Salon: Don’t tweak the geeks! “Hacker historian Eric Raymond critiques Kakutani’s “wrongheaded New York Times assault on digital culture”, and gets some licks in for Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish as well.

…Kakutani and Borsook’s failure to notice the native

generosity and sustained cooperation typical of hackers and

geeks makes the predictable slam at libertarianism and Ayn

Rand that follows unintentionally humorous. Borsook and

Kakutani are correct in describing the “cyberculture” (not a

term hackers would use) as implicitly libertarian. Where

they go wrong is in their presumption that this means my

peers desire to kill and eat the weak. The truth is, we don’t

build our networks to abolish ordinary people — we do it to

empower them.

New Scientist: “Just a normal town…

out of nowhere a wave of chaos was to wash over

that world. In a millisecond it was gone. There were no

phones, no computers, no power, nothing. Yet nobody

had died, no buildings razed to the ground. And then the

blind panic set in.” EMP weapons may already be part of some nations’ arsenals.

CNN.com: No prescription for the Pill? The FDA considers allowing over-the-counter sale of the pill. The price would be right, and on the surface of it, it would be an extension of a woman’s discretion over her own body. But I think this is a very very bad idea. It comes down to the amount of irrationality, eccentricity and bad judgment there is around so many matters related to sexuality and sex. Because of the possible complications of hormonal treatment, skipping gynecological checkups (as unpleasant as the exams can be) would be tempting but potentially disastrous. Then there’s taking the pill continuously to suppress the inconvenience or discomfort of menstruation, which can be quite medically dangerous if unsupervised. And the problems with potential overdoses (for example, in an ill-advised attempt to induce an abortion). And the considerable potential for adverse interactions with other prescription medications, which no lay person can be expected to recognize or track. By all means, women should learn as much as they can about the incredibly complicated reproductive cycle and its hormonal manipulation, but by all means allow an MD who is qualified to do so and committed to “first doing no harm” be an expert consultant.

Can you really trust the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture and distribute oral contraceptives to give you reliable and complete information in an unregulated market, when the only protective considerations toward their “customers” they have are around product liability costs? Take a look at some of the direct-to-consumer ads for other medications and tell me if they appear to be thoughtful comprehensive attempts to make you an informed careful consumer, or if they’re just trying to sell you something while making the most perfunctory of nods in the direction of product safety, usually in rapidly-scrolling small print. Don’t you bet the industry is just salivating at the potential expansion of this market, and that they will trot out any number of physicians in their pockets to talk about how medically safe this will be?

Other drugs being considered for release from prescribing requirements include antihypertensives, oral diabetic agents, and anti-cholesterol medicines. I’m ambivalent about some of these as well, especially the antihypertensives.

Addendum: an article that develops a more comprehensive critique of the medical advertising phenomenon. “If direct-to-consumer advertising empowers anyone, it’s drug companies.” This comes from a thought-provoking anti-consumerist webzine I was just pointed to, Stay Free.

Responding to Hate Groups: Ten Points to Remember, from the Center for Democratic Renewal.

The excellent weblog Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room is too subversive for some people’s tastes, apparently. If you’ve been blocked from accessing his site from your workplace, you may not have seen this yet. So, as a public service:

ACCESS DENIED?: Several Obscure Store visitors report that their companies

— AT&T included — now block my site. It seems that obscurestore.com has

been added to some master list of sites to be filtered out. If you need to get

around that, you can also enter Obscure via redwood.he.net/~obscure. Also,

some people say they’re being directed to http://www.he.net when they punch up

obscurestore.com. If a friend or associate reports this, tell them to refresh

their browser to access the site via my new Web hosting service.

Now, finally, there might be some entertainment value in Election 2000. [Salon]

An original Declaration of Independence auctioned off at SOTHEBYS.COM today went for $8.14 million; the opening bid was $4 million. The document had reportedly been found in the backing of a picture bought at a Philadelphia flea market in 1989 for $4 by someone who was interested in the frame.

Gene found for color blindness in Pacific Islanders. I can’t believe that this news report doesn’t even mention that this (achromatopsia) is the subject of Oliver Sacks’ fascinating Island of the Colorblind.

Retailers Hid True Costs of ‘Free’ PCs – FTC You’re all pretty savvy consumers, aren’t you? The FTC says you might not have known what you were really getting yourself into if you bought one of those computer-and-internet deals, because of deceptive advertising.

The Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Wildfire Rages at Wash. State Nuclear Site. Is there a natural uprising against human nuclear hubris this summer? Grassfires now threaten the Hanford Reservation as they did the Los Alamos National Laboratory last month. Radioactive environmental catastrophe looms, some say, if the winds spread the fire the wrong way through this obscene, contaminated dumping ground. Plutonium could be dispersed in smoke and ash, and radioactive ground denuded of vegetation by the fires could be washed into the Rio Grande by seasonal rains. Public health officials have demonstrated over and over again that they minimize risks to prevent public panic; “serves-you-right” doomsayers (like me) always spin worst-case-scenarios to wag our fingers more dramatically. I’d love to hear some credible, objective environmental scientist’s estimation of the degree and impact of such risks.

Pollution Eats Into Russian Exports of Caviar. What is the story on why the reduction is so drastic? This news item says that pollution of the Caspian Sea attributable to oil exploration and industry, as well as a contribution from increased illegal poaching, has cut caviar harvests by 2/3 in just one year.

Technology may finally enter the land mine-disposal fray.

Pressure Increases to End Nuclear Reprocessing. 90% of radioactive pollution of the northeast Atlantic comes from the Sellafield (UK) and La Hague (France) reprocessing plants for spent nuclear fuel. Now, but for the abstention of Luxembourg, the other countries with northeast Atlantic concerns are unanimously urging a move to dry storage of spent nuclear fuel instead of reprocessing. No comment from the UK or France yet. In the early ’90’s, this watchdog group was successful in pushing through a ban on direct sea dumping of nuclear wastes, which had been rampant up to that point. The UK and France, which initially opposed that earlier ban, joined in within a year. Recall that Sellafield’s viability is already questioned on fiscal grounds, far more persuasive than environmental concerns are to the nuclear industry. Also recall that Germany recently became the first industrialized state to resolve to totally decommission its nuclear power-generating capacity.

Forget me not. Neuroscientists are pushing the envelope, even if the work remains reductionistic and inferential for now, of understanding the biological basis of social affiliation. Recall the posts below on mirror neurons in primates, and autistic subjects’ failure to use facial recognition circuitry in the brain in interpersonal perception. Now this elucidation of the role of oxytocin in shaping relationships, at least in rodents…

Do they really still think, no matter how glaring or grotesque, that New Tobacco Labels actually deter smokers? It’s not as if any of the health warnings will be news to anyone, or that being better informed is the key to beating one’s compulsion.

Relatively Few Watch Penile Implant Webcast. The penile pump is the highest-rated solution for serious male erectile dysfunction; an implantation was webcast to increase public understanding of the technique, but only a few thousand, orders of magnitude less than those who have “tuned in” to other surgical procedure webcasts, watched. Might penile surgery be too unbearable for male viewers in particular?

The venue is different, but the white man is still not letting any savages stand in the way of his land grab.

Canada Researchers Make Major Anti-Cancer Discovery. Many common cancers are destroyed by being injected with vesicular stomatitis virus, not infectious to humans. Tumors affected include melanomas, leukemia, lung, breast and prostate cancers. Human patients have not yet been exposed to the massive doses of VSV that therapeutic application of this discovery would involve.

The mortuaries in Lagos, Nigeria are filling up due to a strike of government workers, and Authorities Have Ordered a Mass Burial of over 600 unclaimed corpses.

Supreme Court Strikes Down Anti-Abortion Law. The Nebraska law banning “partial birth abortion” (a heinous propagandistic term for the medical procedure flogged by its opponents) is unconstitutional. You never know with this Court, but you do know where some of its justices sit. The usual Gang of Three — Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas — were joined in dissenting by Kennedy.

In a 6-3 vote, the Court also upheld the states’ rights to protect those going into or out of medical facilities from anti-abortion protesters. Kennedy wrote the opinion, and Kennedy and Scalia wrote dissents.

Regrettably, a 5-4 vote upheld the right of the Boy Scouts to exclude gays, overturning a decision by the New Jersey Supreme Court in the case of a Scout leader dismissed once known to be gay. Rehnquist wrote for the majority. Let’s see how the Boy Scouts fare now as an openly anti-gay institution.

Thank Goodness, It Appears Finally to be Over

Jon Carroll, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, ponders Mondegreens.

