S-weeds: Eva Ekeblad, from Göteborg Sweden, has been going out each day and finding a weed in the vicinity of her home, identifying it, and scanning it in. “Persistent walking with eyes to the ground.”

Junkscience.com focuses on the “faulty scientific data and analysis used to further a special agenda. The junk science ‘mob’
includes:

The MEDIA may use junk science for sensational headlines and programming. Some members of the media
use junk science to advance their and their employers’ social and political agendas.

PERSONAL INJURY LAWYERS may use junk science to bamboozle juries into awarding huge verdicts. Large
verdicts may then be used to extort even greater sums from deep-pocket businesses that may be fearful of
future jury verdicts.

SOCIAL ACTIVISTS, such as the “food police,” environmental extremists, and gun-control advocates, may use
junk science to achieve social and political change.

GOVERNMENT REGULATORS may use junk science to expand their authority and to increase their budgets.

BUSINESSES may use junk science to bad-mouth competitors’ products or to make bogus claims about their
own products.

POLITICIANS may use junk science to curry favor with special interest groups or to be “politically correct.”

INDIVIDUAL SCIENTISTS may use junk science to achieve fame and fortune.

INDIVIDUALS who are ill (real or imagined) may use junk science to blame others for causing their illness.”

Update: Dan Hartung, in a comment on this post, observes that it is “run by a Cato Institute libertarian.” Certainly don’t want to be inadvertently furthering their special agenda, but for a thinking person a halftruth is still usable…

Bembo’s Zoo is a delightful and beautiful abecedary children’s book by Robert deVicq de Cumptich that will appeal to typographically inclined grown-ups too. The website should be viewed with a child on your lap, especially if you have Flash installed.

“In this first book for children, de Cumptich… has created an abecedary of animals made entirely from Bembo letterforms and punctuation marks — nothing else. And you know, the conceit works.” — New York Times

The exodus from Blogger has begun. Today, I’ve noticed a number of people migrating to greymatter. I downloaded it last week but, alas, my website host doesn’t allow me to run custom Perl scripts without a costly upgrade in my service. Here‘s the weblog of Noah Grey, the author of greymatter.

International Necronautical Society: “…death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and,
eventually, inhabit.”

Reprinted in its entirety, the neologism of the day from Looka!: The word “embushen“,
contributed to the language by a fellow named Steve on
soc.motss, who exhorts us to “please make a point to use this
word as often as is appropriate in your daily conversations.”

Main Entry: em.bush.en

Pronunciation: im-‘bush-&n

Function: verb

Etymology: As derived from George W. Bush

Date: January 19, 2001

1 : to imbue with an attribute of stupidity, ineptitude
and incompetence

It Takes Training and Genes to Make a Mean Dog Mean. [The icing on the cake of this article is in bold below]:

About four million to five million people are bitten
each year by the nation’s 55 million to 59 million dogs,
according to statistics compiled by the Humane Society of
the United States and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, which consider dog bites epidemic.

The reason for the bites vary. Some are clearly accidental,
or the dog is provoked, while others result from various
forms of abnormal aggression in the dog.

Perhaps more significant, a statistical analysis by researchers
at the Humane Society, the C.D.C. and the American Medical
Veterinary Association and published in the Sept. 15 issue of
The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association
shows that between 1977 and 1998, pit bulls and Rottweilers
accounted for more than half of the 238 fatal attacks on
humans.

That same study shows that since 1975 dogs representing
more than 30 breeds have engaged in such attacks. Because
so many types of dog can be involved in fatal attacks,
including, in the past year, a Pomeranian and Lhasa apso,
experts in dog behavior have consistently argued that
outlawing specific breeds fails to address the greater
problem of all dogs that pose a threat to people and other
animals.

New York Times

What, Geeks at M.I.T.? Not With This Class The university offers an annual one-day “charm school” to counter nerdy image of its students. New York Times

Wanted: Employee Willing to Snooze on the Job

Government Revises HIV Treatment Guidelines. The good news is that AIDS experts are retreating from the “hit hard, hit early” dictum that has governed AIDS treatment in recent years. This means that the HIV(+) patient can wait longer before starting on the rigorous and burdensome multidrug regimen; findings suggest the immune system can hang on for longer than had been believed. The bad news is that this is an admission that the protease inhibitors are not a cure and, once someone starts taking them, they’re likely going to be on them for life. So putting off initiating treatment is a way of reducing attendant side effects, which include cardiovascular liabilities.

