Another new tick-borne disease, HGE, human granulocytic erlichiosis. First recognized in 1994, around 1,000 cases have been reported. 2-3% fatality rate reported when prompt diagnosis and care are not received, according to the CDC.

Archaeologists’ playtime: Ancient Cities Reported Found Under Sea Off Egypt, and Lost City Discovered in Peruvian Jungle.

Canada Funds Clinical Trials of ‘Invisible Condom’. This probably deals with the male concerns about the notorious loss of sensation caused by conventional condoms, but of course it appears to be inconvenient to use and the burden falls on the woman (in heterosexual sex).

Look at it this way. This is one of those things that is perfectly obvious once you think about it but took a long time for anyone to recognize. Engineers at Fuji have realized that the world has more horizontal and vertical lines than oblique ones, probably because both natural and manmade things organize themselves in relation to the pull of gravity. That means that the linear gaps in a conventional horizontal array of photodiodes in a digital camera will result in more loss of detail than an innovative, different arrangement of the diodes they are now introducing. [New Scientist]

Raising a stink. The methane produced from decaying vegetation in stagnant water makes hydroelectric power schemes worse greenhouse-gas offenders than large coal-fired power plants, says the World Commission on

Dams, a group of scientists, engineers and environmentalists supported by the World Bank, the world’s biggest funder

of large dams.

The New York Times Book Review summer reading list 2000.

Salon TV critic Joyce Millman reflects on the debut episode of The Survivor, finds few surprises. “When the president of CBS TV, Leslie Moonves, tells

reporters that he participated in the casting of “Survivor,”

helping choose the final 16 contestants, and gets all giddy

describing the show’s “voyeuristic appeal,” then you can bet,

my friends, that this is not “reality,” but some winking faux

version of it. Still, I’m sure that won’t stop “Survivor” from

becoming this summer’s national obsession and then, who

knows, maybe next year’s sweeps programming main event.

I can see the celebrity edition of “Survivor” now: Bobby

Knight, Oprah Winfrey and the cast of “Friends” vs. Martha

Stewart, the Dixie Chicks, Jerry, George, Kramer and

Shaquille O’Neal.”

Improve Performance; Check your BIOS Settings

The Turn. “At the very heart of winged flight lies the banked

turn, a procedure that by now seems so routine and

familiar that airline passengers appreciate neither

its elegance and mystery nor its dangerously

delusive character. The author, a pilot, takes us up

into the subject.” One of the points in this essay is the way in which the aerodynamic forces in a turn can counteract the inner ear’s positional sense and contrary to common sense one may be unable to feel one’s position relative to the vertical, especially when flying without visual cues. A pilot friend of mine explained to me the way in which, if I understood it correctly, this can easily get inexperienced pilots in trouble and may have caused the fatal crash of JFK Jr’s plane. [Atlantic Monthly]

Salon: L.A. to serve toilet water. One proposal for the Southern California water shortage. In the ’70’s, I worked briefly for an environmental concern that promoted wastewater recycling. But they were talking about “grey water” — bath-, sink- and laundry-drainage. In this scheme, waterless composting toilets keep human waste contamination out of the recycling stream and “stop the five-gallon flush”; seemed like a good idea then and now. In recent years, I’ve been delighted to discover this system in use at several of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s backcountry huts in the White Mountains, but imagine the economy of scale and public acceptance that could come from its LA-wide introduction!

Cal State Long Beach (CSLB) psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, as a recent New Times LA article describes it, uses

evolutionary

psychology to argue that Judaism is not merely a religion; it is

also a Darwinian strategy that serves to raise Jewish IQ, and

that anti-Semitism can be understood rationally as a by-product

of natural selection. He writes that Jews have reacted to

anti-Semitism by taking over intellectual movements and

attacking Gentile culture to promote Jewish interests. The

result, he warns, is a “present decline of European peoples in

the New World.” He also asserts that Jews protect their

interests by suppressing criticism of Judaism, and cites David

Irving as an example of a writer whose work has been

suppressed by Jewish groups.

MacDonald agreed to testify on behalf of Irving at the prominent London libel suit Irving recently lost against Deborah Lipstadt, whose academic criticism of Holocaust deniers claims distortions in Irving’s work. MacDonald says he is an “agnostic” about the question of the reality of the Holocaust because he has not studied its history extensively enough and that his decision to support Irving was based on academic freedom considerations. (He writes here about his reasons for testifying.)

