Micro-nukes coming even sooner than minis

Or, a nuke on every block. Who needs a nationwide grid when you can have local power anywhere or everywhere?

The Toshiba micro-nuke.

Thanks to Instapundit, who asks, "Where do I order one?"

What mini-nukes? These mini-nukes.

Thoughts on the death penalty (was: Open thread for Earl)

This post is updated, but kept at the original link, in order to keep the Internet from falling into utter chaos.

(A discussion at Making Light has become a bit warm. I would like to see if the talk might cool off a bit, if moved here.) That's not happening. Reader, if you want to see me make an ass of myself in public, take a look at this: Go, New Jersey! The lesson: don't post while feelings are running high. The old wisdom about writing angry letters applies: write it, but don't mail it till the next day, when you have cooled off. On reflection, you may find that you want to say something different, or to say the same thing in different, less inflammatory language. Or, maybe, not say anything at all.

But let's look at the original post over there. Here's the substance of it:

The arguments against capital punishment are these: It doesn’t actually prevent violent criminals from committing crimes, it’s barbaric no matter how you go about doing it, there’s no guarantee you got the right guy, and it sends the wrong message: Killing is wrong, and to prove it we’ll kill you. Most civilized countries banned capital punishment long ago.

Much as I respect Jim Macdonald (I have linked to his posts several times here), these "arguments" are bumper stickers. One at a time:

• "It doesn’t actually prevent violent criminals from committing crimes." Which criminals? A violent criminal who has been executed will commit no more crimes. I would call that some actual prevention. Or is this intended to mean, "It does not deter potentially violent criminals from committing crimes?" That's another matter. In London when pickpockets were publicly hanged at Tyburn, other pickpockets worked the crowd of spectators. Someone is going to object that picking pockets is not a violent crime. So shouldn't the message get across even more clearly to non-violent criminals? Apparently not. Some people just don't get the message. They are not listening and do not care about messages. As Samuel Goldwyn famously said, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union." Goldwyn was talking about movies, of course; but the point is that there are people who will not or cannot get the message. So how to stop them from murdering, raping, and robbing? Sentencing them to life imprisonment does not seem to work, since governors and parole boards who wish to make themselves feel good by being merciful are always likely to be with us. To grant mercy to a predator is to condemn the prey, which would be the general populace. Jack Abbott. Darrell Billingslea. (Why was this convicted murderer released from prison?) Wayne Dumond. Richard Allen Davis. Daniel Tavares. Far too many more. "Life without parole" is not a real sentence, as it is always subject to review; and the possibility of escape is always there.

• "It’s barbaric no matter how you go about doing it." Barbarism is in the eye of the beholder. The word "barbaric" means foreign, alien, uncouth, uncivilized; literally, unable to speak our language; so, something that "we" would not do, because it's just not "our" way. Squicky and unpleasant. There's an element of elitism here, of amour-propre above all, reminiscent of the Jains of India, who will not kill an insect. Of course they have to hire flunkies of other beliefs to sweep their paths before them, lest they tread on some little creature; but the flunkies' sins are their own, not their master's. Killing an animal is unpleasant; killing a human being, I can only imagine, much more so; but a mad dog must be killed. Is this argument really about the death penalty itself, or about Which Execution Method Causes the Least Discomfort (to the Public)? Leaving out such things as 9/11, unaimed rockets fired into Israel, and bomb attacks on Israeli buses, Balinese nightclubs, Spanish trains, and English pillar-boxes, I would call the killing of Daniel Pearl barbaric. Or that of Nicholas Berg. Or those of Jennifer, Hayley, and Michaela Petit. Or those of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. The execution of Nathan Hale: regrettable, for our side; not barbaric. The rules of war were followed; Nathan Hale knew what he risked. The execution of John Wayne Gacy: not regrettable, not barbaric. (Though botched; maybe Dr. Guillotine had the right idea. He invented his device for humane reasons.) Is it too incomprehensible to consider the death penalty as a public safety measure? In this comment thread I argue against it for the mentally incompetent. Now I am starting to wonder if I was right about that.

