Not only, some say, the biggest publishing event in the English-speaking world but, to others quoting Deuteronomy, an “abomination” full of character after character who “useth divination, or (is) an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a

consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”

Nando Times: Controversial ardent proponent of drinking in moderation for alcoholics goes on trial for killing two while driving drunk. Reportedly she had had second thoughts about moderation before travelling wrong way down I-90 in Washington with a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit and causing deaths of a father and 12-year-old daughter in head-on collision.

What would happen if, crazy as it might sound, a

newspaper published the correct numbers of a

lottery before the numbers were drawn?

The Sunday Times: The rise of tokophobia: Psychiatrists are reporting an increasing number of women, especially white middle class intelligent women, with a profound and sometimes disabling dread of childbirth. Some are so afraid of conceiving that they use several methods of contraception. “In some cases the women will not

even contemplate having sex for fear of falling

pregnant. And some who do become pregnant

will request a termination, or even try to induce

a miscarriage themselves…

Not Exactly It Came from Beneath the Sea, but close. [Discovery]

Google Search: “Foreign Accent Syndrome”. After a stroke or a blow to the head, people suddenly begin to speak with a foreign accent in this exceedingly rare, fascinating syndrome. In some cases the accent is that of their childhood origins decades before, but in other mysterious cases it appears to be one with which they’ve had no prior connection.

Something to Watch Over Me. You know those ankle bracelets convicts wear when they’re on house arrest or restrictive parole? Now you can slap one onto your child!

Publius Home Page. The original Publius was the pen name of the pseudonymously published Federalist Papers. The new Publius is a system developed by AT&T Lab researchers to evade potential censorship of web content and provide a “high degree of anonymity” to publishers. If I understand the explanation rightly, it works by encrypting a document and distributing its content among a number of servers who host random-looking shares of the document with no idea what they are hosting. The publishing process produces a special URL that readers use to retrieve a proportion of the shares of the document sufficient to reconstruct it. The underlying principle — of encrypting and distributing content among several servers — has previously been articulated among the “cypherpunk” movement, and other schemes to achieve this are also being tried, but the Publius system seems to be a more sophisticated implementation…if it works.

Suppressing the presence on the web of a Publius-published document would require securing the cooperation of the operators of however many servers the content had been divided among — difficult but not unthinkable, it would appear. So much for the C-h-u-r-c-h o-f S-c-i-e-n-t-o-l-o-g-y’s war on unsalutory web content, for example. Of course, the method could be used to disseminate undesirable content, such as child pornography or materials pirated or otherwise in violation of copyright — the price of freedom? Could this be a largely unstoppable way to bear witness to a repressive political regime, sort of a twenty-first century samizdat system? The Publius system will be given away for free when ready. The developers of the process are seeking Publius Server volunteers for a two-month live trial beginning at the end of July.