How Nader and Gore can both win: What if frustrated Gore voters wasting their votes in states where Bush has a commanding lead “swap” votes with progressives in “swing states” where voting for Nader could lose the election for Gore? Slate

Today is the 793rd anniversary of the reputed birthday of Sufi mystic poet Jelaluddin Rumi.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

The Molecular Biology of Paradise

A mainstay of forensic science is on trial. Almost everyone accepts unquestioningly the power of fingerprint evidence in criminal investigation. Yet there appears to be no scientific justification to the assertion that each person’s fingerprints are unique. Moreover, fingerprint examiners rely on fragmentary, blurred, smeared and overlapped prints. They then proceed to

avoid statistics, rely on mere hunches,

and then …couch their conclusions in terms of absolute

certainty. The strongly held belief among FPEs that latent

fingerprints can be matched to one person alone, wrote David

Stoney in a 1997 legal practice manual, is “the product of

probabilistic intuitions widely shared among fingerprint examiners,

not of scientific research. There is no justification based on

conventional science, no theoretical model, statistics, or an

empirical validation process.”

The reliance on fingerprint evidence was nearly struck down in a recent court case, and there’s probably more to come. Lingua Franca

Gifted Children May Be Stressed Out. New research from this week’s meetings of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in New York suggests that teasing, social isolation, and other pressures take their toll on the gifted. The article appears to focus on the costs of subjecting children to “pull-out” programs as a means of providing educational enrichment. It appears to me to miss the most pervasive and insidious stress of being gifted, however. There is a great cost to “buying into” intellect or academic achievement as the sole basis of self-esteem, as most gifted children do in an “educational meritocracy” system. The effects on both identity formation and social relationships of such a stilted value system may take the better part of a lifetime to overcome, if ever.

This is from blogger.com: ‘…Odd, but true: there’s a nasty email virus circulating from the email

account ShysterAll@aol.com with a subject line “hahaha.. this is the funniest

blogger images in the world!!” There’s an attached file called blogger.exe, which

is actually the Backdoor.SubSeven virus. Don’t run this file under any

circumstances and make sure your antivirus program is up to date (though it

seems to only affect windows 98 users).’ [I don’t know about you, but I would never open any email message in whose subject line the subject and predicate don’t agree…]

Plasma magic:

“…Plasma is the height

of fashion in aerospace research.

The trouble with fashion is that it is based on the whims of

those who buy into it, and the amazing claims made for

plasmas have the insidious smell of Cold War hype about them.” New Scientist

Some details on the elaborate Microsoft hack. The Register

MIT’s Technology Review reflects on The Cell-Phone Scare and finds it irrational: “Eventually the anxiety-of-the-decade will fade, to be replaced in our minds and our newspapers by

a more up-to-date apprehension. It would be nice to think that eventually we’ll outgrow the cycle,

but I have to defer here to my late mother, who was a lay expert on anxiety. The time to really

worry, she used to say, is when things seem so good you have nothing to worry about.”

Is progression to complexity a necessary law of life itself? The Sunday Times of London

The NYT and the Washington Post Under the Microscope: A respected economist examining our fears about the coming bankruptcy of the Social Security system claims that ” the public is badly misinformed, because there is virtually no imaginable

economic scenario in which the program could not pay benefits.

The media, including the elite media, deserve much of the blame for the

public’s misperception.” Tompaine.com

Math Against Tyranny. A physicist has spent about two decades developing a formal theorem protecting the electoral college system against would-be reformers by “proving” that, “without this quirky

glitch in the system, our democracy might well have fallen apart long

ago into warring factions.” In other words, it protects us against real choice among true alternatives? [via Robot Wisdom]

“Europeans are terrified at

the prospect of a George W. Bush presidency and are

wondering if Americans have lost their good sense.

Canadians, too, are shaking in their boots. ” Thanks to a reader for pointing me to this commentary.

Several unsavory revelations about Gore’s presidential rivals hit last week and may give Gore a last-minute boost, according to this Online Journal commentary. The essayist hopes for more where this came from if the media start giving as much critical scrutiny to the other candidates as they have Gore. First, a new Rand Corp. study came out debunking the “Texas Eduational Miracle” phenomenon (based on an earlier Rand Corp. study) Dubya has been touting so highly in his campaign. Next, it is revealed that a company overseen until four months ago by Dick Cheney is under criminal investigation for fraudulent billing on federal contracts, i.e. bilking the government bigtime. And, with increasing attention to Nader’s role as a spoiler for Gore comes a proposal that he is actually more conservative than we give him credit for, according to an article by a senior fellow at the far-right National Center for Policy Analysis attempting to find a way to, as the saying goes, find a way to befriend the “enemy of my enemy.”

Looking Glass War. It turns out that the question of why a mirror “reverses left and right but not up and down” is a disturbing philosophical quandary that preoccupies serious thinkers. Read about it here and see what you think. My take on it is that the distinction comes from the fact that our eyes are on a horizontal and not a vertical axis with each other.

The editors of Lingua Franca are offering a new book, The Sham That Shook The Academy, about one of my favorite academic hoaxes of the decade. “In May 1996 New York University physicist Alan Sokal revealed that he had tricked the editors of the

fashionable academic journal Social Text into publishing a sham essay titled “Transgressing the Boundaries:

Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The essay was a parody of postmodernist

thought intended to demonstrate how little contemporary theorists and philosophers like Jacques Derrida

understand the science they invoke and, at times, criticize. The Sokal Hoax, as the event has come to be

called, instigated a scandal both inside and outside the academy that has had an enormous impact on

scholarship and is still debated today. Collected here for the first time are the most significant articles,

essays, letters, e-mail exchanges, and forums that have responded to and tried to make sense of the Sokal

Hoax. The original essay from Social Text is included, as are news stories from the United States and

abroad. Also featured are the views of a host of prominent intellectuals such as Michael Bérubé, Stanley

Fish, George F. Will, and Stanley Aronowitz, further responses from Alan Sokal and the editors of Social

Text, and informative panel discussions.” [You can find the (quite amusing) text of the original essay here.]

“After a ten-year fight, the “abortion pill” RU486 is finally available in the US. But the pill’s supporters fear theirs

may be a pyrrhic victory, because production of a second pill that has to be taken with RU486 is now under threat. Now that the US Food and

Drug Administration has approved mifepristone, attention has turned to misoprostol, a prostaglandin pill originally

developed to treat gastric ulcers.

Supporters of RU486 told New Scientist that they fear anti-abortion campaigners will target misoprostol supply

because, although it is officially produced to treat stomach ulcers, obstetricians use it to complete the abortion

process started by RU486.” New Scientist

New Orleans Patients Exposed to Rare Brain Disease. Sterilization of surgical instruments may not have prevented the transmission of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease [an incurable “slow virus” or prion disease related to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or “mad cow disease”), scrapie and kuru] from a neurosurgical patient later found to have had the disease to patients subsequently operated on with the same instruments. If the exposed patients are infected, it’ll be a horrific way to die.

And, after mad cow, rotten duck.