• "There’s no guarantee you got the right guy." Sometimes you can be sure; Brian Nichols, for instance. Jack Ruby. Otherwise, it varies from case to case. And this bumper sticker just about invalidates the entire justice system, since the same could be said in any criminal case. Juries do the best they can. Cases of corrupt juries and overzealous prosecutors do not make the whole system useless. Such cases, as with the Duke lacrosse players, or the Scottsboro Boys, are horrible examples that should help to wake people up to abuses of a system that is about as good as what we can have, given the human material available. (On the opposite side of this coin are such as O.J. Simpson and the first couple of trials of Byron De La Beckwith.) As modern forensic science improves, especially with DNA testing (exemplified by the great work of the Innocence Project), it is possible to achieve a greater degree of certainty. If we could see more of the kind of thing that Radley Balko writes about in More Prosecutors Like Craig Watkins, Please, that would be a great thing, too.

• "It sends the wrong message: Killing is wrong, and to prove it we’ll kill you." See above about sending messages. This seems to be a misunderstanding of the sixth, or fifth, Commandment, which in the Hebrew, is not "Thou shalt not kill," but "Thou shalt not murder." The distinction between murder and killing is an important one. Is every soldier who has killed an enemy in battle a murderer? Is a person who kills an attacker in self-defense a murderer? For that matter, is an executioner, employed by the state to do justice, a murderer? The answer to each of these must be "No." The alternative is the worst kind of Hobbesian anarchy.

• "Most civilized countries banned capital punishment long ago." Depends on what is meant by "civilized." Most of the "civilized" countries of Europe have been convulsed with violence in the last century: revolutions, the Holocaust, two World Wars, terror gangs like the Red Brigades, "ethnic cleansing," now the rioting youths in the banlieues; the US is far more civilized than those places. If being civilized means to keep on turning the other cheek, for the sake of one's own self-regard, then the civilized will run out of cheeks before the real barbarians run out of knives, bombs, bullets, clubs, and fists.

Those are arguments against the arguments against the death penalty. Do I have arguments in favor of the death penalty? Other than the above, not so much. This is a lesser of two evils decision that someone has to make. In our system, "someone" would be the legislature and governor, in this specific case, of New Jersey. Banning the death penalty means that, in the estimation of those who hold the High Justice, no crime is serious enough to warrant it. Murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, treason, espionage, all of them in combination: nothing. A counsel, literally, of nihilism. A statement that no sins are deadly. A trivialization of human volition. A sloughing of responsibility. Certainly the death penalty should be rarely applied; but to say that it is never warranted is to deny the seriousness of free will, the existence of evil, and the worth of lives and nations.

=======================

There's one more point to address here, having to do with netiquette and politeness in general. The post of mine that has received the most hits in the shortest space of time was the one about trolls. It's ironic, then, that I should be perceived as trolling, when I have expressed my detestation of the creatures. As I said in my apology on the New Jersey thread, "Making Light is a wonderful party." It's not polite to bust into a party where everyone shares the same ideas, and tell them that they are wrong. I was Alice, and got the Hatter's final reply. No-one's ideas are ever changed in Internet comment fora. (What, never? Well, hardly ever.)

=======================

Update, years later: Glenn Reynolds, on Radley Balko (Why Americans still support the death penalty), offers this:

I think it’s because tedious liberals self-righteously oppose it, while showing an appalling insensitivity to the lives (and deaths) of ordinary non-criminal Americans. Though I should note that European citizens also support the death penalty in large numbers — they’re just ignored by their leaders. The best argument against the death penalty, of course, is what Charles Black called “the inevitability of caprice and mistake.” But that argument, taken seriously, is an indictment of the entire criminal-justice system, not just the death penalty. It may be a valid indictment, but few are willing to go that far.

The worst argument against the death penalty, of course, is that it’s somehow awful for the state to kill people. Nation-states are all about killing people. They exist solely because they’re better at that, on a large scale, than any other form of human organization. Everything else is superstructure, and if they lose that edge it will fade away.

Speaking of magic

Tales of Beedle the Bard.

