Chan's Personal Blog

Should it unexpectedly start raining at anytime during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, don't blame the weathercaster -- blame the military.

In an effort to ensure clear skies during Asia's rainy season, Chinese meteorologists are planning to fire rockets into the sky to disperse rain clouds. Once the rockets are launched into the upper atmosphere, silver iodide and dry ice contained inside will detonate, and the resulting explosion could conceivably destroy rain clouds below.

William Brune, head of Penn State University's meteorology department, said the process is technically feasible, but he remains skeptical about its effectiveness.

"What this process is trying to do is distribute the water among the cloud to make it hard for the water molecules to come together to make rain drops," he said. "It is very hard to prove you've actually done anything at all, and there isn't any indisputable evidence that this actually works."

Most suicide bombers are Muslim

Suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, but according to Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, when religion is involved, the attackers are always Muslim. Why? The surprising answer is that Muslim suicide bombing has nothing to do with Islam or the Quran (except for two lines). It has a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.

What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at all.

So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.

However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.

The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.

It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.

Yahoo! and Google are fierce rivals online but once in a while, the two companies tangle offline too. In November, about 50 tennis players from the two companies faced off at the "Battle over the Net," the companies' first annual face-off at the Stanford Tennis Courts. Google's team included some top-notch players, but Yahoo! squeaked out a victory, 163-157. "I worried it would be like David and Goliath," says Meg Garlinghouse, director of Yahoo! for Good. "But we actually won." Yahoo! also has basketball and softball teams. And on weeknights, poker is a favored pastime for Yahoo! engineers, who also play an array of board games after work in the company's "URL's" cafeteria.