Duh: Reasons to Live Help Prevent Suicide During Depression, says new psychiatric research. However, as a psychiatrist treating suicidal patients every day, I largely disagree with the article’s inference that treatment of a suicidally depressed patient be directed toward instilling hope. You can rarely persuade a hopeless patient that they should not be hopeless. If they were susceptible to that kind of reasoning, they wouldn’t be as desperately depressed,would they? And, more important, if you contradict their hopelessness, you’ve usually just made them feel you don’t take their complaints seriously and you’ve blown your alliance with them. One of my mentors once said that treating the suicidal means, first and foremost, paradoxically empathizing with the desireability of death.

I knew they couldn’t pull off the (derivative) public fiberglass animal art in NYC as they did in Chicago. Holland, Mich. is having difficulties too. And Toronto as well.

Steven Baum’s feeling abit peevish about some of the attributes of the weblogs he’s finding. I agree. [Ethel the Blog]

News of Palm’s next direction from the PC Expo, courtesy of Wired: “Palm, meanwhile, announced that it will support a different

module/expansion slot than those currently used by

Handspring and the soon-to-be-debuted Sony.

Palm’s official add-ons will be built around the Secure

Digital slot technology, from Toshiba, Matsushita, and

SanDisk.”

Jorn Barger, at Robot Wisdom, has been doing what he calls

Cliche Watch for awhile. He posts the links to Google searches he’s done of various phrases to elucidate their net.overuse. Search on “cliche” in the Robot Wisdom weblog page to find recent examples, which have included “half full half empty”, “in your pocket or are you just”, “ways of looking at a” (not “blackbird”), and “portrait of the artist as a” (not “young man”). A Google search of “cliche AND ‘robot wisdom’ ” lets you glimpse some of the recognized impact of Barger’s Cliche Watching.

Apparently partners.nytimes.com doesn’t work anymore. If you need to get to some of the previous New York Times links I’ve posted, reportedly you can use www10.nytimes.com. I can’t tell if these things are functional because I’m a registered NYT reader (and I don’t think, in this case, that’s such a bad thing), so they let me in on anything that redirects to nytimes.com itself. Thanks for readers informing me of links that don’t work for them…

The news doesn’t have to be logged, but I think the quote does:

“We have caught the first glimpses of our instruction book,

previously known only to God.”

–Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human

Genome Research Institute.

The Halfbakery, a repository of all things halfbaked. “Whatever you can think of.”

Supreme Court declines to hear appeal of denial of law license to white supremacist. “…(The) leader of the segregationist World Church

of the Creator was denied a law license last summer even though he

graduated from Southern Illinois University’s law school and passed the state

bar exam.

State bar officials noted that Hale had “dedicated his life to inciting racial

hatred,” and said he could not “do this as an officer of the court.”

I Was Certain, But I Was Dead Wrong. Any conviction based on the sole evidence of one eyewitness, no matter how competent and confident, can be a mistake. Commentary in the aftermath of the execution in Texas of Gary Graham.

The American Civil Liberties Union reacts to the completion of the human genome map with a warning about the urgency of legislation against genetic discrimination.

Greenpeace press release: Greenpeace Installs Webcam At The End Of France’s

Nuclear Reprocessing Discharge Pipe ‘To Open The Eyes

Of Governments’

The Register: Sony to unveil Palm-based multimedia handheld, according to the WSJ, which apparently got a sneak preview. With a slot for a memory stick and possibly a Handspring-like Springboard expansion slot for modem etc., “The Sony device will weigh a light 5.3 ounces, be narrower than the

stylish Palm V and thinner than the Palm III, and come in

black-and-white as well as color versions,” explained an unusually

gushing Journal. It also boasts a “JogDial scrolling and highlighting

button that allows users to manoeuvre the screen with one hand”.

St. Louis Riverfront Times: Not Just Another Pin-up in the Ste. Genevieve County Jail. In a bid for an interview scoop, St. Louis TV reporter Deanne Lane sent a handwritten letter and a postcard-sized color photo of herself to convicted and incarcerated serial rapist Dennis Rabbitt, now serving several consecutive life sentences after pleading guilty to sexual assaults on 14 women. “Think about it. Sending a picture of yourself to a sex offender

— what do you think he’s gonna do with it? It was just gross,”

says Rabbitt’s attorney. “Dennis thought it was ridiculous. Dennis gave

it to me. He said, ‘This is what I got. You keep it.’ He thought

it was silly. He was unimpressed.”

Asked about the handwritten letter and the photo, Lane is

foggy on details. “I don’t recall that,” she says when asked

whether she included a photo with her letter to Rabbitt.

