A Bush Family Slip-Up. “The official story is that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has stayed out of his
state’s electoral fray. But his father thinks otherwise.” Consortium News

Australian humpback whales adopt new love song . ‘Male humpbacks migrating along the east coast have stunned scientists by
abandoning their signature mating song and adopting a new tune from a
small group of visiting Indian Ocean whales.

“There has been a cultural takeover by the west coast whales,” marine
scientist Michael Noad told Reuters today.

“What is staggering is that all the males have switched to the new song
which was brought over by a few ambassadors from the west coast,” said
Noad, co-author of a report on the musical revolution in the latest
issue of scientific journal Nature
.’ Environmental News Network

Review: Beethoven’s Hair
by Russell Martin. “Sometimes the truth really is stranger than fiction. More conspiring.
And more filled with coincidence than would be credible in a work
constructed purely through imagination. Russell Martin’s striking
Beethoven’s Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific
Mystery Solved
is like that.”

Do Remarkable Female Mutants Walk Among Us? . “Most people are trichromats, with retinas having three kinds of color sensors, called cone photopigments — those for red, green, and blue. The 8 percent of men who are color-blind typically have the cone photopigment for blue but are either missing one of the other colors, or the men have them, in effect, for two cone photopigment, for a color between red and green.

The theoretical possibility of this secret sorority — genetics dictates
that tetrachromats would all be female — has intrigued scientists since
it was broached in 1948. Now two scientists, working separately, plan to
search systematically for tetrachromats to determine once and for all
whether they exist and whether they see more colors than the rest of us
do.

Besides the philosophical interest in learning something new about perception, the brain, and the evolution of our species, finding a tetrachromat would also offer a practical reward. It would prove that the human nervous system can adapt to new capabilities. Flexibility matters greatly in a number of scenarios envisaged for gene therapy. For example, if someone with four kinds of color photopigments cannot see more colors than others, it would imply that the human nervous system cannot easily take advantage of genetic interventions.

For years now, scientists have known that some fraction of women have four different cone photopigments in their retinas. The question still remains, however, whether any of these females have the neural circuitry that enables them to enjoy a different — surely richer — visual experience than the common run of humanity sees. “If we could identify these tetrachromats, it would speak directly to the ability of the brain to organize itself to take advantage of novel stimuli,” says Dr. Neitz. “It would make us a lot more optimistic about doing a gene therapy for color blindness.”

Red Herring

In much of
the world, democracy
is still a ‘low-tech, old-economy business: ballots are
marked by hand —
with crosses or
stamps or fingerprints — and then counted by hand,
with an assortment of officials supposed to
guarantee impartiality looking on.

If manual counting is “subjective,” as George W. Bush
suggested this week, then global democracy is
overwhelmingly a subjective thing. ‘ New York Times

Carl Hiaasen writes in the Miami Herald about Rioting by GOP tourists “imported and paid for by the Republican Party
and the Bush-Cheney campaign” during the presidential vote recount — “It’s a page right out of the old Richard Nixon
playbook, the type of stunt favored by G. Gordon Liddy and the other dirty
tricksters.

The difference is, Liddy was smarter about covering his tracks.”

Will Irian Jaya be the next East Timor? International Herald Tribune

Two Men Shoot First, Figure It Out Later. One of these 20-year-olds in rural Manitoba brought home a bullet-proof vest and asked his roommate to shoot him in the chest, first with a .22 and then — pleased with the results — a 12-gauge shotgun. Luckily, they decided on the insurance policy of stuffing a phone book inside the vest for the second shot, and the target suffered only bruising and cracked ribs. Might’ve been a candidate for the Darwin Awards otherwise…

Criticism on the Job is a Pain in the Posterior…

“This month, things should get interesting.” Adbusters: Jamming Harper’s. The irreverent and profound social gadflies at Adbusters have made a cause celebre out of buzzing around Lewis Lapham’s ears since 1995, when they first took him to task for accepting Philip Morris’ ad support on a monthly basis in Harper’s, “a progressive voice of record.” Lapham fired back one volley over their bow but has consistently refused to be drawn into further debate. Now they’ve bought ad space in Harper’s for their anti-Philip Morris ad asking Why Are You Buying Your Food from a Tobacco Company?” “Now, we’re eager to find out: Will Philip Morris tolerate this
intrusion onto their traditional turf? Will they threaten to pull
their ads? Will the cozy, decades-long relationship between Harper’s and Philip Morris suddenly turn sour?”

Charles Taylor Interviewed. “Depending on your philosophical perspective, Charles Taylor is either the philosopher of
the self par excellence or the thinker who writes about everything else but the self. His
comprehensive conception of identity incorporates philosophical, historical, political,
sociological, anthropological, psychological, religious and aesthetic elements, stepping
across the boundaries that standardly separate philosophy from other disciplines.” Taylor finds that modern Western secular society is a stark forbidding place for a self to be. The Philosophers’ Magazine on the Internet

Lie Test: Bush 57, Gore 23: A portable polygraph meant for consumer use, claiming around 80% accurate detection of lies, was used by Time magazine reporters during the three Presidential debates. The Handy Truster, based on voice analysis technology originally developed for the Israeli military, said that Bush told 57 lies and Gore 23 during the three debates. Its manufacturers ‘…recommend using the product only as
a “decision-support tool” and strongly suggest that people use their common sense in
analyzing the results.’ [But if common sense were at play in the Presidential election process, we wouldn’t need a decision-support toll in the first place, right?] Wired