Magic, can we have magic

Fantasy can be cruel.
It's difficult for some people to admit to themselves that there is a war going on.
But then, something happens…

Ginsberg , by Julia Vinograd

No blame. Anyone who wrote Howl and Kaddish
earned the right to make any possible mistake
for the rest of his life.
I just wish I hadn't made this mistake with him.
It was during the Vietnam war
and he was giving a great protest reading
in Washington Square Park
and nobody wanted to leave.
So Ginsberg got the idea, "I'm going to shout
"the war is over" as loud as I can," he said
"and all of you run over the city
in different directions
yelling the war is over, shout it in offices,
shops, everywhere and when enough people
believe the war is over
why, not even the politicians
will be able to keep it going."
I thought it was a great idea at the time
a truly poetic idea.
So when Ginsberg yelled I ran down the street
and leaned in the doorway
of the sort of respectable down on its luck cafeteria
where librarians and minor clerks have lunch
and I yelled "the war is over."
And a little old lady looked up
from her cottage cheese and fruit salad.
She was so ordinary she would have been invisible
except for the terrible light
filling her face as she whispered
"My son. My son is coming home."
I got myself out of there and was sick in some bushes.
That was the first time I believed there was a war.

Thanks to mazzie and Lee.

Heinlein speaks

Bill Higgins, who introduced us to the Zeusaphone a while back, links to a page with a sound recording of Robert Heinlein. This I believe… "Our Noble, Essential Decency." It's a big part of what makes Western Civilization work.

The opening and closing voice is that of Edward R. Murrow.

Republican show of hands for warming in Iowa

Michelle Malkin has the scoop, and the pic: Digging deeper: The enviro-nitwit-ization of the GOP. Fred Thompson won the gold star on this one. Video at Hot Air.

Fred: a Calvin Coolidge for our time! (That's a compliment.)

How did I miss this! Michelle Malkin liveblogged the debate.

Keep washing those hands

There's a new virus in town: Virus Starts Like a Cold But Can Turn Into a Killer. RTWT. Glenn Reynolds says:

IF YOU HAVE A BAD COLD, and the symptoms keep getting worse, it could be this nasty new virus. If it seems out of the ordinary for a cold, and you have trouble breathing, get to a doctor fast.

UPDATE: Reader Stephen Hill emails:

I had this virus, succumbing to it two days after returning from a trip to Australia. To give you an idea of just how bad it can be, understand that I'm not your normal, everyday, healthy adult male. I'm a National Champion Elite-level cyclist. I had a 104°F fever within a day, and a cough that would not quit. Now I have trained through just about every kind of illness that is transmittable (and some that aren't), but it was three weeks before I could even think of riding again, and for a week could only exercise lightly. Six weeks later, I still have an occasional (4-6 times per day) coughing fit.

Wash your hands!

Always good advice. Or use hand sanitizer.

Apparently a new variety of a common virus with wide variations in how it affects people. And see Did you get your flu shot for more on hand-washing.

More Holy Land Foundation jurors are talking

There has been some blog reaction to an article at the Investigative Project on Terrorism by Michael Fechter. The piece is mainly an interview with juror Kristina Williams. It includes video.

Most of the blog reactions are just quotations and comments.
Captain Ed: The Idiot Who Torpedoed The Holy Land Foundation Trial.
Hot Air: Steve Emerson’s IPT uncovers jury bullying in Holy Land Foundation trial?
LGF: IPT Investigation Uncovers HLF Jury Room Bullying. Over 600 comments!
Jihad Watch: Investigative Project uncovers Holy Land Foundation jury bullying
Patterico: Inside the Jury Room at the Holy Land Foundation Trial

I expect there will be more.

Whipped ocean, or "Cappucino coast"

In email, an environmental oddity in Australia. This seems to be making the rounds. I'll link to what seems to be the original in the Daily Mail because the pictures are nice and big.

Cappuccino Coast: The day the Pacific was whipped up into an ocean of froth
By RICHARD SHEARS - Last updated at 08:27am on 28th August 2007

It was as if someone had poured tons of coffee and milk into the ocean, then switched on a giant blender.