Norman Mailer to draw cartoons for the New York Observer. “They’re somewhere between Feiffer and Picasso,”

Observer editor-in-chief Peter Kaplan says. “There is a nuance to them that is a

little darker and a little more intense than the average

cartoon. They look like they were done by a

novelist.”

Helping Parents Choose Wrong. Op-ed piece in The New York Times by Patrick Murphy, public guardian of Cook County IL, decries the bill just passed by the New York State legislature allowing legally sanctioned abandonment of newborns:

I work at the bottom of the judicial food chain, in juvenile

court, and the clients I represent there, abused and

neglected children, have the least clout of any in the legal

system. Daily I see their lives laid waste. In some cases it is

inevitable: what some parents do to children cannot be

undone by social workers, judges and lawyers. But too often

the misused influence of politicians and interest groups is

causing unintended misery.

But IMHO his opposition is for the wrong reasons — he mainly fears the discouragement of the adoption process. I think the problem with the law is, first and foremost, that it strips away any remaining residue of responsibility, thoughtfulness or obligation from the decision to have a child. It should be thought of as one of those benchmarks by which we measure the worth of our society, like several others I can think of off the top of my head — our incarceration rate; our eagerness for state-sanctioned murder; and our glorification of the mediocre and unthinking insofar as someone like George Dubya leads the pack for President. Just for starters.

New York Times: A Magic Carpet of Cultures in London In a much more vibrant and fertile way than, say, in New York or LA, multiculturalism pervades London’s cultural life. Maybe it comes of being an erstwhile colonial power?

But unlike before, the purveyors of diversity are more than

suppliers. They choose not to be possessed but to possess,

and to move beyond becoming just another choice for the

insatiably greedy white consumer. The “ethnic minorities”

are beginning to redefine the very essence of what it means

to be a Londoner.

Seeing Drugs as a Choice or as a Brain Anomaly. Psychiatrists debate whether the brains of abusers are malfunctioning badly enough to make their actions nonvolitional. Brain changes in heavy chronic drug users are easy to demonstrate, but when do they cross the line to being considered responsible for alterations in behavior, or worthy of being called a disease? Ramifications are legal and fiscal as well as medical, of course. [New York Times]

EPIC Testimony on Use and Misuse of the Social Security Number. Mark Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, testified before a subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee on May 11.

In conclusion, there is clear authority in both legislation and judicial opinion that supports the enactment of further laws to limit the collection and use of the

Social Security Number. It is particularly important that such legislation not force consumers to make unfair or unreasonable “choices” that essentially

require trading the privacy interest in the SSN for some benefit or opportunity.

What’s News at Junkbusters. “This page is updated frequently, for the benefit of both reporters and consumers who want to keep posted on current events affecting

their privacy. ”

Wired: New York Times Site Exposes CIA Agents. “A freedom of information activist plans to publish online a classified CIA document that was pulled from The

New York Times‘ site after newspaper officials learned it exposed the identities of Iranians involved in the

1953 U.S. and British-backed coup that overthrew Iran’s elected officials.

The Times used the graphic to accompany an article detailing the coup. In a technical glitch, those who

visited the Times website on June 16 were able to read the names of the agents when they downloaded

the graphic.”

Wired: Amazon to Break Embargo on early sales of fourth Harry Potter book, slated for July 8th release and inspiring booksellers’ dreams of dollar signs and ringing cash registers.

Oh my, Dr. Laura says her feelings have been hurt by those nasty homosexuals trying to axe her upcoming TV show. “I’ve cried more at times than I would like to admit,” Schlessinger told Time magazine. “It’s been agonizing.” But she also persisted: “Not being able to relate normally to a member of the opposite sex is some kind of error. We were biologically meant

to give birth to more people.”

In Gamble, U.S. Supports Russian Germ Warfare Scientists. U.S. support is massively endowing the careers of some 2200 scientists at more than 30 institutions throughout the former Soviet Union. It might not be an oversimplification to say that we are buying them out mostly to prevent them from selling their expertise to some notorious “rogue state”.

Feed: Street Level, the brave new world of urban mapping. “New York City and Los Angeles,

already seen as the epicenters of American narcissism, are

getting to know themselves a lot better these days. With

sophisticated computer simulation and mapping projects

underway, they’ll soon know themselves down to the square

foot. Both maps will integrate aerial photos with data gathered

from city agencies, utilities, and developers, and will be

continuously updated in years hence.” Among other consequences, the maps, it is claimed, will make for “one-stop shopping” for potential terrorists.

The Jerusalem Report is amused as Islamists attack apparent hidden anti-Islamic messages in multinational brand name advertising.

