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

A New Star in the Sky: “Something in the heavens is growing brighter and it will
soon become one of the more eye-catching stars in the
night sky. No, it’s not a supernova. It’s the International
Space Station.”

Code breakers believe Poe puzzle solved after 150 years. The second of two coded messages left by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841 in a magazine where he was an editor, which he challenged his readers to decipher, has finally been decoded. The deciphered message is such a saccharin, trite passage that doubts are raised if it was even penned by Poe.

If you’ve ever thought that the man in your life was only half-listening, a new study shows your hunch correct.