Suddenly the shoreline north of Sydney were transformed into the Cappuccino Coast.

Foam swallowed an entire beach and half the nearby buildings, including the local lifeguards' centre, in a freak display of nature at Yamba in New South Wales.

Anybody who spends time near water has seen small amounts of this stuff, often lying on the beach at low tide. This much of it at once, crikey! Must be some kind of a record!

Update: Some searchers seem to think this story is a fake. I was not there, so I can't testify, but there is some discussion here, which leads indirectly to this. So, not only was it real, it happened again in January '08!

Historical origin of Kucinich

A piece in Cleveland Scene on Kucinich's early years in politics: The King of Spin: How Dennis Kucinich remade himself from race-baiting bomb-thrower to liberal sweetheart.

Thanks to Charles at LGF.

A little more levity

There's a blog post that's been making the rounds as one of those forwarded-and-reforwarded emails. I just received it in a format that stripped all the pictures out, so the humor didn't work, which led me to look around a little and re-find the original post. Anyhow, just a note to remind myself that the original of the "1977 J.C. Penney Catalog" is "Strap in, shut up and hold on. We're going back." at 15 Minute Lunch. The post has, in a little less than two months, picked up 572 comments!

One of them recommends the collection of Weight-Watchers recipe cards, with commentary, at Candyboots. And so do I. Frightening food. And those who like this sort of thing should pay a visit to Lileks.com, for hours, no, days, even months, of fun.

Funny name, interesting ideas: Mencius Moldbug

I'm adding a new name to the links list: Mencius Moldbug. For some reason, a pricking of my thumbs, I suspect this is a pseudonym. An interesting thinker, who is not afraid of writing long posts. Michael Blowhard gave him a coming-out party back in April. Read that link first, as an introduction to Moldbug's thinking. Don't click unless you are prepared to spend at least half an hour reading and thinking. He seems to derive some inspiration from Albert Jay Nock; I found Nock's Our Enemy, the State illuminating, so we have that in common. I like the way he tears into the poetry establishment here.

Speaking of farce, here's Tim Slagle

I have been hoping to see more in the line of mockery of this whole Global Warming business, and Gerard Van der Leun comes through with this. I hope he is right when he says, "Once the comics get onto you with this kind of granulation, you are history." Thanks!

Not safe for work.

Update: And another! Country Joe meets Big Warm Al: Gore to Earthlings: The Memo.

Global warming conference: private jets overwhelm Bali airport facilities

It's getting more farcical all the time:

Heart-Ache: UN Climate Confence In Bali Runs Out Of... Parking Space For Private Jets

Private jet parking spaces are endangered by global warming, much like the adorable polar bears you've seen pictures of.

They're hot at Powerline

with several posts on the new NIE: The Crystal Ball Changes Its Mind, Are we fools? (in which Iran's new nuclear negotiator is quoted as saying, "With me, you start over."), World doesn't end, Bush suffers blow, Iran's nuclear weapons program: Israel assesses, Five years of the Condor, A word from Mark Falcoff on the NIE, and High confidence in low confidence. And that's just the NIE. In other posts from the last few days, Harry Reid is Still Betting On Defeat, and the Boswell Sisters have the Heebie Jeebies.

Happy Repeal Day!

It is the anniversary of December 5, 1933, happy ending of an unhappy experiment. The evils inflicted upon the nation, and the world for that matter, by Prohibition, continue, but now our gangsters, politicians and G-Men quarrel over different kinds of contraband. We know from history that anodynes need not be outlawed; there is just too much profit in misery for the current version of Prohibition to be ended. Volstead and Anslinger have worked much evil in the world. Thanks to The Wine Commonsewer at Hit & Run for this lovely bit of nostalgia: But today let us be joyful, within the limits imposed by the current bunch of wowsers.

Election in Venezuela

A very near thing indeed.

Gleanings

Instapundit: Progress on resveratrol.

Andrea Harris: Global warming is responsible for everything.

Recommended by two of Jerry Pournelle's correspondents: The Secret to Raising Smart Kids.