Use your Bush-era tax cut to buy a boat: Polar Ice Sheet Shows Shrinkage. “Scientists have worried for decades that
the Antarctic ice sheet was shrinking, threatening a global rise
in sea level. Now, satellite studies show that about 7.5 cubic
miles of ice have eroded from a key area in just eight years.”

Powell alters Bush campaign pledges, already. BBC

“It’s about time you had a say in what you are wearing. Make your mark!” Bid to personalize sneakers has Nike sweating. Although Nike’s website invites fans to “build your own shoe”, the company invoked its right to refuse the request of a customer who wanted the word “Sweatshop” on his personal shoe “to remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes.” It was abit hard for them to find a justification in their own fine print, but they sputtered on; San Jose Mercury Center here’s the email exchange.

ACLU Action Alert: Legislation Would Entangle Government and Religion — a campaign to oppose Dubya’s “faith-based initiative”. Since courts have allowed religious institutions to discriminate
on the basis of their beliefs and teachings in such areas as race,
religion, sexual orientation, gender and pregnancy status, funneling an expanding slice of the existing social services pie to faith-based organizations (after all, you don’t really think there’s going to be an expansion of social needs funding, do you? It’s not even likely we’re going to maintain current levels of expenditure on our most needy!) would result in taxpayer-funded
discrimination in social services employment and service delivery. The alternative in this devil’s bargain would be increasing regulation of religious institutions and loss of traditional autonomy of religious practices. Furthermore, a proportion of the delivery of social services would inherently shift from licensed and trained professionals to those in ministry who, for example, see drug addiction as a sin rather than a mental health problem. With a single click from this site, you can fax your U.S. Senators and Representatives, as well as the President himself, to make your feelings on ths issue known.

Here‘s the entire range of ACLU civil liberties concerns facing the 107th Congress, subject to your similar one-click action.

The Search for Another Earth: “NASA is currently mulling over a proposal that could help answer a question that has
divided astronomers since we began looking skyward: Are we alone?

The proposal is called the Kepler Mission and both proponents and opponents of the
project say it could change the way we see the universe.

The Kepler Mission, proposed by the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in
Sunnyvale, California, wants to search for potentially life-sustaining planets by launching
a telescope that would orbit around the sun in 2005. For four years, the telescope would
monitor 100,000 stars contained in an area of the sky equal to the size of a human hand
held at arm’s length.” Wired

Scientists Seek Sense of Balance “Can rich social environments protect against dementia and cognitive decline?” The Scientist

Hidden meanings of the initials of New York City using Microsoft fonts. [via MetaFilter]

Who Let the Cat Out?

Thanks to LingMachineGo for pointing me to David Icke’s reaction to the accession of the Shrub: Another Shapeshifter in the White House: ” The Bush inauguration marks the start of the massive push by the Illuminati to further their agenda for a
global fascist state. You will see this clearly unfolding in the next 24 months and, as usual, watch what
they do, not what they say. The Bush administration will be a cold, calculating, vicious, period of human
history. I know people who have met the Shrub during his period as Governor of Texas and cold,
calculating, and vicious, as well as staggeringly unintelligent, are words they chose to describe him. But
those who will be dictating the actions of his presidency make him look like a puppy dog. Or maybe
lapdog would be more appropriate.” And here is Icke’s self-justification.

Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): Father Who Killed Sons Finds Way to Deepen Their Mother’s Grief New York Times

A Brand of Tap Dance Springing From Europe’s Streets sounds like an exciting reinvigoration of the art. New York Times

The Body Artist, Don DeLillo’s new, short, ‘pamphlet’ of a novel (at 124 pp.), seems uncharacteristically weightless until you dig beneath the surface, says Adam Begley in this complimentary review. And, as usual, a New York Times review of a major author’s new work is the occasion for a feature page linking to reviews of his earlier books and articles about and by him, as well as an audio reading and interview with the author.

Who’s afraid of Falun Gong? In this interview, progressive journalist Danny Schechter (when I was in college in the early ’70’s, he was “the news dissector” on underground rock radio station WBCN in Boston), whose recent book Falun Gong’s Challenge to China has been called a whitewash by the New York Times, explains why it’s not the cult it’s made out to be and why the Chinese are so afraid of the movement some call the most effective protest against the Chinese regime since Tiananmen. This in the aftermath of the recent attempted self-immolation by five sect members, including a 12-year-old girl, protesting continued Chinese suppression of the sect (an act which the sect has publicly disavowed), and, in one of his first official acts as Secretary of State, Colin Powell’s criticism of China’s stance, which drew a bitter rejoinder from its Foreign Ministry. Salon