No Running, No Jumping: Christina Hoff Sommers, in her recent The War Against Boys, describes the public education system’s intolerance of “youthful male exuberance” and finds “misguided feminism” behind it. Discipline and medication are two of the inappropriate responses to this thinly-veiled notion that there is something wrong with being a boy. The educational system may be failing our sons. Hoff Sommers’ concerns counterbalance the notion of a “girl crisis” that has been

seized upon by feminists and promoted by leading academic experts.
Sommers examines the work of some of the “experts” and finds that it
is girls who are outperforming boys academically. Under the guise of
helping girls, many schools have adopted policies that penalize boys,
often for simply being masculine. Sommers says that boys need help,
but not the sort they’ve been getting. They need help catching up with
girls academically, they do not need to be rescued from masculinity.

Here’re the results of a Google search on coverage and discussion of the issues she raises. Dr. Carol Gilligan, professor of gender studies at the Harvard School of Education, whose research findings are directly criticized by Sommers, leads off a hefty set of responses in the Atlantic‘s letters column.

More on The Physics of Gridlock by Stephen Budiansky. If we accept that the gas dynamics model of traffic flow that various physicists have worked out is as good a simulation as they claim it is, spontaneous “sludging” of flow may be unavoidable and irremediable barring Orwellian control of the volume, speed and spacing of vehicular traffic. Atlantic

Art, Science and Postmodern Society. Arthur Pontynen, an art historian at the University of Wisconsin: “The tragedy is that American culture is increasingly Postmodernist, whether we identify ourselves as pragmatists or as persons of faith, as
defenders of tradition or as progressives. To ask about the practical value of the fine arts is to trivialize them as thoroughly as the rabid academic
deconstructionists who argue that standards and canons are simply tools of oppression and that all art is ultimately political. Both sides seek to
subsume art to base political purposes.

The Right wants to use art to “remoralize” the society, and the Left wants to use it for social therapy, to encourage “oppressed” groups. Moreover,
the assumption that sensible people called moderates avoid the extremes of both Left and Right offers no relief. The mean resulting from two
incoherent starting points is not golden; it has all the translucence of mud. …Whereas the Right and Left
both wish to censor art, moderate opponents of censorship trivialize art, by claiming that movies, books, and the like cannot harm people. If they
can do no harm, however, how can they do any good? Thus, opponents of censorship ironically trivialize the arts through the very arguments by
which they hope to protect them.

Postmodernism is so rampant a cultural contagion that it destroys not only our cultural health but our ability even to perceive our decline…By arguing that all statements are
political and therefore equally meaningful (and meaningless), Postmodernism undermines our ability to draw distinctions and, of particular note here,
to make value judgments.” American Outlook

Neurotransplantation of fetal tissue into patients with Huntington’s Disease showed evidence of significant benefit, in two studies from the University of South Florida and McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. ‘ “Everybody said ten years ago that this was outlandish — you
can’t transplant cells into a toxic brain (because) those new cells
will die,” Dr. Ole Isacson…, who helped direct the (McLean) study,
said in a statement.’ While excitement in neurotransplantation to combat a range of degenerative nervous system diseases continues, ethical concerns about using fetal tissues will probably limit the applicability of this technique in our abortion-polarized society. Fortunately, recent studies have shown that stem cells derived from adult bone marrow may be able to do the same trick, differentiating into healthy neural tissue.

Research to Develop Anti-Cancer Vaccine is Promising. Argentinian scientists have succeeded in ridding mice of tumor cells by injecting them with immune cells from healthy mice who had previously been provoked into an immune response against specially-treated colon cancer cells. Interestingly, promoting the rejection of the tumors in the recipient, ill mice worked regardless of what type of tumor they had.

“For the moment, this is just an experiment on animals which has
provided biological proof of a very important concept — that one
could imagine a single type of vaccine against cancer, against
different sorts of tumors,” Osvaldo Podhajcer, who led the team of
eight Argentine researchers and one British scientist, said on
Thursday.

Human trials could start soon.

Far Right Watch: Skinheads Sentenced for Temple Bomb in Reno. The five, self-professed white supremacists ages 19-26, received prison terms of up to 15 years in a plea bargain. Not succeeding in breaking a window of the synagogue before they tossed their molotov cocktail, they had only succeeded in scorching the sidewalk outside. AP

It is Cantwell in disputed Senate race in Washington State, and the U.S. Senate is 50-50. Reuters

“It covers everything except the exceptions and the exceptions
cover everything.” Enforcement of a law making English the official language of Utah was blocked by the courts today.

Ecomafia Dumping on Italy. Organized crime’s interest in trafficking in nuclear and radioactive materials is gaining rapidly on its involvement in the illegal arms and drug trade. An Italian environmental agency warns that Italy is sitting on a “radioactive waste bomb”; around 5,000 tons of radioactive metal waste originating in Eastern Europe finds its way into the country annually, most of it passed off as innocuous scrap metal. In 1998, the accidental smelting of radioactive metal scrap by a Spanish foundry spread a plume of cesium-137 across five European countries.
Wired

The Oddness of Oz: “The year 2000 is the centenary of a famous and much-loved but essentially very odd
children’s classic: L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Those who recall the story only from
childhood reading, or from the MGM film, have perhaps never realized how strange the
original book and its sequels are. New York Review of Books