Stumbling Toward Enlightenment

Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya (15 January [O.S. 3 January] 1850 – 10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1891), was the first major Russian female mathematician, responsible for important original contributions to analysis, differential equations and mechanics, and the first woman appointed to a full professorship in Northern Europe. There are some alternative transliterations of her name. She herself used Sophie Kowalevski (or occasionally Kowalevsky), for her academic publications. After moving to Sweden, she called herself Sonya. [Wikipedia]

By the time she was 18 years old, Kovalevskaya had studied physics, geometry, algebra, trigonometry, calculus and biology. This was an exceptional accomplishment for any 19th century woman, especially from Russia. She would die at the age of 41 from influenza and pneumonia.

In Russia at that time, there was no opportunity for women to continue their education, or to travel, without the permission of her father or her husband. Kovalevskaya chose to marry rather than go to her father, influenced by her recent conversion to radicalism, especially to nihilism, which held that the sexes were equal and that women, as well as men, should educate themselves and serve society. In radical circles it was common to make marriages of convenience so as to travel abroad and escape parental supervision. Seldom consummated, after the ceremony bride and groom often never saw each other again.

Kovalevskaya made such a marriage to paleontologist Vladamir Kovalevskaya, but she paid for her freedom with 15 years of misery, as her husband was irresponsible, unreliable and mentally unstable. He refused to leave her alone, and until his suicide in 1883 he was a constant burden. To compensate, she developed new interests and obtained an introduction to University of Göttingen professor Karl Weierstrass. He gave her some difficult problems just to get rid of her, but when she returned with the problems correctly solved, they began a lifelong friendship.

Although he tutored her, her progress was beset by discrimination and sexism. Each professor demanded special permission to be allowed to attend lectures. After her graduation from Göttingen summa cum laude she was unable to get a teaching job in Russia because of her sex.

After writing a novel and an autobiographical novel, The Sisters Rajevsky, she took a job as a lecturer at the University of Stockholm. Some Swedes welcomed her graciously, the playwright Strindberg stated, “A female professor of mathematics is a pernicious and unpleasant phenomenon—even, one might say, a monstrosity.” Nonetheless, she became well known for the Caucy-Kovalevskaya Theorem of differential equations and for her essay On the Rotation of a Solid Body About a Fixed Point, which won the French Academy’s Prix Bordin.

She was made a tenured professor in 1889, and in the same year Russia’s Imperial Academy of Sciences changed its rules to allow her to join its ranks. She was admired throughout Europe. Nonetheless, two years before her death, she was banned from teaching in her native land—because she was a woman.

BY Randy Rieland
The oil lobby has spent tens of millions lobbying Congress.

Let’s review. We just lived through the worst accidental oil leak in history. And we’re at the tail end of a summer of cataclysmic weather that top climate scientists tell us is a taste of the globally-warmed future. Yet the United States Senate failed even to pass a climate bill so tepid that it qualified as what a Republican (South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham) once would have described as “half-assed.”

How does this happen? The Center for Responsive Politics offers a whopper of a clue. It reports that during the first six months of this year alone, Big Oil spent $75 million lobbying Congress. The report also points out that last year, when green groups retaliated and spent a record $22.4 million on their own lobbying, they still were outspent 7 to 1 by fossil fuel lobbies. The Center’s Open Secrets Blog has all the dirty details as part of a weeklong series on how Big Oil fuels Washington.

Target practice: For BP, the Gulf oil leak has been the gift that keeps on giving—and not in a good way. At yesterday’s hearing in Houston on the Deepwater Horizon explosion, federal investigators nailed the oil giant for not addressing hundreds of maintenance problems on the rig. BP’s erstwhile partners pointed one finger after another at their beleaguered colleague. Even Brad Pitt unloaded on BP, saying:

I was never for the death penalty before; I am willing to look at it again.

Dirty business: If you think clean coal is an oxymoron you’ve got plenty of company. Turns out a lot of utility companies don’t buy the concept either. According to AP reporter Matthew Brown, 30 old-fashioned dirty coal plants have been built since 2008, or are under construction:

The expansion, the industry’s largest in two decades, represents an acknowledgment that highly touted “clean coal” technology is still a long way from becoming a reality and underscores a renewed confidence among utilities that proposals to regulate carbon emissions will fail.

Waiting to inhale: And while we’re on the subject of the air we’d rather not breathe, the EPA is postponing the announcement of tougher smog regulations at least until late October. More likely the agency will stay mum on smog until after the November elections, because any announcement would provide ammo for Republicans who have been accusing the federal government of running amok. Even November would be way too soon for some on Capitol Hill. Why rush asked a group of seven senators in a written complaint to EPA chief Lisa Jackson earlier this month? New smog regulations can wait until 2013.

We take it all back: Feels like you could use a little positive spin right about now, so how’s this? Bob Marshall, in the New Orleans Times Picayune, reports that some enviros think the BP gusher in the Gulf may actually save more Louisiana wetlands than it destroyed:

… three months of daily newscasts have dramatically increased national awareness of the state’s real coastal disaster, and the billions in fines BP is expected to pay could bankroll critical projects Congress had refused to fund.

Whine and punishment: And here’s another little pick-you-up. During a visit to a remote research base in the Russian Arctic, Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, suggested that too much has been made of man’s role in global warming, pointing out that climate change helped kill off woolly mammoths long before the age of human industrialization. German scientist Inken Preuss set him straight:

Climate change has never happened like now and man is making a huge impact.

He got told.

Antiwar protesters mark the eighth anniversary of military action in Afghanistan at a demonstration outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles.

By Heather Maher
A new poll shows that a growing number of Americans feel that the United States should “mind its own business internationally” when it comes to foreign affairs.

