Jerry Groopman MD reviews Frank Vertosick’s Why We Hurt: the natural history of pain. “In 1979, while training for the

Boston marathon, I ruptured a

lumbar disc. I underwent two

failed operations and was left

disabled and in severe pain. It

took many months of arduous

physical therapy to be weaned

from pain medication and to

regain the ability to move about.

To this day, if I lift something

heavy without bending correctly,

or fail to support my muscles

when sitting in a soft chair, I am

laid low by back pain. It was,

therefore, with more than

academic interest, and some

trepidation, that I read ‘Why We

Hurt. To my surprise and delight,

Dr. Frank T. Vertosick Jr., a practicing neurosurgeon,

performs a feat of literary alchemy. He transmutes the

lugubrious subject of pain into a provocative and edifying

treatise that tightly engages the reader.” New York Times

The Whole World in our Hands: “James Lovelock’s Gaia theory inspired the Green

movement. But as fossil fuels begin, literally, to cost

the earth, he argues that nuclear power could save the

planet.” Guardian

Spin Magazine’s 100 Sleaziest Moments in the History of Rock. A rather tame example:

With his moccasins, Moroccan shirts, and impressive ‘fro, hippie deity

Jimi Hendrix seemed an unlikely candidate for gangster’s paradise. But in

the fall of 1969, he and his band Gypsys, Suns & Rainbows performed at

the opening of the tiny, reputedly Mob-owned Manhattan club Salvation

as a favor to the joint’s promoter – Hendrix’s coke dealer Bobby Woods.

After the gig, he and Woods took off to score some blow, hanging out

until morning. Late that evening, Woods was found murdered – a

gangland-style hit – and Hendrix was kidnapped by goons eager to grill

him about his ties to the pusherman. Hendrix’s enraged manager, Mike

Jeffery, quickly dispatched a few of his own well-connected brutes, who

sped to the funky Woodstock-area retreat where the guitarist was being

held. Jeffery’s boys were further up the Mafia food chain than Jimi’s

oppressors, who quickly fled the scene. Though Hendrix was reportedly

amused by the charade, rumors have persisted that the Mob may have

played a role in the odd circumstances surrounding his 1970 death. So

much for flower power.

Hmmm, second Jimi Hendrix post in a week…

Manufacturer, psychiatric group accused of overdiagnosing to sell Ritalin. “The American Psychiatric Association and the makers of the drug

Ritalin are encouraging overdiagnosis of behavioral problems in children to boost sales of the drug, according to two lawsuits filed this week.

Novartis Pharmaceutical Corp. and the psychiatric association promoted the belief that a large number of children need to take Ritalin for

attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the suits filed in New Jersey and California allege.” Nando Times My take on this, in a few words, is that the lawsuit is pure litigious nonsense. The medical evidence for the reality of ADHD as a brain dysfunction is incontrovertible, as is the positive impact of medication treatments. At the same time, it is overdiagnosed, but not because of any unholy conspiracy. There is an inherent cycle of fascination with faddish diagnoses and an unfortunate capacity for self-fulfilling prophecy to shape diagnosis of psychopathology among less careful clinicians.

Windows ME Bugged by Flaw. “Microsoft’s brand-new operating system, Windows ME already has one confirmed security bug.

The vulnerability allows malicious users to remotely shut down or force a reboot if the computer is running

the WebTV for Windows application.” Wired

GAC (Generic Artificial

Consciousness)

is “the world’s

first computer program to

attempt to learn from the world

wide community how to be

artificially conscious.” The knowledge base of the community of registered users fuels its AI by contributing to a database of mindpixels — “one-bit pieces of knowledge”. Now MIT’s Media Lab has gotten into the act. Wired

When Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Jim Higgins interviewed me over the phone for his July piece on weblogs, we discovered our shared involvement in adoption. He’s pointed me to Rainbow Kids, a self-described “online international adoption publication”. The current issue has a review article on the common medical problems encountered in children being adopted from abroad; and a celebratory personal adoption story from Higgins himself on the adoption of his daughter Zoe.