Amy Alkon links to Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic on Caring for Your Introvert: The habits and needs of a little-understood group. Alkon's comments may be better than the original Rauch piece.

Youtube debate

I seem to have participated in this. Just got excited, I guess. I'm usually more phlegmatic.

Climatologists vs. physicists

A couple of old-fashioned German physicists take on global warming in a paper available at arXiv. From the summary of Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics (pdf), by Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner:

The CO2-greenhouse effect, however is a "mirage". The horror visions of a risen sea level, melting pole caps and developing deserts in North America and in Europe are fictitious consequences of fictitious physical mechanisms as they cannot be seen even in the climate model computations.

[…]

Evidently, the defenders of the CO2-greenhouse thesis refuse to accept any reproducible calculation as an explanation and have resorted to unreproducible ones. A theoretical physicist must complain about a lack of transparency here, and he also has to complain about the style of the scientific discussion, where advocators of the greenhouse thesis claim that the discussion is closed, and others are discrediting justified arguments as a discussion of "questions of yesterday and the day before yesterday". In exact sciences, in particular in theoretical physics, the discussion is never closed and is to be continued ad infinitum, even if there are proofs of theorems available. Regardless of the specific field of studies a minimal basic rule should be fulfilled in natural science, though, even if the scientific fields are methodically as far apart as physics and meteorology: At least among experts, the results and conclusions should be understandable or reproducible. And it should be strictly distinguished between a theory and a model on the one hand, and between a model and a scenario on the other hand, as clarified in the philosophy of science.

That means that if conclusions out of computer simulations are to be more than simple speculations, then in addition to the examination of the numerical stability and the estimation of the effects of the many vague input parameters, at least the simplifications of the physical original equations should be critically exposed. Not the critics have to estimate the effects of the approximation, but the scientists who do the computer simulation.

"Global warming is good … The net effect of a modest global warming is positive." (Singer). In any case, it is extremely interesting to understand the dynamics and causes of the long-term fluctuations of the climates. However, it was not the purpose of this paper to get into all aspects of the climate variability debate.

The point discussed here was to answer the question, whether the supposed atmospheric effect has a physical basis. This is not the case. In summary, there is no atmospheric greenhouse effect, in particular CO2-greenhouse effect, in theoretical physics and engineering thermodynamics. Thus it is illegitimate to deduce predictions which provide a consulting solution for economics and intergovernmental policy.

Another country heard from. Thanks to Louis D. Nettles, one of Jerry Pournelle's correspondents.

Arctic Ocean circulation reverses, again

It used to be one way, then it changed, then it changed again, and you know, it might change again! What a wild idea.

Arctic Ocean Circulation Does An About-Face

ScienceDaily (Nov. 14, 2007) — A team of NASA and university scientists has detected an ongoing reversal in Arctic Ocean circulation triggered by atmospheric circulation changes that vary on decade-long time scales. The results suggest not all the large changes seen in Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming.

The team, led by James Morison of the University of Washington's Polar Science Center Applied Physics Laboratory, Seattle, used data from an Earth-observing satellite and from deep-sea pressure gauges to monitor Arctic Ocean circulation from 2002 to 2006. They measured changes in the weight of columns of Arctic Ocean water, from the surface to the ocean bottom. That weight is influenced by factors such as the height of the ocean's surface, and its salinity. A saltier ocean is heavier and circulates differently than one with less salt.

The very precise deep-sea gauges were developed with help from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the satellite is NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace). The team of scientists found a 10-millibar decrease in water pressure at the bottom of the ocean at the North Pole between 2002 and 2006, equal to removing the weight of 10 centimeters (four inches) of water from the ocean. The distribution and size of the decrease suggest that Arctic Ocean circulation changed from the counterclockwise pattern it exhibited in the 1990s to the clockwise pattern that was dominant prior to 1990.

Reporting in Geophysical Research Letters, the authors attribute the reversal to a weakened Arctic Oscillation, a major atmospheric circulation pattern in the northern hemisphere. The weakening reduced the salinity of the upper ocean near the North Pole, decreasing its weight and changing its circulation.