Squall: Blowing the lid on the Bilderberg conference: “You’d imagine that if the President of the World Bank, the director of the World Trade

Organisation, the Queen of the Netherlands and the head of the Xerox Corporation were

amongst the delegates at an international conference, there would be some mention of it in

the media.

But then again this is the annual meeting of the highly influential and highly secretive

Bilderberg Group, a collection of top ranking western politicians, media moguls, corporate

presidents and big bankers who meet at a different location each year to conduct

clandestine talks on the furthering of global capitalism. Every delegate, including a handful

of carefully selected journalists, are sworn to secrecy.”

Fetus Develops Taste for Food in the Womb. It appears that exposure to

flavors either through amniotic fluid or in breast milk can influence a child’s food preferences.

APB news: Satanists Suspected in Theft of General’s Skull

A satanist likely is to blame for the theft of a Civil War general’s skull from a Rochester cemetery during

this week’s summer solstice, police said today.

Fading aroma. The gene pool of wild arabica coffee plants is under threat. Over 90% of the coffee we drink is arabica, and the highland forests of Ethiopia from which it originates, and where wild coffee plants make up most of the underbrush, have lost more than half of their trees in the past 30 years. When cultivated coffee on plantations outside Ethiopia is devastated by the diseases from which they are in peril, breeders turn to the Ethiopian gene pool for help.

Fetus Develops Taste for Food in the Womb. It appears that exposure to

flavors either through amniotic fluid or in breast milk can influence a child’s food preferences.

Slate: The Sultans of Stats – A Harvard professor pooh-poohs McGwire’s records. Is he right? I’ve suspected this was true; here is the best articulation of it. “Home runs can’t be as meaningful as they once were if

Steve Finley is on pace to hit more in a season than Reggie

Jackson ever did. But it is also irrelevant. Baseball history,

even as the purists who complain about today’s cheapened

offensive statistics construct it, is little more than a record of

inflated achievement. Insane numbers don’t threaten the

integrity of baseball’s historical accomplishments. They

constitute it.”

Matthew Rossi, in the excellent and maniacal (!) Once I Noticed I Was on Fire, I Decided to Relax and Enjoy the Fall, on weblogging:

Lately, it seems as though you might as soon admit to consorting with Lucifer

as maintaining one of these sites. Everyone’s tired of it, it seems. Everyone’s

sick of the link economy, or the cookie cutter nature of 9/10’s of the content of

these ‘blogs’ as people have taken to calling them. Everyone wants to get

back to the purity of maintaining a site just for them.

Well, not me, baby. Me and my diseased imagination are gonna keep on

keeping on till they pry our cold dead fingers away from the keys. Let me bare

myself to my limited readership for an instant; I am fully aware of how unique I

am, and I like it. I like that I’m smart. I like that I’m erudite. I like that I read

and think about what I read and melt my disparate reading into mental alloy. I

am, in short, not all that humble about this page, or what it is I do on it. Is it

Earth-Shattering? Nope. Does anyone care? Well, a few people do, and

they’ve been very nice about it. To everyone who has bothered to come by and

send me a nice email, I thank you kindly. Your simple generosity has been

appreciated.

But I do not do this for you, and I never did. Go back in the archives and

look. I was rampaging along the edges of the sanity borderlands well before

anyone was linked to me, before anyone read a damn thing I had to say, and

I’ll be doing it as long as there’s a cheap and easy way for me to screed out

these demented babblings without having to work too hard at coding.

vnunet.com: Deserted domains to go under the

hammer. “Hundreds of thousands of domain names that have been

abandoned by their owners will be sold in an auction next

week, and there might be some real bargains on offer.

On Wednesday, US domain name registrar Network Solutions

will run the first ever auction of its kind, which will include

.com, .net and .org domains and could be the internet sale of

the century because a ceiling of just $35 has been set on

each name.”

I’m sure everyone’s heard this already, but it’s too exciting not to log. Signs of Recent Water Flow Spotted by a Mars Orbiter: “A

spacecraft orbiting Mars has

sighted grooved surface features

suggesting a relatively recent water

flow on the planet, a finding that

could redirect efforts to find

evidence of past or present life

there, experts said today.” [New York Times]

Greil Marcus profiles Sleater-Kinney, with audio clips. Courtney Love, in her recent critique of the music industry, cited them as one of the bands too good not to be heard.