Now critics on the faculty of CSLB want him to defend his own controversial doctrines in a public academic forum, which he refuses to do partially on the grounds that it is not appropriate to ask a tenured professor to present such complicated ideas orally to an audience that is likely to be hostile. CSLB, whose enormous psychology dept. (with over 1200 students and 55 faculty) was criticized in a 1994 external audit for doing too little to foster open debate of academic issues, has put off until the fall its decision on calls for a public forum on MacDonald’s ideas. Many colleagues say they’ll be reading his work this summer, vowing to move forward with criticism in the fall whether MacDonald participates or not. His colleagues point out that they believe MacDonald’s right to do the kind of research he does is protected by academic freedom, and no one is calling for his discipline or expulsion.

One prominent critic is UC Santa Barbara professor John Tooby, arguably the founder of the discipline of evolutionary psychology in the early ’90’s. Tooby wants to defend the good name of evolutionary psychology against what he perceives as a disreputble extremist extrapolation. He has recently reportedly denied that MacDonald’s work is even evolutionary psychology at all. ‘Blaming the new science for MacDonald’s views, Tooby says,

is like asking doctors, “What do you physicians have to say

about Josef Mengele?”‘ A lengthy refutation of MacDonald’s work on which Tooby is currently at work is slated to appear on his website later this summer.

MacDonald may essentially be cursed simply by being a shy, reluctant public speaker whose trio of books on Judaism, published between 1994 and 1998, received little attention (except among rightwing extremist hatemongers, whose websites have been laudatory), but he may now regret the visibility his decision to participate in Irving’s trial has engendered. Academic work in which there is such a dramatic tension between scholarly freedom and the use of the work in the service of extremist hatred and divisiveness has long provoked heated ethical controversy on campus. I recall the very similar bitterness of the debate over the work on the genetic basis of intelligence done by Harvard professor Roger Herrnstein in the early ’70’s, EO Wilson’s sociobiology (also engendered at Harvard in the ’70’s), and the Bell Curve flap (Herrnstein again, with Charles Murray) several years ago. Critics always claim that these are bad science even if well-intentioned; prejudice presented as if it were undistorted scientific fact. It’ll be interesting to see how explicitly MacDonald paints himself as a victim of the “Jewish agenda” he sees at work against threats to its “eugenics program” in public defenses.

Read an earlier New Times LA article about MacDonald and his work here. And, thanks to Jorn Barger who commented that the above exposition was one-sided (I actually feel I’m not being unfair to MacDonald as much as noting with interest a one-sided groundswell of response), this link to MacDonald’s replies to the New Times LA publicity. MacDonald says in part:

Ortega quotes me as saying that the Jews brought the Holocaust on

themselves. This is just wrong. I claim only to have a theory of anti-Semitism,

not a theory of the Nazi Holocaust. In my book, Separation and Its

Discontents, I argue that perceptions of real conflicts of interest engendered

and exacerbated widespread popular anti-Jewish feelings in Germany prior to

and during the Nazi era, as they have in many other times and places. These

perceptions of conflicts of interest are related complexly to real conflicts of

interest. For example, exaggeration and even fantasies may color the

situation once the battle lines have been drawn between groups. Other

scholars have also argued that Jewish behavior—very often Jewish success—is

an important factor in anti-Semitism; see, e.g., Albert Lindemann’s Esau’s

Tears[Cambridge University Press, 1998]). My position is that we should not

simply assume that every instance of anti-Semitism is completely irrational.

Rather, we should suppose that in general there are indeed real conflicts of

interest between groups and that outbreaks of hostility are a complex

interplay of fantasy and reality. Anti-Semitism has taken many different

forms from simple dislike to economic boycots, pogroms, expulsion and

genocide.

And:

In the last chapter of The Culture of Critique I suggest that the

increasing ethnic division in the U.S. and other European-derived societies

resulting from high levels of immigration and the rise of multiculturalism will

lead to increased ethnocentrism on all sides and a decline in the

Enlightenment values of de-ethnicized individualism. I state only that this is

a dangerous situation and I do so on the basis of psychological theory and my

reading of the history of the Jews as well as a great many examples of ethnic

conflict in contemporary and past societies.

This is just a start; I imagine MacDonald would agree with me that a “soundbite”, or weblog, review cannot be thoughtful enough about these complex issues. If this controversy interests you, I’m sure you’ll delve further.

