Web trigrams are beautiful things.
Deane dismisses a Newsweek article that says “in addition to being an ethnic conflict, the Sri Lankan civil war is a religious one”. Deane’s contention?
“Sri Lankan conflict is many things, what it’s not is a religious conflict. The fact that most Sinhalese are Buddhist and most Tamils are Hindu (and all Mulims are well, muslims) doesn’t mean that the conflict is drawn along those lines.”
I find that a little baffling. Of course the war is religious. The war is a lot of things, but it makes no sense to split “cultural”, “ethnic”, “religious”, “historical” etc., into separate boxes and talk about some without talking about the other. The whole historical ethno-religious mess is precisely what gives our little war that special flavour, the tedious Buddhist mythology of race and destiny, the chosen people, the holy land. It doesn’t matter that nobody, far as I know, goes into battle shouting the Buddha’s name.
No, this is about the magic of Vesak, this is. This is about the idea that the Sinhala Buddhists are special, and that their special destiny as the last bastion of glorious Hinayana means that it is just for them to fight to protect it. If they did not believe that they were special and different, would things have been different?
Who knows, man. Who knows.
The beetle’s name is Lamprocyphus augustus, and its iridiscent green colour is not pigmentation, but is instead produced by the crystal structure of its chitin scales. This in itself is not news: in the last decade or so, people have been finding biological photonic crystals in all kinds of places: butterfly wings, peacock tail feathers, mallard heads, flies, beetles. In all of them, instead of pigmentation, the crystal microstructures cause wave interference, which excludes specific frequencies of light. The difference with Lamprocyphus is that the particular photonic crystal structure in its chitin scales is the only known sample in existence, biological or otherwise, of the ideal structure for photonic crystals that may actually make optical computers possible some day. They are trying to build synthetic versions using transparent semiconductors because they can’t actually use beetle scales themselves, which is incidentally a pity because I would love to live in a world where our superfast optical computers were made out of beetles.
