temple priests, essentially a tax break for fat cats 2,200 years ago. It is toadying in the extreme: “Ptolemy, the ever living, beloved by Ptah, the God manifest and gracious . . .” Blah, blah, ptah. But, crucially, it is sycophantic in three distinct languages: Ancient Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphs and the everyday language of the people.

The inscription was a reflection of cultural diversity and colonial politics, aimed at three separate constituencies: the Greek government, Egyptian locals and the Ancient Egyptian gods. Deciphering these parallel texts restored a lost chapter of history, enabling linguists to begin deciphering hieroglyphics and decoding 4,000 years of Egypt’s past.

It was extracted from the tangle of history through international rivalry, but it came to be understood through international co-operation. Thomas Young, British scientist and polymath, deciphered parts of the demotic text (mostly during weekends in Worthing) and offered up his findings in the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1819. Jean-François Champollion, the French Egyptologist, corresponded with Young, and produced his own breakthrough in 1822.

Instead of complaining about being pipped to the script, Young was delighted: “Were I ever so much the victim of the bad passions, I should feel nothing but exaltation at Mr Champollion’s success.” Young was a true son of the Enlightenment, fascinated by discovery for its own sake: in addition to the Rosetta code, he left us the word “energy”, as applied to science, “Young’s modulus” of elasticity and “Young’s principles” in life insurance.

But it is Young’s principles of openness to the intellectual riches of ancient objects that should inform the argument over cultural property. Instead of debating ownership and trying to impose modern notions of political sovereignty on ancient cultural patrimony, the argument should be about how to bring the world’s cultural riches to the widest possible audience, regardless of where they physically reside.

Arguments about “stolen” artefacts and national identity seem oddly old-fashioned in a world where the internet enables every object in a public collection to be seen and appreciated anywhere on the planet.

Some curators, fearful of the insistence that all cultural artefacts must stay in the country of discovery, argue for a return of the system of “partage”, whereby discoveries were shared between the source country and the finders. In a globalised world, this system should be universal, allowing the widest possible exchange of artefacts and the ideas that go with them, irrespective of national boundaries and political pride.

The Rosetta Stone is not a national icon, as Dr Hawass maintains, but an international symbol, as demonstrated by its idiomatic usage: the word “Rosetta” has come to mean not just unlocking ideas, but spreading them. Some ideas, and some objects, are so universally important that they demand that we stand spontaneously to attention.

(ben macintyre, The Times, 10December2009)

Confidential intelligence documents obtained by The Times show that Iran is working on testing a key final component of a nuclear bomb.

The notes, from Iran’s most sensitive military nuclear project, describe a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion. Foreign intelligence agencies date them to early 2007, four years after Iran was thought to have suspended its weapons programme.

An Asian intelligence source last week confirmed to The Times that his country also believed that weapons work was being carried out as recently as 2007 — specifically, work on a neutron initiator.

The technical document describes the use of a neutron source, uranium deuteride, which independent experts confirm has no possible civilian or military use other than in a nuclear weapon. Uranium deuteride is the material used in Pakistan’s bomb, from where Iran obtained its blueprint.

“Although Iran might claim that this work is for civil purposes, there is no civil application,” said David Albright, a physicist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, which has analysed hundreds of pages of documents related to the Iranian programme. “This is a very strong indicator of weapons work.”

The documents have been seen by intelligence agencies from several Western countries, including Britain. A senior source at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that they had been passed to the UN’s nuclear watchdog.

A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokeswoman said yesterday: “We do not comment on intelligence, but our concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme are clear. Obviously this document, if authentic, raises serious questions about Iran’s intentions.”

Responding to The Times’ findings, an Israeli government spokesperson said: “Israel is increasingly concerned about the state of the Iranian nuclear programme and the real intentions that may lie behind it.”

The revelation coincides with growing international concern about Iran’s nuclear programme. Tehran insists that it wants to build a civilian nuclear industry to generate power, but critics suspect that the regime is intent on diverting the

The degree of deceit involved in our [Britain’s] decision to go to war on Iraq becomes steadily clearer. This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage. It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible. Who is any longer naive enough to accept that the then Prime Minister’s mind remained innocently open after his visit to Crawford, Texas?

