Neurosurgeons ‘fear risky surgery’. Patients are losing out as neurosurgeons, faced with burgeoning numbers of lawsuits, curtail chancy practices.

The Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Why didn’t the NYPD stop the Central Park wolf pack? “With Amadou Diallo, the

cops went too far. In

Central Park, not far enough. But guess what? It’s the same

problem.” The author makes a case that the problem is the NYPD’s contempt for the people of the city, leading it to be both tough on suspected ‘perps’ and soft on victims; and that this attitude trickels down from above, ultimately from Giuliani. There’s also the possibility that this is payback for recent protests of police brutality including, of course, the flap over the new Springsteen song “American Skin (41 Shots)”. [Salon] But let’s get more basic — is why the police didn’t stop this even the right question to ask? Giuliani actually tried to softpeddle the events (until the rising tide of public outcry against the police flipped him to a get-tough ‘spin’) by saying that there wasn’t any more violence at this year’s Puerto Rican Day parade than there was last year, and one of his police spokespeople said something along the lines of: what’s the big deal, this happens in New Orleans every year at Mardi Gras? It’s unbelievable to me that we have come to the point of living in the kind of world where bystanders are going to be savaged at a public celebration unless they have police protection.

Software that can spy on you.

“Why did Mattel include technology that can encrypt and send data to and from your PC in its children’s CD-ROMs?” [Salon, via Robot Wisdom]

Complete list: “100 Funniest Films” as chosen by a panel of 1,800 people in the

industry for the American Film Institute. Here are the top ten:

1. “Some Like It Hot,” 1959

2. “Tootsie,” 1982

3. “Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love

the Bomb,” 1964

4. “Annie Hall,” 1977

5. “Duck Soup,” 1933

6. “Blazing Saddles,” 1974

7. “M*A*S*H,” 1970

8. “It Happened One Night,” 1934

9. “The Graduate,” 1967

10. “Airplane!,” 1980

The Y2K MacArthur Fellowship winners announced. Links to biographical sketches of the award winners.

[American Prospect]: Harvey Blume, “Neuro-Narrative,” May 22, 2000. I thought it was only because of my own involvement with neuroscience that I’ve been noticing fiction pivoting around characters with such conditions as Tourette’s disorder, autism, and temporal lobe epilepsy. But this essayist argues that, reflective of an emerging new worldview, “neurology and neuroscience have in recent years become major forces in American arts and media, charting new narrative pathways. If noted at all, this development

has been written off as only another example of our

culture’s hunger for varieties of victimhood.”