In connection with my post on this issue, Barger has also referred me to his page on Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor turned anti-Zionist civil rights campaigner in Israel. He has paid special attention to the efffects of Jewish fundamentalism on Israeli policy and politics. I’m just beginning to absorb this material. Thank you again, Jorn.

CokeSpotlight. Greenpeace and Adbusters kick off a massive campaign against Coca Cola’s environmental hypocrisy as a polluting sponsor of the first “Green” Olympics: ‘To be Number One in the world: that’s the

goal of The Coca-Cola Company. That’s

why Coke is the longest running

corporate sponsor of the Olympic Games.

It’s a partnership that has helped make

Coke the world’s best known brand, sold

in nearly 200 countries.

But there’s something different about the

2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney,

Australia. They will be the first Green

Games, a global celebration of sport,

culture, and the environment.

In the Green Games, Coca-Cola isn’t winning the race. Coke keeps

its products “always cool” with the help of HFCs, some of the most

potent global warming gases ever produced.’

Mental Health is Not an Issue…Yet. “Then, you realize you’ve asked the wrong question. You are asking how many of the downtrodden have to die. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about

the mentally ill. They’re crazy. Not until the mentally ill begin to see who is responsible for their continued suffering, and find that person, and show

up on his doorstep with their agony, and share it with him, will mental health care be available for all who need it.”

“…simply a mistake where a piece of type accidentally fell onto the page during production”, or (much more likely, it would seem) a clever culture-jam by a guerrilla Seattle Times employee?

I want one of these!

Alas, Inability to secure funding stream axes NewsWatch.

‘On Tuesday, May 30,

NewsWatch.org, a daily media

criticism Web site run by The Center

for Media and Public Affairs, ceased

operations. Described by Smart

Computing as one of the “best

little-known Web sites,” on the Web,

NewsWatch.org was launched a year

and a half ago to serve as a

“consumer’s guide to the news.”

Rather than look at the inside stories

behind the day’s news – who was up,

who was down and who did what to

whom – NewsWatch focused on news

content, examining inaccuracies,

distortions, lack of context and other

controversies of interest to the

consumers as well as the producers

of news.’

Scientists Excited by Rare Meteorite Find in Canada:

like “…sampling on the surface of a comet”. But why does Reuters confuse meteorites and asteroids?

A Spelling Test of fifty commonly misspelled words. I consider myself to be a strong speller yet I’m chagrined to say I only scored 86%.

Adult stem cells can produce a wealth of cell types, Science authors report. This exciting study by a Swedish team shows that, when grown within an embryo, adult neural stem cells can revert to a precursor state that can give rise to lineages of a variety of tissue types. The pluripotentiality of embryonal stem cells has long been recognized, but current ethical concerns have led to a ban on tissue from embryos. This discovery about the open-ended potential of stem cells from adults opens the way to therapeutic advances, such aas growing replacement organs, that do not require embryonic tissue. Of course, neural stem cells are among the most difficult cell types to obtain from living adults, so it would be nice if we discovered similar versatility in other types of adult stem cells.

Toshiba euthanasia laptop goes on display. “The patient got a needle in their arm, while the computer sat on the bed. The laptop

asked the patient twice if they knew what they were doing. The third time they had to

hit the space bar to confirm they wanted to die. Fifteen seconds later a message was

sent to a switching unit, which turned on a compressor.” [The Register]

New Scientist: Before the big bang. One cosmologist’s attempt to apply string theory to the thorny problem of the singularity at the origin of the universe has some surprising results:

“Our Universe is a patch of the inside

of a black hole,” amd there was a time before the Big Bang. Something like this notion is all over science fiction, however, from even before we knew about black holes. Does anyone remember the culmination of James Blish’s Cities in Flight series from the late ’50’s?

Survey: Online Therapy Bad Idea. I don’t think I’m just trying to protect my market niche as a psychiatrist when I say that I agree with this survey finding.

Little-known ventriloquist puts words into Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ mouth.

Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): Mother Kept Son Locked Up for 30 Years.

‘”Why didn’t we report it? Because this was something between the two of them,” one person from the village was quoted as saying.’

The Travel Guide Says what? Words fail me.

“They’re Going to Eat What?” World nettle-eating challenge in Dorset UK; sponsored by Ben & Jerry’s, to be netcast live…

Wet, Windy Atlantic Hurricane Season Starts Thursday. I’ve always wondered. Do the hurricanes know they’re okay to come as of Thursday but not Wednesday?