Protesters “Just Do It” Again to Nike [New York Times]

Among the Deaf, Sign Language Faces a Challenge. In face of burgeoning acceptance of ASL, critics say

the overreliance on sign

language fosters a kind of false pride in deaf separatism. The consequences include needless academic impairments. [New York Times]

CBS News: Harry Potter’s Magical Print Run: 1.5M

“We have certainly never

heard of anyone else doing

such a large first print of a

book, children’s or

otherwise,” said Sarah

Odedina, editorial director of

children’s books at the

London-based publishers.

This meme is being propagated rapidly through the weblogging world (if you want to call it a meme). The do.some.good bookmarklet (linked to the left) opens browser windows for four donation sites — the

Hunger Site, Click for a Cause, The Rainforest Site,

and Clear Landmines —

with one click. Just go to each, click to donate,

and close the window. Drag the “do.some.good” link to the personal toolbar on your

browser and click on it daily to do.some.good with ease. [via Rebecca Blood]

An Apple a Day may be a better antioxidant than high-dose vitamin C.

Mean and green. Viruses given a gene for a toxin from one of the world’s deadliest spiders could replace chemical pesticides, say

researchers…When the modified baculovirus infects an

insect, the insect’s cells should start to produce the toxin, killing it faster than wild viruses.” ?Famous last words: ” Because the host dies

quickly, before much virus can replicate, the modified virus shouldn’t persist in the environment, say the

researchers.” [New Scientist]

“It’s just a horror, a plague. It’s biblical.”

“Left Behind”: Superficially Christian. Christian editor Michael G. Maudlin and theology professor Randall Balmer agree that this bestselling millennial pulp fiction series turns the Book of Revelation to “camp Christianity.” Along the way, they explain end-times theology to unbelievers.

Remote-Control Assassination. The improvement in precision of GPS now available to private citizens allows missile targeting of individuals by would-be assassins, says Robert Wright in Slate. Weblogger David Brake, who also knows something about location technology, thinks the Slate article isn’t worth much.

Happy Summer Solstice! At 01:48 Universal Time today the Sun reaches its northernmost point in the sky.

Nearing Diagnosis Of Alzheimer’s In Living Patients. A test for the first time promises to allow radiological visualization of Alzheimer’s plaques in living patients. Until now, the diagnosis has been presumptive until autopsy reveals the plaques.

The Nation cover story depicts David Horowitz’s Long March from Ramparts editor and major Black Panthers white liaison, to combatant against “political correctness”, to chief Republican strategist.

Aim Low by Yossi Klein Halevi. New Republic commentator argues that the prospects for Arab-Israeli peace are slim, that Assad’s death will not improve relations with Syria, and that Israel should have “a

government without great expectations, inward-looking

and aware of its limits: a government of national

humility.”

Slate: Rogue State Contest Winners

Politics makes strange bedfellows, but apparently no one can stand sleeping with Buchanan for long…

Why is the Lockerbie trial being ignored by the media?

“The Lockerbie case is probably the most interesting and

important criminal trial taking place anywhere in the world. But

you’re not likely to be reading or hearing very much about it in

the weeks and months to come.” [The Guardian]

Have you been wondering who’s driving those new PT Cruisers and VW Beetles? [US News & World Reports]

Pimping enters the Internet age

Inside The World of Art Theft

“To put your head in the sand as a governor, to my mind, that’s dereliction of duty.” A Virginia activist has filed suit to compel Gov. James Gilmore to acknowledge clandestine UFO landings and alien abductions, and to repel the space invaders with all available force.

Salon: Slaves of a different color. “In writing a book on the mixing of black

and white life throughout American history, I discovered

that white slavery did occur before the Civil War in small

but significant numbers. And in unearthing this fascinating

lost chapter in American history, I also discovered how

slavery has been partitioned into a piece of

African-American cultural property — made sacred by black

Americans, abandoned by whites. Petrified by politics and

shame, the richest and most central drama of early American

history is now playing to segregated houses.”

Good news: [Chuck Taggart at Looka! chose to cluster these three news items together and I’m taking his lead.] First, in the Louisiana case, the Supreme Court ruled that schools can’t be required to include a disclaimer mentioning creationism whenever they teach evolution. Dissenting were (of course) Rehnquist, Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Next, in the Texas case, with George Dubya weighing in on the other side, the Court ruled that school districts allowing student-led prayer are violating the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Supporters of school prayer were hoping to be allowed to continue using student pawns to attempt to circumvent government-religion separation. Dissenting? Rehnquist, Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Lastly, Bob Lucente, the NYPD officer who had called Bruce Springsteen a “fucking dirtbag” and a “floating fag,” found that his apology to those he had offended was not enough, and he handed in his badge. Law enforcement officers around the city have protestedSpringsteen’s new song “American Skin”,

which they perceive as critical of police actions in the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo, the West African

immigrant who was shot and killed during a confrontation with police.

