“When the Mars Rover sat and
stared at a rock, how do we know that the rock was not staring
right back? ” Life, but not as we know it. Astrobiology is all the rage, but “those in search of alien life could be barking up the
wrong planet…” The Guardian Here’s a link to the new NASA Astrobiology Institute.

Civilian on Sub, Marc Rich Linked. “One of the civilians aboard the submarine that sank
a Japanese fishing vessel is related to a Texas
oilman and big Republican Party contributor whose
company once did business with fugitive financier Marc
Rich.” That’s how the New York Daily News played the story. But the real meat is buried several paragraphs further down, IMHO: “Last week, after the Navy refused to release the names
of the civilians aboard the Greeneville…, a Bush
administration source told the Daily News there was a
‘tremendous amount of nervousness at the White House
about who these guys are.’ ” ..because they’re good ol’ Texas oil boys with ties to Bush, it seems! Meanwhile, “investigators are saying the
crew of the submarine Greeneville knew the
doomed Ehime Maru was sailing above them — more
than a full hour before the nuclear attack sub slammed
and sank the fishing vessel”, but that the”crewman who was plotting sonar readings also has
told investigators he was distracted by civilian guests
in the control room and halted his work.”

Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): U.N. War Crimes Court Convicts Bosnian Serbs in Rape Case. Legal precedent set; rape, in a guise a quantum level beyond isolated crimes against individual women, joins the family of crimes against humanity. The tribunal recognized that “… the rapes were
used by members of the Bosnian armed forces as an
instrument of terror, an instrument they were given free rein
to apply whenever and against whomever they wished.” This was an organized and well-orchestrated system of taking Muslim women into sexual slavery to destroy their people. New York Times

The “No Dubya” Logo by FmH reader Ed Fitzgerald.

Aibo special: Puppy Love for a Robot: “It sounds barking mad, but people are developing
relationships with their robot dogs, as though they were
real pets.

People are adopting Sony Aibos as more convenient
alternatives for travelers and renters who are barred from
having pets. Scientists are now even studying the robots to
see if they offer some of the therapeutic benefits of animal
ownership.”

“Aibo owners say their robot pets aren’t just curiosities; the
metallic mutts are actually becoming family members. Leander Kahney talks about how owners can become ill
when the doggies won’t boot up and are forming support
groups.” (.MP3 audio) Doctor Fun knows all about that issue. [via Dan Hartung]

“Aibos are cute interactive pets that can provide hours of
entertainment. But can they also be used to keep tabs on
children and seniors? Leander Kahney talks with
human-robot experts.” (.MP3 audio) Wired

If you write with a fountain pen (one of my fetishes; I write alot in connection with my day job, and want it to be pleasurable), you’ll appreciate this writer’s thoughtful comparative review of black fountain pen inks. [via Red Rock Eaters]

A Moderate Wouldn’t Make Appointments Like These. ‘It may be legal, but it’s still a coup d’etat. The nomination of Theodore B. Olson
to be solicitor general, a position of such influence that it is often referred to as “the
10th member of the Supreme Court,” affirms that President Bush has turned the
U.S. judiciary over to the far right.’ LA Times In a similar vein: A Bush nominee who should
not be treated gently: “How should Democratic senators act at Olson’s confirmation
hearings? Well, how would Republicans act under like circumstances?” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

How to Write an Op-Ed: “Editors have some very concrete requirements for selection, more or less in this order:

a provocative idea on any subject

an opinion on a current issue that is controversial, unexpected, authoritative and/or news

a call to arms on a neglected subject

bite and wit on a current issue”

I checked several times to be sure this wasn’t from a newspaper dated April 1st. Please tell me this is a joke! New York Times Update: It is.

Bush on Stage: Deft or Just Lacking Depth? We already know the answer to that rhetorical question. The deftness is his handlers’; left to his own resources, he’s a lightweight and a bungler with a slightly panicked tone around whether he’ll be able to stick to the talking points with which he’s been prepped. That’s why it’ll be a long while before he fields questions at a press conference and, oh what a performance that’ll be! Michael O’Hanlon, defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, observing his justification of the Iraqi airstrike, said he “seemed to merge different concepts in his head in a random and somewhat illogical way,” e.g. saying that enforcing the no-fly zones was keeping Saddam Hussein bound to the Gulf War peace accord, when it is nothing of the kind. Republican aides seem to be going to extraordinary lengths to explain and even glorify Dubya’s brevity of response, pointing out that the Americans appreciate someone so to the point and that the public has a limited attention span. And, you know, I think they’re right about that. I continue to rail about his intellectual shortcomings without ever remembering that I’m probably barking up the wrong tree. It’s not that the public doesn’t realize, it’s that they don’t care how lightweight he is. Anti-intellectualism carries the day, and the people who think are likely to be the most disenfranchised — and enraged — in the Age of the Shrub. Washington Post

No coverage of the Grammys here. They’re about as meaningful as the Oscars.

