Taste for flesh troubled Neanderthals. The Neanderthals were dedicated carnivores; was this related to their demise? [BBC]
Daily Archives: 12 Jun 00
Seattle’s Purple Haze. Frank Gehry (who prefers Haydn) meets Jimi Hendrix. [Newsweek.com]
Behind Enemy Lines – Premier Services Exposed. Hacking into a spammer’s computer. [via Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eaters News Service]
Secret Nuclear Weapons Data Missing From Los Alamos Lab. As if it weren’t already bad enough, hard drives containing sensitive data had disappeared from inside locked containers which were inside a locked vault when officials went to check for them after the lab had been evacuated in the brush fires last week.
The material, stored in the vault of
the laboratory’s X Division, where
nuclear weapons are designed,
contained what officials described
as nuclear weapons data used by the
government’s Nuclear Emergency
Search Team, or NEST, which
responds to nuclear accidents and
nuclear-related threats from
terrorists. The material includes all
the data on American nuclear
weapons that the team needs to
render nuclear devices safe in
emergencies.In addition, the missing material
included intelligence information concerning the Russian
nuclear weapons program, law enforcement officials said.
The article contains many links to older stories in the continuing saga of security leaks from the U.S. Nuclear Lab.[New York Times]
Radio-Frequency Tags Could Pierce Some of the Fog of War. Other applications for transponders of the sort I use to whiz through a toll booth without stopping are being pioneered by the military.
Call me old-fashioned, but: I hadn’t realized that there’s already, apparently, a brisk trade in digitized pirated hit films on the web. [Washington Post]
Screams haunt town. Bloodcurdling cries in a wooded area of a Quebec town prompt large scale search. Rescuers continue to hear the screams, increasing their urgency to find the source, but the cries fall silent by dawn and the searchers turn up nothing. Eventually written off as coyotes, but residents see they’ve never seen any around…
The first chapter of British philosopher Colin McGinn’s Mysterious Flame, which argues that not only do we not presently understand how consciousness arises out of the physical brain in which it is rooted, but that the intellect we have is ill-equipped to ever understand this essential mystery.
…the bond between the mind and the brain is a deep mystery. Moreover, it is an ultimate
mystery, a mystery that human intelligence will never unravel. Consciousness indubitably exists, and it is connected
to the brain in some intelligible way, but the nature of this connection necessarily eludes us. The full import of this
thesis will take some time to unfold. I am especially concerned to examine the reasons for this mystery. I am not
just throwing my hands up in despair; I am interested in uncovering the deep reasons for our bafflement and
examining the consequences of our constitutional ignorance. Socrates was concerned to show people that they
know less than they think they do. I too am concerned with the nature and source of human not-knowing; I want to
know why some things are so hard to know. What is it about consciousness that makes it so elusive to theoretical
understanding? And what is it about the knowing mind that makes it founder here?
Slate: The End of Mystery – The encroachment of science on fantasy’s last redoubts. Charles Paul Freund takes the occasion of the Church’s revealing the Third Mystery of Fatima to say that science is taking all the mystery out of life:
Comes science with its DNA and its bioarchaeology,
its mummy CAT scans, its satellite imaging, its sonar, its
computer analysis, and soon lost cities are found, dead
royalty turns out really to be dead, pretenders to be but
pretenders. The past must then reveal itself in fantasy’s
ashes.
But I say pity anyone whose mystery is so petty that it can be cast aside by the results of DNA analysis and the the like! There’s still plenty to truly, unassailably enchant us.
Not Your Average Bear. Reinhold Messner, first to climb Mt Everest solo (and without oxygen) claims to have solved the yeti mystery, determining it to be a species of bear, in a frustratingly colorless book that never explains why no one else pondering the mysteries of the abominable snowman had ever noticed the similarities before.
Who Gets to Tell a Black Story? The behind-the-scenes racial politics of the fascinating HBO miniseries The Corner, from the book by a white Baltimore reporter who says he’s colorblind, directed by the complicated and mercurial Charles Dutton, one angry African-American man who himself comes from these very corners, has been there, done that. An unflinching look at ghetto life and especially the way heroin is interwoven through its fabric, but would it be too humiliating to blacks to be that real? [New York Times]
Slate: The Myth of Russian Reform by Anne Applebaum
This is why Western newspaper analysis of Russia is so often
wrong or at least misplaced: To date, the writing about Putin’s
Cabinet and entourage has generally focused on how
well-known a given Putin appointee or adviser is in the
West—and therefore how “reformist” he is likely to be.
Russian analysts, on the other hand, focus on which particular
business clan supports the man in question (they are all men)
and whose interests he is therefore likely to favor. Likewise,
the most important political battle in Russia over the past year,
that between the interests grouped around Putin and the
interests grouped around Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and
former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, had nothing to do
with “Left vs. Right” or “Reform vs. Nasty,” but is better
characterized by the Leninist phrase “Who Whom?” In that
context, calling one group more or less “democratic” or
“internationalist” or “pro-Western” makes no sense.
Finding New Audiences for Alienation. New York Times status report on the Beckett Film Project, bringing all nineteen of his plays to celluloid with impressive personnel by the end of this year. Can you imagine seeing them all in one sitting??