I was two weeks into fatherhood before I remembered that all babies were not Chinese. That’s

because I spent the first two weeks of February in a southeast China hotel with my wife Karen

and our new daughter Zoe, and 10 other American families and their new Chinese daughters. If

you want to imagine the atmosphere, think of your freshman year in a college dorm, only you’re

married, your dorm is as swanky as the Pfister Hotel, you’ve just been handed a tiny 10-month-old

swaddled in three hand-knit sweaters (even though it’s 60 degrees outside), and you’re surrounded

by 1.6 million Chinese people, many of whom haven’t seen an American in person before…

[So far in browsing their site though, I can’t find anything approximating our experience of adopting our daughter from the exotic state of …Maine.]

” I am Pilot Professr Y and we need you to

Save Earth! As you know, On September 1, 2020, Earth was surrounded by a sphere of

undetermined substance letting nothing through but light. The newly-established

World Government may have a hard time coping. We are here to help.

We are calling for Pilots to fly remote-control probes in order to map the beautiful yet

ominous macro-crystalline structure of the sphere. With this accomplished, we may

be able to produce a resonance pattern to crack the sphere and Save Earth! Watch

out for static though.”

Reintroducing Ursus arctos horribilis: parts of the West are bracing for a second coming as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to return endangered grizzlies to the Bitterroot Wilderness in Montana. This is becoming the latest touchstone in that particular brand of political polarization endemic to the American West, characterized as a struggle over “who owns the land”. The Atlantic

Background piece on Spain’s longstanding Basque conflict and dimming hopes for a resolution after a long hot summer of conflict between ETA and Spanish authorities. Chicago Tribune

“Any time now, the Internet will start demanding information…or else. Shouldn’t you be afraid?” New Scientist

Paddling with Supertankers: latest dispatch from two Britons travelling from London to Sydney via bicycle and sea kayak. Now crossing to Sumatra. Adventure-mag.com

Russia’s interesting strategy for cash infusion. AP

2600: The Hacker Quarterly has been enjoined by the court from posting links to places where you can get DeCSS. But they say: “Looking for a copy of DeCSS?

The easiest way is to go to Disney’s search engine and search

for DeCSS. They will then LINK you to thousands of sites,

something we’re no longer allowed to do. It’s possible we may

not even be allowed to tell you this! You can still access our old

list of mirror sites sans the links.”

Berlin outlaws neo-Nazi rock music company. “The sinister Blood and Honour group, Europe’s largest distributor of neo-Nazi rock music, was outlawed by the German

Government yesterday in its latest attack on underground far-right culture.” The Times of London

Satellite Catholics enter world of Fantasy. “A mistake at a satellite television company in Luxembourg led to two hours of the soundtrack from The Fantasy Channel,

broadcaster of pornographic films, being broadcast over pictures from a Vatican celebration of the year 2000.

In an equally confusing switch, viewers of The Fantasy Channel, expecting to hear Stacey doing her best, were treated to the

sounds coming from The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.” The Times of London

‘Ego-Surfing’ derides valid, prudent activity. In defense of searching the web for your own online presence. Online Journalism Review And egosurf.com, which facilitates the process.

The Sorrow, the Pity, and the Angry Professor: The essay considers a “Chomskyite leftist” who rails against what he considers the devil’s pact between the U.S. government and a “cadre of Jewish spokespeople” to exploit the public’s lurid fascination with the Holocaust for personal and political advantage, whether it is the enormous fees garnered by reparations lawyers or the State Dept’s justification of a double standard in foreign policy.

Flap over gay male blood donation. The FDA defeated a proposal to loosen the ban on blood donation by gay men by only one vote. An opinion piece by the editor of the reactionary Washington Times shrilly spins the kneejerk reaction that even considering the proposal was playing election year politics, pandering to the self-esteem of the gay constituency at the expense of the safety of the nation’s blood supply. What do others think?

Feed Daily: More about the subliminal campaigning flap.”The gag’s only good ’til the

next PR blunder in the Bush campaign sweeps

it aside, but, oddly enough, it touches upon

issues that have gotten a lot of play recently

among cognitive scientists. In fact, W’s

apparent inability to pronounce “subliminal” —

he garbled the word four times during a news

conference this week, adding an “able” at the

end — hasn’t prevented the candidate from

straying into murky waters in regards to the

science behind subliminal advertising.”