Who’s afraid of Falun Gong? In this interview, progressive journalist Danny Schechter (when I was in college in the early ’70’s, he was “the news dissector” on underground rock radio station WBCN in Boston), whose recent book Falun Gong’s Challenge to China has been called a whitewash by the New York Times, explains why it’s not the cult it’s made out to be and why the Chinese are so afraid of the movement some call the most effective protest against the Chinese regime since Tiananmen. This in the aftermath of the recent attempted self-immolation by five sect members, including a 12-year-old girl, protesting continued Chinese suppression of the sect (an act which the sect has publicly disavowed), and, in one of his first official acts as Secretary of State, Colin Powell’s criticism of China’s stance, which drew a bitter rejoinder from its Foreign Ministry. Salon

Who’s afraid of Falun Gong? In this interview, progressive journalist Danny Schechter (when I was in college in the early ’70’s, he was “the news dissector” on underground rock radio station WBCN in Boston), whose recent book Falun Gong’s Challenge to China has been called a whitewash by the New York Times, explains why it’s not the cult it’s made out to be and why the Chinese are so afraid of the movement some call the most effective protest against the Chinese regime since Tiananmen. This in the aftermath of the recent attempted self-immolation by five sect members, including a 12-year-old girl, protesting continued Chinese suppression of the sect (an act which the sect has publicly disavowed), and, in one of his first official acts as Secretary of State, Colin Powell’s criticism of China’s stance, which drew a bitter rejoinder from its Foreign Ministry. Salon

Landlord created ‘noise machine’ to drive tenants out. “A landlord who wanted to get rid of a family renting a flat in his
building rigged up a ‘banging machine’ to annoy them so much
they would leave.

A court in Germany has heard that the plan came unstuck
when he went out himself because of the noise – and the family
from Geretsried called the police. Ananova

Caffeine ‘reduces productivity’ “Office managers who want to get the best out
of their workers should put a limit on how much
coffee and tea they drink each day.

Researchers have found that caffeine intake
may be partly to blame for office workers’ poor
performance.” The research was supported by Volvic bottled water… BBC

Report: DEA’s Latin drug operation’s numbers show discrepancies. They attempt to score a public relations coup with cooked-up statistics that don’t bear up to investigation at all.

Could the Scientists Be Wrong on Madcow Disease? One of those mavericks-bucking-the-received-wisdom stories, but credible enough to keep track of. New York Times

Doctor’s Doctor Home. IMHO, these two pathologists use the language of empowerment —

Patients should be more in charge of their own care. One way to do this is to learn as much about your
disease as you can. Much of the information you need is already accessible, you just need to ask for it.

The laboratory, surgical pathology, and cytology reports are your property, but most patients do not ask for
copies. This web site is dedicated to keeping patients informed and in control.

— to prey on patients’ fears and take them for a ride. After they hook you in, you get to the heart of their site, where they offer to “translate” your pathology report or lab test results “into plain English” for $50 a pop. Save your money, I’ll empower you for free: as this web site points out, you should feel free to request a copy of any of your lab tests or pathology reports; it’s your property and you have a right to it for the asking. But the appropriate physician to get to interpret it is your own, with whom you have a treatment relationship. S/he knows the particulars of your health situation which can put the lab values in context, the most medically responsible way to interpret them for you. (A generic interpretation reminds me of the booklets you can buy on the corner newsstand offering “cookbook” interpretations of your dreams.) Most physicians should be willing to do this with you, and if yours doesn’t satisfy you in this respect, then be empowered enough to consider finding a different doctor.

And, in related news, the New York Times says Talking Back to Doctors is Good Medicine, warning that the baby boomers are poised to become uppity senior health consumers.

Curiouser and curiouser: Killer Dog Linked to Ring Run by Inmates. “What first looked like a terrifying
tragedy–young woman killed by rogue dog–has
revealed an illegal guard dog-breeding operation run
from behind the walls of the state’s most secure prison,
law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
Authorities investigating the death of Diane Whipple,
33, are on the trail of a bizarre story, complete with white
supremacists, a surprise adoption and the Mexican Mafia.” LA Times

The founder of the field of cognitive ethology is No Longer Alone in daring to say that animals other than humans have consciousness and thoughts. New York Times

Salon reviews a laundry list of Democratic ills; is the party Riding a road to nowhere? “While the Republican president tries to broaden his party’s
tent, critics are wondering aloud whether Democrats are
folding their party’s tent altogether.” And the New York Times sees the Democrats Shift into Reverse with “the
Democratic National Committee’s
expected election tomorrow of Terry
McAuliffe as chairman. Mr. McAuliffe is
a walking symbol of the wretched excess of the Clinton
years. He raised millions in special-interest money for
President Clinton’s campaign. He made it clear that no
amount of presidential misconduct would sour him on Mr.
Clinton. Now he is promising to lead the entire party on a
quest for big bucks, and he is also expected to push Mr.
Clinton forward as a principal party spokesman during the
presidency of George W. Bush. With Mr. Clinton in that role,
the D.N.C. might as well vote to give the Bush White House
a permanent deed to the character issue.” And, speaking of his endearing character, the Boston Globe reports that Dubya is inviting Democrats out on dates these days.