Flesh or Fiction? Special effects capabilities in modern film have reached the point where it’s becoming more and more difficult to suspend disbelief…and it’s only going to get worse. [Hartford Courant]

Disney snubbed Churchill’s plea for comic relief.

Winston Churchill’s wartime government secretly urged Walt

Disney to make an anti-Nazi cartoon based on the legend of St

George and the Dragon.

Documents discovered by The Telegraph disclose that ministers

desperately wanted a popular film to be made with a strong

pro-British message which would appeal to a large audience in

an isolationist America.

The papers, dated 1940, show that Noël Coward, the playwright

and actor, and officials from the Ministry of Information went to

America to try to persuade Disney to help with Britain’s

propaganda campaign. Their requests, however, were ignored

by Disney who was determined to keep America out of the war

and was anxious to protect the international market for his films.

There is also speculation that he may have snubbed Britain

because he was unhappy with the way his films had been

received by the London critics. He is known to have been

particularly hurt by a suggestion by some censors that Snow

White and the Seven Dwarfs was too dark a film for children and

should not be shown in cinemas.

This lack of respect for his efforts was in contrast to the critical

acclaim his films received elsewhere, particularly in Germany

where even Hitler was a fan.

Moyers Challenges PBS on Public Affairs Coverage.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he told attendees of the PBS annual meeting in his keynote address. “What we do is good. It’s just not enough. We need to

respond more to the needs of America as a democratic society, not just a

consumer market. We need more hard-hitting public affairs programming on

controversial issues. We’re good, but we’re bland,” he said, adding that too

often, producers and stations are fearful of offending Congress or driving off

the corporate underwriters who sponsor shows.

Moreover, said Moyers, “With media ownership consolidating, public

television stands alone in our ability to provide independent journalism free

from corporate strings.”

Consumers of classical recordings locked in cutthroat competition. “Classical-recording consumers are becoming the new counterculture.” [Philadelphia Inquirer]

Brill’s Content: Southern Exposure “The Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger is prying open

murder cases from the ugliest days of the civil-rights era. In

the process, it has come to terms with its own role in fueling

the racism of the South.”

Satellite Events Art from the “perfect storm” 0f October 30, 1991, portrayed in the eponymous book (and forthcoming film), from The National Climatic Data Center of NOAA.

A new alternative to fans and heatsinks for cooling off your overheating CPU. It seems to have problems of its own, however. Anyone have experience with these?

How to handle telemarketers. Some of these, forwarded by a reader, seem promising:

1. If they want to loan you money, tell them you just filed for

bankruptcy and you could sure use some money.

2. If they start out with, “How are you today?” say, “Why do you

want to know?” Alternately, you can tell them, “I’m so glad you

asked, because no one these days seems to care, and I have all

these problems; my arthritis is acting up, my eyelashes are sore,

my car won’t start…” When they try to get to the sell, just

keep talking about your problems.

3. If they say they’re John Doe from XYZ Company, ask them to

spell their name. Then ask them to spell the company name. Then

ask them where it is located. Continue asking them personal

questions or questions about their company for as long as

necessary.

4. This works great if you are male: Telemarketer: “Hi, my name

is Judy and I’m with XYZ Company…” You: (Wait for a second)

With a real husky voice ask, “What are you wearing?”

5. Cry out in surprise, “Judy! Is that you? Oh my God! Judy,

how have you been?” Hopefully, this will give Judy a few brief

moments of terror as she tries to figure out where she could know

you from.

6. Say “No”, over and over. Be sure to vary the sound of each

one, and keep a rhythmic tempo, even as they are trying to speak.

This is most fun if you can do it until they hang up.

7. If MCI calls trying to get you to sign up for the Family and

Friends Plan, reply, in as SINISTER a voice as you can, “I don’t

have any friends…would YOU be my friend?”

8. If the company cleans rugs, respond: “Can you get blood out?

Can you get out GOAT blood? How about HUMAN blood?”

9. Ask him/her to marry you. When they get all flustered, tell

them that you could not just give your credit card number to a

complete stranger.

10. Tell the telemarketer that you work for the same company,

they often can’t sell to their fellow employees.