One Man’s Rage Against Bad Thinking. Recently-noticed late Australian philosopher of science David Stove said we lost faith in science because of our revulsion at the cocky certainty of 19th century Victorian scientific triumphalism, and because we have never been able to metabolize the quantum mechanical impeachment of Newtonian physics. Rationalist Stove intended to heal the plague of scientific relativism that has ensued. He was particularly concerned with what he considered the deplorable inconsistencies of modern evolutionary science and what he called the “slander on our race” of assuming that natural selection explains anything about the human race.

According to Stove, theories of helplessness gain a

hearing because the “human race is mad.” But Stove

is no defender of an intellectual elite. He exhibits his

greatest antipathy toward the allegedly learned few.

In a volume called The Plato Cult (three pieces

from which are included among Roger Kimball’s

selections), Stove cites a host of philosophers, from

Plato to Foucault, to illustrate the “spectacle of

nightmare irrationality” that is characteristic of our

intellectual heritage. The “cult of Plato,” which was

an integral part of the Renaissance revival,

encapsulates the tendency to treat great minds with

religious reverence. What we need is a “nosology”

of intellectual error, a classification of the diseases

that have afflicted the human mind at least since

Plato.

Stove does not hope to uncover the single root of all

these diseases, which are too numerous and varied

even to list exhaustively. And he has no hope for the

ultimate victory of reason: Irrationality will always

win out, because there are simply too many ways to

go wrong.

The Weekly Standard

“There’s (an) aspect of the Gore

candidacy that has gotten me thinking. If elected, the Vice President will be the first

Harvard graduate since J.F.K. to be sworn in as Chief Magistrate, a circumstance

that gives rise to reflections on Harvard then versus Harvard now …The spectacle of the national brow being lowered and lowered, to the point of

near-Neanderthalism, thanks to the ministrations and calculations of three decades’

worth of graduates of its elitest educational institution is a sorry sight indeed.” New York Observer

Monty Python’s Terry Jones: “Gladiatorial shows were not an aberration.

Gladiators were right at the centre of Roman

civilisation. Brutal murders, put on in public arenas

at public expense, were not seen as decadent – on

the contrary, they were staged as an antidote to decadence.

The Romans believed that it was beneficial to

watch people being killed. Not just good

entertainment, but morally valuable. It made

people into better Romans.” The Times of London

Are the Republicans using subliminal advertising? ‘The Republican National

Committee’s prescription-drug

advertisement flashes the word

“rats,” a fragment of the word

“bureaucrats,” for one-thirtieth of

a second, in huge white

capital letters, larger than any

other word on the commercial.

The advertisement continues, “The Gore prescription plan:

bureaucrats decide.” The man

who produced the ad for the RNC

denied responsibility. It was

“purely accidental,” he said. “We

don’t play ball that way. I’m

not that clever.” Other admakers

said it would be “virtually

impossible” for the placement of

the frame to be accidental.’ New York Times via Slate

Another pricing glitch at Amazon, this time more egregious. DVD boxed sets were mistakenly priced at enormous discounts — some >75% off list. When Amazon discovered their mistake, they asked customers to pay the higher price or cancel their orders. “This is the last time I will do business with Amazon. There are too many other places online that don’t pull stunts like that,” was one (representative??) customer response. Amazon had similar difficulties last month in its toy store, which led to complaints to the FTC and the Better Business Bureau about what some construed as deceptive advertising and unfair treatment. Then there’s the “price-testing” debacle of last week, also in the DVD store. Lo! how the mighty have fallen — Amazon’s fate as the online retailer the public loves to hate seems sealed.CNET

Get Off the Lists! The Center for Democracy and Technology runs this “Opt-Out!” site collecting links and information to get you off telephone solicitation, spam and junk-mailing lists.

If you use Eudora for email, an upgrade to ver. 5 will get you MoodWatch ‘Research has shown that “people behaved irresponsibly more often in email

than they did in face to face conversations.” But you already knew that, right? MoodWatch won’t stop you from acting irresponsibly in email, it will just let you

know when you might be about to send a message you’ll regret.’ [via Memepool]

Olympics: We Know the Winners. Now, Let the Games Begin.

“In a

study released on Aug. 28, Andrew Bernard, of the Tuck

School of Business at Dartmouth College, and Meghan R.

