Aryan Nations leader: We’re staying in Idaho. Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations lose a landmark $6.3 million damage judgment to a family assaulted by his henchmen, represented by attorney Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery AL. Dees intends to seize every asset of the racist sect, including its right to use its name. One twist on this is that the sect has apparently recently been bankrolled by two Silicon Valley multimillionaires who now live in Idaho. There’s some speculation that they will bail Butler out by paying off this judgment. With this decision, Dees and the SPLC extend an impressive streak of winning ruinous judgments against hate groups. (Hint: the work of the SPLC depends on your contributions…) Nando Times

All in a day’s work: After you’ve finished responding to these ten most vexing unanswered questions in contemporary physics New York Times, try your hand at these seven major unsolved mathematical posers. The solution to each of the latter is worth $1 million US. Here’s an example:

It is Saturday evening and you arrive at a big party. Feeling shy, you wonder whether you already know anyone in the room.

Your host proposes that you must certainly know Rose, the lady in the corner next to the dessert tray. In a fraction of a

second you are able to cast a glance and verify that your host is correct. However, in the absence of such a suggestion, you are

obliged to make a tour of the whole room, checking out each person one by one, to see if there is anyone you recognize. This is

an example of the general phenomenon that generating a solution to a problem often takes far longer than verifying that a

given solution is correct. Similarly, if someone tells you that the number 13,717,421 can be written as the product of two

smaller numbers, you might not know whether to believe him, but if he tells you that it can be factored as 3607 times 3803

then you can easily check that it is true using a hand calculator. One of the outstanding problems in logic and computer science

is determining whether questions exist whose answer can be quickly checked (for example by computer), but which require a

much longer time to solve from scratch (without knowing the answer). There certainly seem to be many such questions. But so

far no one has proved that any of them really does require a long time to solve; it may be that we simply have not yet

discovered how to solve them quickly. Stephen Cook formulated the P versus NP problem in 1971.

Put that chip where the sun don’t shine. Life imitating — not art but — paranoid fantasy. Many patients with paranoid delusions feel there are covert implants in their bodies monitoring them and causing their distressing symptoms such as auditory hallucinations. Now it’s coming true. I’ve had two patients this week in great distress about this news. Salon [I haven’t been sharing with them some of the more conspiratorial potential trends I’ve been blinking in this weblog, like Carnivore or tracking you by your cellphone…]

A roundup of recent pertinent science news from New Scientist: First, global warming trends have roused fears that malaria is headed for higher latitudes. A new computer model appears to set our minds at ease.

Second, a surprise success in reprogramming cells

brings brain repair a step closer. Scientists have found that it is relatively easy to coax brain tissue to revert to stem cell status. Reimplanting such tissue could help patients regenerate brain matter lost or damaged, for example, in Parkinson’s Disease or after a stroke.

Next, accumulating evidence suggests that the first stars after the big bang at the dawn of the universe were monsters pumping out millions of times the energy of the largest stars in today’s universe, and suffering violent spectacular deaths. These stars may have briefly pumped out more energy than 100 billion galaxies in going supernova! Their brief and violent lifecycle may have been responsible for the generation of most of the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in the modern universe.

Finally, CERN scientists think they have spotted the

Higgs particle, the most sought-after prize in

particle physics — the

elusive particle that gives matter its mass. New Scientist

Reverent 4-CD boxed set released by family to coincide with 30th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix‘s death. Reuters

An apple a day may keep the dentist away; but, if you do have to go, don’t let the dentist rinse your mouth out. Reuters; New Scientist

There’s an AvantGo Client for Blogger! Now I can post blinks from my Palm~! Why would I want to? Simple, silly: because I can, of course.

“In 32 years I’ve never seen anything like

this,”… the U.S. Drug Enforcement

Administration director in Colombia, told

reporters.

“This is huge,” he said. “We’re talking about being able to load up to 200 tons of cocaine in this submarine.” My first question was, how is it going to get launched, given that it was being built in a brick warehouse on the outskirts of Bogota, 7500 feet or so above sea level? Reportedly, it was to be trucked to the sea in three sections to be assembled there. ABC

Escaping the Matrix: This author actually appears to think he’s the first one to realize that the media-shaped consensus version of political reality is an illusion that doesn’t make sense. “I also perceived important

patterns that others seemed to have missed. When I started tracing

historical forces, and began to interpret present-day events from a

historical perspective, I could see the same old dynamics at work

and found a meaning in unfolding events far different from what

official pronouncements proclaimed.” The patterns he proclaims he’s noticed amount to:

Now, let’s not, for the moment, quibble over whether you agree or not with this author’s political analysis. What’s impressed me is why Whole Earth (a journal which, after all, has been around since then, and to which I’ve been a subscriber from its first issue) would publish a piece that does nothing but summarize every truism of the last thirty years’ progressive thinking as if it were newly discovered revelation. What am I missing here? I suppose it should be sufficient warning whenever someone trumpets that he “perceived important patterns that others seemed to have missed” in the first paragraph…

There’s an AvantGo Client for Blogger! Now I can post blinks from my Palm~! Why would I want to? Simple, silly: because I can, of course.