The Last Green Mile “…When we wake up 20 years from now and find that
the Atlantic Ocean is just outside Washington, D.C., because
the polar icecaps are melting, we may look back at this
pivotal election. We may wonder whether it wasn’t the last
moment when a U.S. policy to deal with global warming
might have made a difference, and we may ask why the
party most concerned about that, the Greens, helped to
elect Mr. Bush by casting 97,000 Nader votes in Florida…

Throughout the campaign, the egomaniacal Mr. Nader — who
makes Ross Perot look selfless by comparison — justified
taking away votes from Mr. Gore by arguing that there really
wasn’t much difference between him and Mr. Bush. And, like
a good Leninist, Mr. Nader also didn’t seem to mind
destroying the Democratic Party to save it. Well, maybe
there didn’t appear to be much difference between the two
men — but there was a huge difference between the
hundreds of key people Al Gore and George Bush would
appoint to staff their administrations. And those hundreds of
people will make thousands of decisions that one day will
add up to a very big difference.” New York Times

Christopher Hitchens: Yes, We’re the Great Pretenders. “I’ve been tempted to exercise this right every time I hear some fool on TV say that the current fiasco proves what a wonderful system we have.
Please. Por favor. Je vous en prie. It proves nothing of the kind. What it does is expose the huge bias against democracy that is built into the
system. Those million uncounted votes in California would have elected two senators if they were cast in Montana or Delaware, thus enabling any
two tiny rural white states to outvote Illinois or New York, and would have elected no senators at all if they were cast in Washington, DC, which is
legally disfranchised. And even if the whole pile of absentee votes had gone to Bush in California, they would still have been “represented” by
exclusively Gore electors in the Electoral College. (Which is why the Republicans do not protest the injustice, since the Electoral College has
become their last best hope.) Other democratic countries do not watch in respectful awe as America avoids “blood in the streets” in a contest
between two bloodless candidates. Other democratic countries say, Wow, whatever system we may have, it’s not as flagrantly fouled up as the
Yankee one. If this were a seriously pluralistic system, a Gore-Nader coalition government would now be in the cards; a ridiculous notion I grant
you, but by no means as ridiculous as two hereditary princes simultaneously trying on the crown while going back to their corporate fundraisers to
hire fresh teams of attorneys. Meanwhile, one Pretender hasn’t even quit as governor of Texas and one Vice Pretender hasn’t resigned as senator
from Connecticut. ” The Nation

F.D.A. Approves New Ointment for the Treatment of Eczema. The topical version of a powerful immunosuppressant (used to suppress rejection in transplant recipients) proves useful in relieving treatment-resistent eczema, probably by suppressing the overactive immune response in the skin in eczema. Because the eczema returns after the ointment is stopped, there’ll probably be a temptation to use it continuously or open-endedly. It appears safe at one-year followup, but don’t get your hopes up. Based on my knowledge (although, of course, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing…), I’d predict that prolonged use might contribute to an increased long-range incidence of skin cancer in sun-traumatized skin. This is because the immune system plays a role in scavenging sun-damaged tissue that might otherwise turn cancerous. And eczema certainly occurs on sun-exposed skin. New York Times

See Spot Run, or Is That Spot’s Clone? “Now that human cloning is in the midst of
debate over the moral implications, the
genetic copying of pets is next on the list.” New York Times

In a nation that dreams it lives by the rule of law, those who stoop to conquer and their supporters are of course making claims on a daily basis of what the law mandates in the Florida vote count boondoggle. Two of the most recent examples — the claim that Florida law does not in fact give the Legislature the authority to mount a slate of electors if the results of the vote have not been certified by the deadline; and the argument that, in the Seminole County absentee ballot controversy, Florida law requires that all the absentee ballots be thrown out if some are found to be tainted. Of course, there’s that famous inconsistency about deadlines for recounts that started this whole thing off in the first place. In the face of the predictable partisan attempts to co-opt the law for one’s own ends, it’s inevitable for the courts to be involved sooner or later. But it appears that when the going gets tough for conservative politicans, the conservative jurists in the federal courts get going to explain why technical election-law provisions must take precedence when they help Bush win the White House, but should be set aside if they assist Gore’s case. consortiumnews

Yahoo’s collection of the news photos of the year. Surprisingly, it doesn’t include what was IMHO the single most spectacular picture of this or recent years — the elk silhouetted against the forest fire in the Bitterroot in Montana.

Humans did come out of Africa, says DNA. “Research
revealed in this week’s Nature lends
support to the idea that we appeared in
one location in sub-Saharan Africa and
spread from there, replacing
Neanderthals and other early humans as
we went.

Researchers led by Ulf Gyllensten of the
University of Uppsala in Sweden have found evidence that we are all
descended from a single ancestral group that lived in Africa about
170,000 years ago. And they suggest that modern humans spread across
the globe from Africa in an exodus that took place only around 50,000
years ago.

Gyllensten’s team didn’t scrutinize fossils to come up with these results —
instead the group examined DNA from living people around the world.”

Fooled again: The received wisdom is that human reasoning proceeds by formal rules. But Princeton psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird thinks that, while we can with much effort follow the rules of deduction, we usually don’t think that way, instead employing shortcuts — building “mental models” of the possibilities of a situation — that are much less energy-intensive. The problem is that that, if falsity enters into these models, logic fails us. Johnson-Laird feels this type of confusion may be responsible for some disastrous examples of human error, e.g. the Chernobyl meltdown and the downing of KAL fligot 007 after it strayed off course into Soviet airspace in 1983.

You might have experienced this logical breakdown while hiking
or driving with the aid of a map. If you are on course, then the
landscape you see corresponds to the features the map tells
you to expect. But if you find yourself off-course, working out
your location–and the way back to the right road–gets much
more difficult. You have to deal with false situations: if you
had been on the right track you would have seen a gate
leading into a wood, for example. But you didn’t, and
attempting to compare what you didn’t see with what you
should have seen leads you easily into confusion. Eventually,
you give up on the logical solution to your problem and head
onwards. When you do see something that relates to the map
working out your whereabouts becomes trivial. That’s because
it’s easier to deal with a true scenario than a false one.

The article contains some logic puzzles that may show you — they did me — how easy it is for reasoning to break down. New Scientist

The Simple Things in Life. “Humans like to believe that life is a very complex issue…. (but) perhaps we’re incredibly simple animals, destined to go round and
round according to a few simple rules…. Two separate studies
in the US have drawn the conclusion that planetary life cycles are in
fact much more simple than we ever imagined. In fact, for some
organisms, a straightforward game of paper-scissors-rock pretty well sums up their existence. Beyond 2000