Busse, of the Yale School of Management, examined Summer

Olympics medal counts for the last 40 years to see what

factors determine how many medals each nation wins…. Like so many paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, the formula

discovered by Mr. Bernard and Ms. Busse is beautiful in its

simplicity.

Just two factors account for 95 percent of a nation’s

predicted medal count: the number of medals it won at a

previous Olympics, and the overall size of its economy.” New York Times

Scientists try to foresee marriage breakdowns: “A pair of university researchers announced Monday that they can scientifically and mathematically predict

how likely and how soon a newly married couple will untie the knot…The complicated mathematical formula includes numbers of thoughts of divorce, amount of perspiration

measured by skin conductivity levels, humor during the discussion, marriage length, amount of anger and

something called ‘facial action units’ — or frowns, smiles and grimaces caught on tape.” St. Louis Post

Unborn child ‘can detect language’, child psychologists find. http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Study: Addiction possible after few cigarettes. “Scientists have

confirmed a suspicion held by some

smokers but never proven: It could

take just a few cigarettes to become

addicted. Some 12- and 13-year-olds

showed evidence of addiction within

days of their first cigarette, according

to research reported this week in the

British Medical Association journal

Tobacco Control.” Chicago Tribune

Cultivate excitement, fight boredom, improve self-esteem, duck blame, simplify complications, act out childhood frustrations, facilitate affiliation and social cohesion: find an enemy now! Observer

Scenes from the Apocalypse: Fuel Protests Spread Across Europe, Pumps Run Dry Reuters

Finally, one of life’s most ticklish questions answered. New Scientist

‘Che’ Photographer in Anti-Commercial Fight: ‘When I saw this, I felt indignant because it’s a lack of respect. Even though it has been

used in hundreds of things, T- shirts, flags … they had never linked his image with an

alcoholic drink,” he said, calling Guevara “the greatest person in history after Jesus Christ.” ‘ Reuters

It’s in the air: The debate over whether pheromones influence our behaviour has been fired up by the discovery of what may be a

working gene for a pheromone receptor.

While pheromones are common in insects and lower mammals, which use them for everything from attracting mates

to marking trails, whether such chemical signals affect humans has long been contentious. New Scientist

What’s so special about the Harvest Moon?

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.

TV Golf, Botching the Birdies: “The Buick Open golf tournament was in Michigan, so why was the silvery song of a canyon wren — a bird never seen east of Texas — heard on the TV broadcast?” Washington Post

Running in the genes. As the Olympics nears, the nature vs. nurture debate gets applied to black runners’ prowess. The Times

Strangelove syndrome gives hands a life of their own. A fascinating and rare neurological syndrome may shed light on the neural basis of free will. Forty cases of anarchic hand syndrome, nicknamed Strangelove syndrome after the unforgettable struggles of the Peter Sellers character in Kubrick’s 1963 film to control a wayward hand, have been described. Seemingly caused by damage to a frontal region called the supplemental motor area, most sufferers are at war with the affected limb, slapping, scolding or binding it. Although the concept of free will is a dicey one without a precise neurological basis, one way to conceptualize this syndrome is that a secondary, competing center of will takes over control of the hand. Other neurological syndromes result from “neglect”, in which damage to certain brain areas makes patients lose awareness of the fact (“deny”) that a certain part of their body belongs to them, with predictable results. But, in anarchic hand syndrome, in contrast, ‘ “the patients are aware of the bizarre and

potentially hazardous behaviours of their hand

but have great difficulty inhibiting it,” said

Professor Della Salla. “They often refer to the

feeling that one of their hands behaves as if it

has its own will but never deny that this

capricious hand is part of their own body.” ‘ Let me suggest another way to cut this cake. Might anarchic hand syndrome be a particularly dramatic challenge to the mistaken notion, or convenient fiction, we have of thinking that organisms have a unity of purpose in the first place? The Times; BBC Here‘s the result of a Google search on anarchic hand syndrome — not much. [Searching on Strangelove syndrome comes up with more hits, but they have nothing to do with neurology. Kubrick’s film seems to have become an icon for deepseated public fears of unbalanced military professionals and doomsday scenarios.]