11. Answer the phone. As soon as you realize it is a

telemarketer, set the receiver down, shout or scream “Oh my

God!!!” and then hang-up.

12. Tell the telemarketer you are busy at the moment and ask them

if they will give you their HOME phone number, you will call them

back. When the telemarketer explains that they cannot give out

their HOME number, you say “I guess you don’t want anyone

bothering you at home, right?” The telemarketer will agree and

you say, “Now you know how I feel!” Hang up.

13. Ask them to repeat everything they say, several times.

14. Tell them it is dinner time, BUT ask if they would please

hold. Put them on your speaker phone while you continue to eat at

your leisure. Smack your food loudly and continue with your

dinner conversation.

15. Tell the telemarketer you are on “home incarceration” and ask

if they could bring you some beer.

16. Tell the telemarketer, “Okay, I will listen to you. But I

should probably tell you, I’m not wearing any clothes.”

17. Insist that the caller is really your buddy Leon, playing a

joke. “Come on Leon, cut it out! Seriously, Leon, how’s your

momma?”

18. Tell them you are hard of hearing and that they need to

speakup… louder… louder… louder…

19. Tell them to talk VERY SLOWLY, because you want to write

DOWN EVERY WORD

There’s a crop of interesting articles in this week’s Science Times I’ve just gotten to:

Health Sleuths Assess Homocysteine as Culprit. Elevated homocysteine levels are a new focus of concern as a cause of heart attack and other maladies. B-vitamin supplements are the major way of lowering it, as well as reducing stress.

3 Suits Say Lyme Vaccine Caused Severe Arthritis

Two Stars Collide; a New Star Is Born. Scientists at the first symposium on interstellar collisions report on detecting the aftemath of two- and even three-star collisions.

Mr. Mom Dies; 2 Hatchlings Live. Had been set to become the first weedy sea dragon to give birth in captivity.

Genetic Analysis Yields Intimations of a Primordial Commune: “Everything about the

origin of life on earth is a

mystery, and it seems the

more that is known, the

more acute the puzzles

get…The best efforts of chemists to

reconstruct molecules typical of life in the laboratory have

shown only that it is a problem of fiendish difficulty. The

genesis of life on earth, some time in the fiery last days of

the Hadean, remains an unyielding problem.”

Will the Web Make Us Better Patients? Two doctors discuss the problems and promise of patients’ coming for medical care armed with information from the ‘net. [Slate]

The relativistic heavy-ion collider has begun working and we’re still here. This newest and biggest particle accelerator in the world has been aiming gold ions at each other. The thought is that the quarks and gluons that make up the protons and neutrons in the gold nuclei will be freed for a fleeting moment to exist in a plasma simulating the conditions in the universe in the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang. The problem is that some credible critics feared that this might create a mini-black hole that would suck up all surrounding matter, perhaps destroying the earth. Others felt a new form of matter made up of strange quarks might begin converting all the other matter nearby to its type, sort of like Vonnegut’s Ice-9. Some physicists feared that such an energetic collision might even cause a decay in the fabric of empty space itself which would propagate outward at the speed of light until it changed the entire universe. Brookhaven National Laboratory actually convened a committee to consider such speculative disaster scenarios, which concluded that “…the candidate mechanisms for catastrophic

scenarios at RHIC are firmly excluded by existing empirical evidence, compelling theoretical arguments, or both. Accordingly, we see no reason

to delay the commissioning of RHIC on their account.” Many people have been reminded of the concerns in 1945 that the first fission bomb explosion might set the whole atmosphere on fire. Put yourself in the head of the scientist at the moment her/his finger is poised on the final button to initiate any of these experiments…

The Science of Sex. It makes good evolutionary sense that we find more symmetric faces more appealing. [Nerve]

“In 1916, as the

American daily

newspaper hit its

media peak, a

philosophical

cockroach

named archy

transmigrated

onto the pages of

the New York

Sun. Today, as

the Web hits its

own media peak,

archy’s cousin,

bernie, has

e-mailed his way

into

eXaminer.com”: bernie – the world’s first

cockroach in

cyberspace.

The Science of Sex. It makes good evolutionary sense that we find more symmetric faces more appealing. [Nerve]

Navy sonar may have killed whales in Bahamas. [AP via Robot Wisdom]

Dumb and Dumber. To judge from the new crop of men’s magazines, it’s getting harder and harder to be a man’s body even vaguely connected to a brain. Dreck sells, says Andrew Sullivan in The New Republic.