“They ain’t alright just because they’re white.” “I’ve been involved in the so-called ‘right-wing’ for a number of years
now, but when I step back and look at our so-called movement, especially
more recently, I can’t help saying to myself, ‘Why am I surrounded by so
many misfits?’ “

How much of Blade Runner
has come true? “A new UN report suggests 1982’s rather bleak Blade Runner
may be in danger of proving all too accurate.” BBC

Clinton and Gore Clashed Over Blame for Election. Sources describe “uncommonly blunt language.” Gore blames Clinton’s sexual embarrassments for his loss, Clinton’s rejoinder is about Gore’s failing to run on the strength of the economy. Perpetuating or healing the crippling split down the middle of the Democratic Party? Washington Post

When Straight Means Weird and Psychosis is Normal. “Given the cultural overlapping of transgression and conformity, what
does it mean to be ethical anymore?” Britannica.com

Melting Arctic Permafrost May Accelerate Global Warming. ‘Global warming may be set to accelerate as rising temperatures in the
Arctic melt the permafrost causing it to release greenhouse gases into
the atmosphere, a United Nations scientist warned today. An estimated 14
per cent of the world’s carbon is stored in Arctic lands.

Svein Tveitdal, director of a United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)
center in Norway that monitors the region, reported that rising Arctic
temperatures are melting the solid structure of frozen soil known as
permafrost and releasing heat trapping greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere.

“Permafrost has acted as a carbon sink, locking away carbon and other
greenhouse gases like methane, for thousands of years,” Tveitdal told a
meeting of the United Nation’s Governing Council in Nairobi.’ Environmental News Service

Terrorism Watch: Greek Mythology? “The clock is ticking toward potential bloody disaster at the Athens
Games in 2004, the worst since the massacre of Israeli athletes at the
Munich Games in 1972. The International Olympic Committee is aware of
the danger but wants to keep it out of the public eye, as it tried to do
with drugs and corruption.”

Poking Holes in the Theory of ‘Broken Windows’. James Q.Wilson’s influential theory, popularized in a 1982 Atlantic Monthly
article, suggests that a zero-tolerance policy toward “neighborhood disorder” — physical decay and nuisance crime — is an effective way to bring down the overall crime rate. Police Chief William Bratton made a name for himself with his own implementation of this in New York City, and it has been credited for the much-ballyhooed dropping crime statistics of the last decade. But the “broken windows” theory appears to be based on specious reasoning and a dearth of empirical evidence, say critics from sociology, criminology and political science. (Among other things, the basic research design errors of confusing correlation with causation and failing to control for confounding variables play a hand here. ) The NYPD’s “order maintenance” program may be doing as much harm as good. Critics see “broken windows” as ‘a harmful, conservative philosophy masquerading as pragmatic and progressive public policy.’ Chronicle of Higher Education

Is the Shrub’s White House vacillating wildly on policy in controversial areas, e.g. between this and <a href=”http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010207/ts/bush_aids_dc_2.html
“>this position on closing the National AIDS Office? Or does the right
hand just not know what the right
hand is doing? Put it together with the story about Dubya demonstrating his lack of understanding of the nuances of the executive order he had signed about restricting funding for foreign abortion advocacy, and you wonder if anybody’s home at the White House and who’s running the show.

New Wild Camel Found on Chinese Nuclear Test Site. “A new species of camel that has adapted to survive on salt water has
been discovered in a remote region of salty sand dunes on the edge of
the Tibetan mountains. The wild camels were found in the middle of the
inhospitable and dangerous Kum Tagh sand dunes in China’s Xinjiang
province, north of Tibet…. The area in which they live was used by China for nuclear weapons
testing and has been, since 1955, off limits to people, allowing the
unique wild camels to survive. Since 1996 when tests were ended, miners
and hunters have been sowing land mines around the camels’ salty water
holes to take them for meat.” Environment News Service

Chance would be a fine thing: ”Walk into a research department in Cambridge, MIT or Stanford
nowadays,’ says Mike Lynch, Britain’s leading software entrepreneur and
a devout Bayesian, ‘and you will meet people who will tell you that
Bayes is more important than Marx and Einstein put together.’

For a quarter of a millennium Bayes’s theorem, or Bayes’s rule as it is
sometimes called, enjoyed a limited and mostly discredited role in
statistical mathematics. Recently, however, with the advent of cheap and
available computers, its influence has rapidly spread beyond the dull
grind of statistics to become something akin to a philosophical
movement, with an almost theological appeal. Yet it’s not a system of
belief so much as a means of measuring belief.’ Telegraph
<a href=”http://www.google.com/search?num=100?client=googlet&q=Bayes%27s%20theorem%2C%20or%20Bayes%27s%20rule
“>Here is the result of a Google search on “Bayes’s Theorem or Bayes’s Rule”.

Cameroon Attempts to Avert Natural Gas Disaster. Did you follow this mysterious and disastrous catastrophe in 1986? Hundreds living in a 25 km radius of this lake, Lake Nyos, died mysteriously and suddenly. At first it was hypothesized that there’d been a release of volcanic gas, but it’s been determined that it was a high concentration of CO2 dissolved in the lake water which suddenly let loose when the lake’s stratification was disturbed by seasonal weather changes; people and animals were suffocated by the cloud of CO2. Now that the cause has been figured out, CO2 levels are being constantly monitored and are again rising ominously. An international team has just completed the first of a projected five “degassing columns” which siphon up the CO2-rich bottom layer of water and release its dissolved gas in a controlled fashion. I wonder if the local inhabitants appreciate the nature of the threat under which they live and the effort being engineered on their behalf. Environmental News Service

Little relief for desperate citizens being driven round the bend : The Australian view of the state of things in New York revolves around the impossibility of finding a clean public toilet. “Restaurateurs complain that people order up big, use the lavatory and then do a runner before the appetisers arrive…. Desperate people have gone so far as to buy and actually drink New York coffee, which has a taste and consistency akin to warm sump oil, simply in order to use a cafe’s restroom.” New York budgeted $5 million last year to put in 100 public toilets. Not to gloat, but in contrast I just heard a news report that my hometown Boston has set aside $2 million for just eight — count ’em, eight — new public restrooms downtown; that breaks down to five times the cost per head (pun intended). Apparently, these are so expensive because they’re going to be totally self-cleaning, somehow or other. Sydney Morning Herald

Emerging Disease News: Woman in Canada Does Not Have Ebola, But Unknown Virus. It’s only a matter of time, though, it seems to me, before the virus is imported into North America. And other viral hemorrhagic fevers,some of them unknown as this unfortunate woman’s appears to be, are equally gruesome. Reuters