To my mind, this clemency scandal is more telling than Clinton’s philandering, direct abuse of the machinery of power that it is. Clinton Tells Relative to Return Pardon Money. “Former President Clinton
disclosed that two felons to whom he granted clemency on his last
day in office paid large legal fees to his brother-in-law, but he
denied prior knowledge of the payments and directed the money be
given back.” Reuters It’s not like Bill and Hillary aren’t going to reimburse Hugh Rodham under the table for returning the money anyway, is it?

Into the Mystic

After spending 8 years training in the meditative practices of Zen
Buddhism, neurologist James H. Austin spent a sabbatical year from 1981
to 1982 at the London Zen Center. On a pleasant March morning, while
waiting for a subway train on a surface platform and idly glancing down the
tracks toward the Thames River, Austin got his first taste of spiritual
enlightenment.

Instantly, the panorama of sky, buildings, and water acquired a sense of
what he calls “absolute reality, intrinsic rightness, and ultimate perfection.”
He suddenly shed his formerly unshakable assumption that he was an
individual, separated from the rest of the world by a skin suit. The sky and
river remained just as blue, the buildings just as gray and dingy, yet the
loss of an “I-me-mine” perspective imbued the view with an extraordinary
emptiness, he says.

Within seconds, other insights dawned. These included the notion that
Austin had experienced an eternal state of affairs, had nothing more to
fear, couldn’t possibly articulate what had happened, and felt a rush of
mental release that impelled him to take himself less seriously.

In Zen and the Brain (1998, MIT Press), Austin described how this brief
experience spurred him to investigate brain processes that underlie
spiritual or mystical encounters. Science News

Verbal abuse: “My lawyer’s card is in my wallet, can you get me
my wallet?” and “I want my lawyer” express the same thought, but there are situations in which you’d better know the difference. New Scientist

“Violence is seasonal, peaking in late summer and at its lowest ebb in spring, shows an audit published in the Emergency
Medicine Journal. Violence towards women has also been increasing.

Data on community violence were collected from a random sample of 33 accident and emergency departments across England
and Wales between 1995 and 1998.” Because of the proportion of violence that goes unreported to the police, an emergency department is in a unique position to study trends, as opposed to analysis of law enforcement data. EurekAlert

In the beginning was the bit. In the face of conflicting philosophical interpretations of how reality squares with quantum physics —

In the
Copenhagen interpretation, the outcome of an experiment is
only revealed when the quantum system interacts with a
macroscopic apparatus in the laboratory, which eliminates all
possibilities but one. The many-worlds interpretation insists
that all possible outcomes of an experiment actually occur in
as many parallel universes, but as we only occupy a single
branch of the hydra-headed multiverse, we experience only
one outcome. Or, if you prefer, there’s the guiding wave
interpretation, which assigns an undetectable “pilot wave” to
each particle to steer it along a perfectly determined path.
Altogether there are at least eight serious and reputable
interpretations of the theory, which implies that no single one
is convincing.

— a University of Vienna theoretical physicist thinks that the key may be, in essence, to consider bits of information to be the quintessential building blocks of physical reality; giving new meaning to the poetic notion that the world is as we see it subjectively? The essay describes how this paradigm accounts for fundamental quantum mechanical principles. New Scientist

Again? Life on Mars? “The Allan Hills meteorite from Mars is peppered with tiny
magnetic crystals that on our planet are made only by bacteria.”

Ecological Integrity: ‘Applying the “polluter pays” principle, a Cornell University ecologist and author suggests a way to improve the
environmental sustainability of agriculture: Levy taxes according to food-chain ranking so that products with the worst environmental
impact cost the most.

“We should internalize the costs of dietary preferences. If one chooses to eat high-impact food, one should pay the full costs of such a
choice,” says David Pimentel, the professor of ecology and agricultural science who is a co-editor and co-author of the newly published
book Ecological Integrity: Integrating Environment, Conservation, and Health‘.

RIP Donella Meadows (1941-2001), a founder of the sustainability movement in environmental thinking and lead author of the seminal ecological tract, The Limits to Growth (1972). Trained as a chemist and biophysicist, she taught global trend analysis and system dynamics at Dartmouth and was no stranger to information science; the Limits to Growth project was in no small part a computer modelling effort. She was a recipient of a MacArthur ‘genius grant’ for her work, and participated in an international group of scientists which “built early and critical avenues of exchange between scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War.”

How Do Women Rule? …Just Like Men: “Christine Stolba says folks who believe women rulers are nicer don’t know
their herstory.”

Want to raze a village? Boadicea, England’s warrior queen, was just the gal to
get the job done. A revered figure and a sentimental favorite of Victorian
painters, Boadicea is commemorated by a statue that stands on Westminster
Bridge, near the Houses of Parliament. She is remembered for her bravery in
leading a revolt against her country’s occupiers, the Romans, in 60 A.D. Alas,
recent discoveries at an archeological dig near Colchester—a town seized and
destroyed by Boadicea—led dig director Philip Crummy to compare Boadicea’s
program and tactics to “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans.

Independent Women’s Forum

The California attorney general backs an Oakland cannabis distribution club “in its fight with the federal government over medical marijuana…, arguing that the state has the right to enforce its medical marijuana law,
which was approved by voters in 1996.” AP