Spiking the Gun Myth. The New York Times reviews Daniel Bellesiles’ Arming America, which deflates the myths evoked by current gun advocates about the early role of the gun in American life. Excerpt from the book:

The gun is so central to American

identity that the nation’s history has

been meticulously reconstructed to

promote the necessity of a heavily

armed American public. In the classic

telling, arms ownership has always

been near universal, and American

liberty was won and maintained by

the actions of privately armed

citizens. The gun culture has been

read from the present into the past.

Franklin Orth, executive vice

president of the NRA, told a Senate

subcommittee in 1968, ‘There is a

very special relationship between a

man and his gun — an atavistic

relation with its deep roots in

prehistory, when the primitive man’s

personal weapon, so often his only

effective defense and food provider,

was nearly as precious to him as his

own limbs.’ What, then, of the man

who does not have such a special

relationship with his gun? What kind

of man is he? And even more

frightening, what if we discover that

early American men did not have that

special bond with their guns?”

Judge orders pregnant women kept in custody, citing danger to fetus. The 8-and-a-1/2-month-pregnant woman, a member of a fundamentalist sect, is suspected of concealing the death of her last child through neglect. ‘The judge said he could sense what the child would say to him.

“I want to live. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die like my brother, Jeremiah, did,” Nasif said, according to Gerald FitzGerald, a prosecutor who

attended the closed hearing.’ The ACLU opposes the detention, citing the deprivation of the woman’s right to privacy. “The law does not require parents to undergo medical procedures to benefit their born children,” said ACLU attorney Sarah Wunsch. “It certainly

cannot force a pregnant woman to be treated on behalf of her fetus.” Nando Times

Cray for sale on eBay: “There is a Cray Y-MP C90 supercomputer for sale on eBay. The current

bid as this is written is US$44,500.69. The system features 16

processors, 4 GB of main memory, 4 GB of solid state storage, and 130

GB of RAIDed hard drive space. The original price in 1991 was $10

million.” Geek.com

NewsWatch is back, with a long article about the Renata Adler — Judge Sirica flap.

Tunku Varadarajan writes the rant about the media frenzy over Diana and her death that’s been needed ever since. “Yesterday was the third anniversary of the death, in a motor accident in Paris, of Princess Diana of

Wales. I am flooded with gloom.

The darkness of my mood, lest you misunderstand, comes not from a rekindled sense of loss. Instead, it

flows from my recollection of the vulgarity and gaudy grief that swept through our lives after the death of

that meretricious, banal and empty-headed woman.” WSJ

A lucid introduction to the philosophical discipline called model theory, one way of dissecting the nature of the relationship between language and world. Lingua Franca

Boston ‘s WCVB-TV is still on the fence about whether to carry the Dr. Laura show, which debuts in four days. And there’ll be no one more surprised than the anti-Schlessinger activists if the station breaks ranks and rejects the show. Boston Globe

Poor literal Texas, compelled to confer legal blessings on a lesbian marriage, because one of the women used to be a man. As Bexar County Clerk Gerard C. Rickoff

observed, “You are what you

are by your Creator.”

Thanks to a reader who suggested I look at this. Amazon is charging different prices on some DVDs to different consumers, or even the same consumer at different times. “Included among the determining factors, they said, was

which browser was being used, whether a consumer was a repeat or first-time customer and

which Internet service provider address a customer was using… Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith said the price differences on certain DVDs are the result of

tests that the company performs to re-evaluate various aspects of its Web site, such as the

navigation system, what the home page looks like, overall site design and product pricing.” One industry analyst described the pricing strategy as befuddling. I’ll settle for “just nuts”, not having gone to business school. Computerworld

An allegedly haunted Maryland castle was bought by a group of self-proclaimed ghost chasers who plan to monitor round-the-clock for paranormal activity, as well as rent out $250 rooms to chill-seeking guests.

R.U. Sirius on Whatever Happened to MONDO 2000’s Cyber Revolution. The mainstream overtook the fringe, in short. Wired hijacked Mondo’s constituency. But Sirius never stops waiting for resurgent glory days.

Thanks to David Brake for pointing me to the Brill’s Content “All-Star Newspaper”, a sort of news weblog. But, perhaps because of their conceit of putting the journalist’s name big and bold instead of any indication of the content of each of their items, I find it hard to read.