Who’s afraid of Falun Gong? In this interview, progressive journalist Danny Schechter (when I was in college in the early ’70’s, he was “the news dissector” on underground rock radio station WBCN in Boston), whose recent book Falun Gong’s Challenge to China has been called a whitewash by the New York Times, explains why it’s not the cult it’s made out to be and why the Chinese are so afraid of the movement some call the most effective protest against the Chinese regime since Tiananmen. This in the aftermath of the recent attempted self-immolation by five sect members, including a 12-year-old girl, protesting continued Chinese suppression of the sect (an act which the sect has publicly disavowed), and, in one of his first official acts as Secretary of State, Colin Powell’s criticism of China’s stance, which drew a bitter rejoinder from its Foreign Ministry. Salon

Bush II: Smells like the ’80s!

But even if the president were inclined to represent the will
of the people in 2001, how would he know what it is? He is
known to be averse to books, television, movies, travel,
culture, public policy, work and staying awake for extended
periods of time. Indeed, some have wondered what it is
exactly that the president does with all his spare time. Could
“napping” be a euphemism for “protracted coma”? Are we
in fact living in the early days of the van Winkle
administration?

“Plus: Advertising makes a hard
right” [this is funny] “and an elitist lefty gives rhetoric tips to nonelitist
righties” [and this is pitiful]. Salon

The seat of power: if any of these are going at fire sale prices as new startups close, I need a new desk chair from which to pilot FmH. Boston Globe

The American Jobs Machine: One of the measures of the quality of the ‘new economy’ can be found in a closer examination of the nature of the jobs it creates. The authors, University of Wisconsin sociologists, find a pattern of “low road capitalism” with racialized job polarization and expansion of the “working poor.” They argue that “the pattern of job expansion is not some “natural” result of the
operation of efficient markets, but the inevitable result of all sorts of public
policies: the nature of the tax code, the institutions of skill formation, the
regulation of the employment contract and working conditions, the minimum
wage, and laws regulating unions. The task of government is to design such
policies in such a way as to rebuild social mobility and expand job
opportunities in the middle of the employment structure.” In particular, they suggest that, for the first time since the New Deal, expansion of jobs in the public works sector, considered increasingly necessary with the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and increasingly economically feasible with growing budget surpluses, may be a politically and socially useful direction to consider. Public policy decisions can also “close off the low road and pave the high road”, they argue. Boston Review

You have to believe in something. “Lewis Wolpert argues that beliefs may
come from our genes and we have a
fundamental need to tell ourselves
stories to make sense of life.” If causal thinking is preordained biologically, it is no surprise that irrational beliefs hold such sway, and Skeptics will always face such an uphill battle. Certainly, while beliefs differ tremendously, it is quintessentially human to explain things, make sense of them and believe in our explanations. Telegraph

In my psychiatric practice and teaching about psychosis, I’ve reached similar conclusions to Wolpert. It’s never easy, and a source of endless debate, to figure out which psychiatric symptoms (especially in the severe illnesses we call psychotic) are the so-called “primary” manifestations of a disease process’s alteration in brain function, and which are “secondary” — attempts of the mind at restituton in the face of the dysfunction. I firmly stand on one side of the deep controversy in psychiatry surrounding delusional beliefs — with the assertion that they are not primary psychotic symptoms. Instead, they are the attempts at restitution — a bewildered mind finding a way to “believe in something” in the face of the dysfunction of the machinery for making sense of things. For example, if you’re overcome by terrifying paranoid feelings of danger, it’s much more powerfully tempting and comforting to have an explanation (no matter how outlandish and no matter to what extent it sacrifices consistency with reality or consensus) than to have no explanation at all for how you are feeling. So you’ll come to believe, for example, that those people lurking on the corner across the street are CIA agents who have you under surveillance — and that that’s why you are feeling these frightening bewildering feelings of being in danger.