"Our study confirms many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming," said Morison.

Thanks to Bill Quick at Daily Pundit. The GRACE satellites were previously mentioned here in Canada still affected by the last ice age.

Can we have mini-nukes?

SteveF at Daily Pundit links to the greatest thing since cold fusion.

Nuke to the Future
By Dave Maass

Published: November 21, 2007

The portable nuclear reactor is the size of a hot tub. It’s shaped like a sake cup, filled with a uranium hydride core and surrounded by a hydrogen atmosphere. Encase it in concrete, truck it to a site, bury it underground, hook it up to a steam turbine and, voila, one would generate enough electricity to power a 25,000-home community for at least five years.

The company Hyperion Power Generation was formed last month to develop the nuclear fission reactor at Los Alamos National Laboratory and take it into the private sector. If all goes according to plan, Hyperion could have a factory in New Mexico by late 2012, and begin producing 4,000 of these reactors.

Not quite a Shipstone, but awfully good! Ever since the local power company shut down our local (coal-burning) power plant, then was bought out by the big regional power company, I have hoped to see local nodes return to the grid. In the old days, when the coal-burning plant was still on line, regional blackouts did not affect the island, since we had local power.

Thankful I'm not a zombie

Theo has found The Greatest Movie Line ever!!!

Transcript in first comment below, for the hard of hearing.

Update: Theo's link no longer works: try this one instead.

Mark Steyn's Thanksgiving address

Blessings close to home.

Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays.

Christmas is celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: In Continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from Dec. 22 to mid-January and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. All part of the rich diversity of our world.

But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. "What's it about?" an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. "Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?"

Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for.

[…]

Three hundred and 14 years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that, too, is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker's dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii.

Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.

Prosperity, democracy, liberty: these are not normal conditions of humanity. They are rare and usually fleeting. Take them for granted, cease to guard them, and they will soon be gone. RTWT and give thanks.

Is music encoded in da Vinci's Last Supper?

From CNN:

Italian musician uncovers hidden music in Da Vinci's 'Last Supper'

ROME, Italy (AP) -- It's a new Da Vinci code, but this time it could be for real.

A laptop screen shows musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper."

An Italian musician and computer technician claims to have uncovered musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper," raising the possibility that the Renaissance genius might have left behind a somber composition to accompany the scene depicted in the 15th-century wall painting.

"It sounds like a requiem," Giovanni Maria Pala said. "It's like a soundtrack that emphasizes the passion of Jesus."

Painted from 1494 to 1498 in Milan's Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the "Last Supper" vividly depicts a key moment in the Gospel narrative: Jesus' last meal with the 12 Apostles before his arrest and crucifixion, and the shock of Christ's followers as they learn that one of them is about to betray him.

Pala, a 45-year-old musician who lives near the southern Italian city of Lecce, began studying Leonardo's painting in 2003, after hearing on a news program that researchers believed the artist and inventor had hidden a musical composition in the work.

"Afterward, I didn't hear anything more about it," he said in an interview with The Associated Press. "As a musician, I wanted to dig deeper."

In a book released Friday in Italy, Pala explains how he took elements of the painting that have symbolic value in Christian theology and interpreted them as musical clues.

Pala first saw that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table as well as the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note.

This fit the relation in Christian symbolism between the bread, representing the body of Christ, and the hands, which are used to bless the food, he said. But the notes made no sense musically until Pala realized that the score had to be read from right to left, following Leonardo's particular writing style.

In his book -- "La Musica Celata" ("The Hidden Music") -- Pala also describes how he found what he says are other clues in the painting that reveal the slow rhythm of the composition and the duration of each note.

The result is a 40-second "hymn to God" that Pala said sounds best on a pipe organ, the instrument most commonly used in Leonardo's time for spiritual music. A short segment taken from a CD of the piece contained a Bach-like passage played on the organ. The tempo was almost painfully slow but musical.

You'd have to play it slow, to make it last 40 seconds. I suspect we have a case of the Law of Fives here, but maybe I've just seen too many conspiracy theories.

From Glenn Reynolds.