Reports: Saddam Hussain stricken with cancer. U.S. is skeptical of reports of his imminent death. Supposedly, he has handed over day-to-day leadership tasks to his son Qusay, the one who has personally directed the ethnic persecution of Iraqi Kurds and Shi’ites, ordering the deaths of hundreds. MSNBC

Internet music-file sharing news roundup: Scour contracts, MP3.com to be assessed damages, Napster suit appeal nears hearing.

Unfortunately, the way American courts have been ruling against

Internet technology recently doesn’t bode too well for Scour’s future,

even if it wasn’t having money problems. It’s unclear whether Napster

will be able to get Judge Patel’s harsh decision overturned on appeal,

even if the Appeals court actually listens to its arguments and allows its

evidence into the record this time (unlike Judge Patel). MP3.com is

probably going to get its hands slapped pretty harshly this week,

meaning it will have to spend even more money than it already has on

the other four settlements it worked out. Plus, I’m hoping that

MP3.com’s cave-in to the record companies that allows them to now

send spammy e-mail to MP3.com users will drive people away from the

MP3.com service completely. Put all this together with the recent

decision against DeCSS and 2600.com and you’ve got a legal climate in

America that is so anti-Internet file/knowledge sharing that even a

deaf, dumb, and blind investor knows to stay away from this for a

while. Geek.com

When it’s turned on, your cellphone is a handheld homing device, in case you didn’t know. And the ability to locate you in this way has alot of implications, from the tantalizing to the insidious. Geek.com

Evolutionary Psychology news: First, a portrait of the EP mailing list where “dangerous ideas thrive without the usual online rancor and hatred.” Salon And Randy Thornhill, whose work on the evolutionary underpinnings of rape I’ve blinked before, is too much to take for some at the Ars Electronica Next Sex symposium in Linz, Austria. Wired

Read about the aftermath when some Santa Clara County prison inmates fool with a homemade Ouija board. San Jose Mercury

The net is not the first threat to the survival of printed literature, says Tom, the Dancing Bug.

The current state of political oratory

Possibly we no longer even have the subject matter for a good speech.

Speech-making begs for large themes. The fate of nations, for instance. Some

excuse for a hint of outrage and demagoguery. It is not easy — and even harder

without PowerPoint — to make a compelling speech out of the administrative

themes of the age: health care, education, campaign-finance reform.

Of course, political discourse itself has become, in the inner circles of both

parties, almost entirely subverbal wonk talk and, in public, a list of painful and

ritualized clichés. “Twenty-first-century jobs need twenty-first-century schools . .

. Progress, not partisanship . . . Honor is not just a word but an obligation . . .

The hard right over the easy wrong . . . I remember a child . . .” New York Magazine

“Eighteen years ago, after a brutal little war, British commandos re-took the remote Falkland Islands

from the Argentine forces that had seized it.

Well… they’re back. Sort of. But undercover (or under the covers, for those preferring double

entendre) and sleeping with the enemy.” An Argentine director and his crew, posing as tourists, shot a clandestine film in Port Stanley with handheld digital video cameras, telling the story of “an Argentine man visiting

the islands with the aim of impregnating as many British women

as possible, thereby achieving the takeover that 72 days of fighting at a

combined cost of 891 lives and $2 billion could not… The director chronicles his

own (nine-day) creative commando raid into enemy territory” on his website (in Spanish). Inside

The “Lord Of The Rings trilogy will have subtitles when

elves speak in their own language, British star Ian McKellen has revealed.”

“The state of New York and billionaire cable industry

mogul Alan Gerry revealed plans yesterday to build a

performing arts center in upstate Bethel on the site of

the original Woodstock… While the design will harken back to the site’s hippie

past, unlike the original Woodstock festival, the arts

center will have toilets.” NY Daily News

GOP vice-presidential nominee Dick Cheney has accused

the Clinton administration of neglecting the military. Earlier

this year, Michael O’Hanlon argued that military readiness is

at least as good now as it was under President Reagan. Slate

“I’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday…”. Robert Cringely on how PayPal has won the battle to be the Internet’s payment system. And if you sign up on my referral, I get $5 in my PayPal account.