The title of the Pew Research Center poll, which asked 2,000 U.S. citizens about United States’ role in the world, says it all: “Isolationist Sentiment Surges to Four-Decade High.”

The survey found that almost half of Americans (49 percent) think the United States should stay out of foreign affairs and let other countries get along the best they can on their own. That number is the highest in 40 years and represents an increase from 30 percent who felt that way just seven years ago. Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Center, calls it “an extraordinary spike in isolationist” sentiment and thinks he knows why. “I think part of the reason here is the American public’s focus on a bad economy, also feeling badly about the world,” Kohut says.

“There are two wars that the public thinks are not going well, terrorist concerns are even greater than they were four years ago, so the American public is not looking fondly at the rest of the world.”

Paralleling the rise in isolationist sentiment among Americans is a sharp rise in unilateralist feelings. Fully 44 percent of Americans—the highest percentage in more than 45 years—say that because the United States is “the most powerful nation in the world, we should go our own way in international matters, not worrying about whether other countries agree with us or not.”

Skepticism On Afghanistan
The survey’s results also reveal a distinct lack of public enthusiasm for President Barack Obama’s foreign-policy approach, especially toward Afghanistan. The poll, which was conducted before Obama announced that he is sending an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, found that only 32 percent of the public favored adding more U.S. soldiers to the fight. Forty percent said they would like to decrease the size of the U.S. force. There is also skepticism that the war is worth fighting. Fewer than half (46 percent) of those surveyed said they think Afghanistan will be able to stand on its own and resist the Taliban and other extremist groups once there is no longer an outside force like the United States to help them.

James Lindsay, the director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, which co-sponsored the poll, said those results could mean problems for Obama as he tries to make the case that the country must deepen its involvement in the Afghanistan.

“My guess is as long as the public and influential [thinkers] are persuaded that Afghanistan can’t be fixed, it’s going to be very hard to sustain strong public support for staying in Afghanistan,” Lindsay says.

The survey also found that just half of Americans (51 percent) approve of Obama’s overall job performance on foreign-policy issues. Americans also think the United States’ role in the world has diminished considerably in the last decade. Forty-one percent said the United States plays a less important and powerful role as a world leader than it did in 1999—the highest number who have ever said so, according to the polling agency.

China’s Rise
By comparison, more Americans than ever now see China’s role in the world, especially economically, as having grown. Forty-four percent said China is now the world’s leading economic power, compared with 27 percent who said the United States is. In February 2008, before the global recession hit, 41 percent of Americans considered their country the world’s leading economic power. But Americans also see China’s new role as an economic powerhouse as something to fear. A majority of those surveyed (53 percent) believe China is a threat to the United States.

Kohut says Americans don’t necessarily see China negatively, but they do worry about what its rising power means for the United States.

“I think in an era where the public feels that China has surpassed the United States economically, and people are feeling very, very badly about the American economy, it’s not unreasonable that people would conclude that China represents a threat,” Kohut says.

Americans’ top three foreign fears, according to the survey, are: Islamic extremist groups like Al-Qaeda, Iran’s nuclear program, and international financial instability. Russia, on the other hand, is no longer seen as an enemy.

“Russia has obviously over the years declined as a threat in the view of the public. The public certainly doesn’t put it at the top of its list as it once did, and we only get 2 percent of the public saying, ‘Russia represents the greatest danger to the United States,’” Kohut notes.

“You get 21 percent saying Iran represents the greatest danger to the United States.”

A little more than a third of Americans are worried about the growing tensions between Russia and its neighbors, while two-thirds say North Korea’s nuclear program constitutes a major threat to the United States.

Obama’s declaration that, “under [his] administration the United States does not torture,” doesn’t seem to have changed many Americans’ minds about the necessity of using harsh interrogation techniques.

The proportion of the public that says torture is at least sometimes justified against suspected terrorists has actually increased slightly over the past year. Just over half of Americans (54 percent) say torture is at least sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists, compared with 44 percent who said so 10 months ago.

The Pew survey was conducted between October 28 and November 8 of this year.

Incredible news. In a historic victory more than 15 years in the making, Russia today announced a complete ban on the hunting of all harp seals less than one year of age.

IFAW Russia Director Masha Vorontsova visits the seal birthing grounds on the White Sea.

YOUR calls and letters have made a huge difference. Nearly 40,000 messages were written for Prime Minister Putin in the last month alone. You have helped save up to 35,000 baby seals this year from a cruel and brutal slaughter in the White Sea.

Thanks to your support, IFAW has worked tirelessly in Russia to end this hunt since we opened our office there in 1994. We were the first organization to visit the ice and expose the bloody cruelty within Russia when it was virtually unknown – despite being physically assaulted by sealers and enduring powerful opposition from Russian government officials.

Over the past year, IFAW organized a wave of anti-hunt protests in 25 cities across Russia. This public outcry led to mounting pressure on Russia’s government to formally address the need to close the harp seal hunt.

And when a ban on just whitecoat pups (up to about 11 days old) was announced in February, we continued to push through the road blocks of fisheries officials to provide the scientific evidence needed to argue for a full ban.

This is your victory. It’s time to celebrate … but we must not forget that more than 250,000 baby seals will still suffer horribly when Canada’s own commercial seal hunt begins any day now.

The time has come for the Canadian government to follow Russia’s lead. Please help us continue our campaign in Canada with a donation to help pass the Harb Seal Bill. This historic legislation would end Canada’s cruel commercial hunt for harp seals once and for all.

With you by our side, the next historic victory will take place in Canada.

For the seals,
Fred O’Regan, IFAW President