Hindsight is a great temptress. But we needn’t trouble her on the way to a confident conclusion that Mr Blair’s fundamental flaw was his sycophancy towards power. Perhaps this seems odd in a man who drank so much of that mind-altering brew at home. But Washington turned his head and he couldn’t resist the stage or the glamour that it gave him. In this sense he was weak and, as we can see, he remains so. Since those sorry days we have frequently heard him repeating the self-regarding mantra that “hand on heart, I only did what I thought was right”. But this is a narcissist’s defence and self-belief is no answer to misjudgment: it is certainly no answer to death. “Yo, Blair”, perhaps, was his truest measure.

How effectively the Chilcot Inquiry, to which Mr Blair will give evidence in the new year, can expose any of this remains to be seen. Ominously for the former Prime Minister, his growing distance from power appears to be loosening some well-placed Whitehall tongues. It seems that the contempt felt by some mandarins for his fancier footwork around the weapons of mass destruction is finally showing in a belated settling of scores. Discretion is fading like toothache and the feast of revenge is as tempting as it is cold.

Yet the position of the inquiry panel is uncertain. So far, apart from some interventions by Sir Roderic Lyne, the former ambassador in Moscow, its questioning has been unchallenging. If this is born of a belief that it creates an atmosphere more conducive to truth, it seems naive. The truth doesn’t always glide out so compliantly; sometimes it struggles to be heard. Sometimes it takes cover in a shelter that is entirely self-serving.

Sir John Chilcot himself, a distinguished former Permanent Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office during the Troubles and finely tuned for years to the security services, will be key. Perhaps a great and brave struggle against instinct will be necessary. In British public life, loyalty and service to power can sometimes count for more to insiders than any tricky questions of wider reputation. It’s the regard you are held in by your peers that really counts, so that steadfastness in the face of attack and threatened exposure brings its own rich hierarchy of honour and reward. Disloyalty, on the other hand, means a terrible casting out, a rocky and barren Roman exile that few have the courage to endure. So which way will our heroes jump?

We must hope in the right direction — for it is precisely this privately arranged nature of British Establishment power, stubborn beyond sympathy for years in the face of the modern world, that has brought our politics so low. If Chilcot fails to reveal the truth without fear in this Middle Eastern story of violence and destruction, the inquiry will be held in deserved and withering contempt. This would be a serious blow to the integrity of the State. It would not restore trust.

For so many years this would not have mattered. Questions sufficiently critical and grand were decided at an elevated level, and in air more refined than most people would ever inhale. A besotted king could be skewered in the shadows and depart, or an illustrious commission twist and turn from any finding of government fault. And if the cost of the reasoning was ermine splashed in whitewash, the price would be willingly paid.

But it’s harder today and the tax on dishonesty is rising. Now our system has to prove itself again and again, it has to persuade people that it deserves their loyalty and support. Citizens believe deeply in a democratic right to know and they no longer acknowledge their unworthiness to enjoy its nourishment. Naturally, this is a less comfortable world for people in power, but it’s a much better world for everyone else. The real tragedy of Iraq, beyond all the danger and the terrible loss, is that it rendered any affair of the heart between government and people no more than a wisp, like a lie in the wind. It broke faith.

This is the gravity of Chilcot, and its broader meaning. A few months of their deliberations will tell us how well, through the solemn work of these illustrious individuals, each one of us, and therefore our country, measures up to a compromised past.

We have seen enormous acts of courage on the part of our men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most heart-rending sacrifices have been made; many of them will become poetry and song in future years. But none of this sprinkles, as he might once have hoped it would, any starlight on Tony Blair. On the contrary, it is entirely the work of warriors thrust carelessly into death’s way by a Prime Minister lost in self-aggrandisement and a governing class too closed to speak truth to power.

(ken macdonald, The Times, 14December2009)

This column is under review.

This column is under review.