Space Scientists are on the Case. Law enforcement authorities have been collaborating with NASA to use image enhancement technology originally developed for the analysis of satellite video to dramatically improve the information yield from surveillance videos here on earth.

Coming back from vacation without my finger on the pulse, it’s hard to know if this is already old hat to everybody. It’s certainly important and sensational enough that it bears repeating. “The late Richard Nixon was under the influence of psychotic drugs for at least part of his presidency, to the point where his defence

secretary warned military commanders not to take his orders without

endorsement from another senior minister. The claim, supported by

the doctor who prescribed the drugs, is made in a new Nixon

biography…” They’re talking about Dilantin (phenytoin), which, to be sure, is not a “psychotic” drug (nor, more properly, an “antipsychotic”, which is what I think they were driving at) but an anti-epileptic medication that some used for mood stabilization, even though there is little evidence it is good for that and it has serious side effects, sometimes mind-altering ones. the Independent

The Emergency Email Network is a free public service that will notify you of natural disasters, other emergencies, organ and blood donation needs in your local area.

The hundred greatest pieces of 20th Century music, as NPR’s All Things Considered is profiling this year. Links to Real Audio files of the shows that have already aired. I’m listening to Louis Armstrong’s West End Blues as I type this…

Document Web Bugs Privacy Advisory: ‘The Privacy Foundation has discovered that it is possible to add

“Web bugs” to Microsoft Word documents. A “Web bug” could

allow an author to track where a document is being read and how

often. In addition, the author can watch how a “bugged” document

is passed from one person to another or from one organization to

another.’

Will Pseudo-Scandals Decide the

Election? The American Prospect

This bottom-feeding monstrosity of

a comedy

“…conjures more leering

euphemisms for male body

parts and sexual acts than any

film in recent memory.” New York Times

A fascinating-sounding new black-and-white documentary, Dark Days, just opened in New York. Stephen Holden reviews: “Most of this unforgettable

movie was filmed below

the streets of Midtown

Manhattan in a dank

Amtrak railway tunnel where a colony of around 75 homeless

put down roots, some for as long as 25 years, among the rats

and the garbage.” New York Times

Is there anyone out there not yet familiar with the Darwin Awards? “Darwin Awards celebrate Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution

by commemorating the remains of those who contribute to the

improvement of our gene pool by removing themselves from it

in really stupid ways.” One reader-submitted vignette describes “Why I’m the Last of Nine Children”.

After the venerable Tom’s Hardware Guide and others wrote of the new chip’s instability and their inability to get it to perform in benchmarking tests on any platform, Intel Admits Problems With 1.13 GHz Pentium III and recalls the chips. They’re not commenting on how many had been shipped already. Haste makes waste, and this feud with AMD to be the fastest surely makes haste.

Tne New York Times reviewer doesn’t like Margaret Atwood’s new novel, The Blind Assassin. But it’s an opportunity for the Times to pull together an anthology page of reviews of all of Atwood’s earlier work. One of her earliest, Surfacing, remains my favorite.

From the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Star TV CEO James Murdoch’s thoughts about how Anglo-American broadcasting misses the boat on how to grapple with a global market:

If I have to read another article about “Threats and Opportunities,” “Surviving in the Digital

Era,” “The New Realities of the New Economy,” or some such other angst-ridden twaddle,

I’ll just have to shoot myself. Americans are worrying about declining standards.

Europeans are worrying about their standards becoming American, and everyone is

worried about the Internet.

But the obsession with the above comes at the expense of a broader discussion that

shouldn’t be given such short shrift. Modern, so-called “Big Media” needs to grapple with

the basic worldwide demographic trends that will shape our industry, and all others, over

the next century, and indeed, well beyond it.

The pressing problem, as I would like to argue this evening, is that most media companies

have failed to understand what it means to be a global company. No where is this more

true than in the Anglo and American countries that have assumed that simply

broadcasting around the world, CNN-style, or exporting English language films, is a

sufficient global strategy.

Is there anyone out there not yet familiar with the Darwin Awards? “Darwin Awards celebrate Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution

by commemorating the remains of those who contribute to the

improvement of our gene pool by removing themselves from it

in really stupid ways.” One reader-submitted vignette describes “Why I’m the Last of Nine Children”.