Figuring out whether delusions are primary symptoms of the alteration in brain function in the illnesses in which they occur has important clinical consequences in how we treat these disorders. I contend that treatments of psychosis, especially the powerful and effective antipsychotic medications we have at our disposal, never change delusional thinking, because once formed beliefs are very compelling and we abandon them only with great difficulty and at great cost even if the occasion for them has passed. Perhaps this “conservation of belief”, as I call it, speaks to Wolpert’s assertion of a biological determinism driving it. In any case, the implication is that we should stop throwing medications at a patient expressing fixed delusional beliefs if that’s his or her only “symptom”; instead, a focus on slower, cognitive measures for belief-changing is called for.

There is precedent for this distinction between primary symptoms and compensatory beliefs from other areas of psychiatry where it is more generally accepted. Panic disorder is a crippling condition with explosive spontaneous outbursts of severe anxiety. Along with it, patients often develop agoraphobia, the fear of going out, because they become convinced that certain places or activities away from the security of their home and family will bring on the panic attacks. Even when these patients have become completely free of panic attacks with the use of the appropriate medications, the agoraphobic avoidance persists as a fixed belief. The patient cannot be convinced that, because their susceptibility to panic attacks is stabilized, they no longer have to avoid the feared exposure. No medication can correct this, but rather only a variety of cognitive therapy approaches.

Well, enough of getting technical on you…

Hunting Web Rumors: ‘A Swiss online marketing company called Agence Virtuelle has created
RumorBot, a software robot intended to uncover the source of rumors
on the Internet. Using 44 autonomous agents (small programs),
RumorBot scans the Web, newsgroups, chat rooms, and listservers for
target words and phrases and then determines posting dates and
origins, a “chain of evidence” for malicious content (e.g., the Emulex
false press release scandal).’ Geek.com

Levi Strauss asked to apologize for Super Bowl ad which apparently (I didn’t see the ad) makes light of the plight of those awaiting organ donation. 74,000 people are on a national waiting list for an organ transplant, and 16 of them die each day because an organ is
not available to them, according to the executive director of a national organ donor registration organization. How about an ad from Levi Strauss in penance — it doesn’t even have to be aired during the Super Bowl — that, in addition to an apology (designed to restore lost sales) gives people the contact information for an organ donor registration organization? Nando Times

If you’ve sat here in the US in recent months watching the chances for a reasonable government slip through your fingers, imagine how it must feel for reasonable Israelis slouching toward Ariel Sharon’s election. I’ve heard several American commentators wishfully invoke
“only-a-Nixon-could-go-to-China” hopes, but it appears that most Israelis aren’t electing Sharon because they believe he is the only one who can make peace with the Palestinians, despite an almost singleminded focus on the peace process in the election campaign. Instead, the election is a disappointed and embittered personal rejection of Barak for his “addiction to a diplomatic formula that by now has been
empirically proven unworkable.” The only debate among those Israelis who hope for peace seems to be whether there will be any prospects left after Sharon, who says ominously “I know the Arabs and they know me” with a General’s sneer. With this, Israel elects the author of the “Lebanese misadventure” and repudiates the man who extricated their forces from the occupation of southern Lebanon. A dismal moment for peace, especially with a Shrub in the White House in place of Clinton, with his interest in leaving a peacemaker’s legacy.

I’ve migrated the FmH mailing list to ListBot after eGroups got swallowed up by Yahoo. Previously subscribed folks should’ve gotten an emailed invitation to join the new group already. If not, of if you’re anyone else wanting to subscribe, please click on this link or go to the sidebar.

Divided U.S. Senate Confirms Ashcroft 58-42. At least he didn’t quite get the 60 confirmation votes that gloating Republican leaders predicted. But it wasn’t quite the united front of opposition the Democrats are preening over either. The cave-in started in the judiciary committee with Sen. Russ Feingold (D.-Wisc.) who said it would be important for the Democrats’ political future not to take a purely ideological position against a nomination and said he felt the president should have the prerogative to choose like-minded people for his cabinet. Well, hello, the Senate Democrats are the only thing that can stand between a rabid unelected President without a popular mandate and the more than 50% of the electorate whose ideological positions won’t otherwise get a hearing for the next four years. The fallback position will have to be a hard line against the explosion of conservative judicial appointments that’s surely coming. Can you spell f-i-l-i-b-u-s-t-e-r?

Well, the only development in the bursting of the dot.com bubble that has the potential to affect me directly, since I’m not involved at all in the new Internet economy, is happening. Pyra is folding. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s the parent company of Blogger, the software/web
service I use to
publish this site. This essay from Pyra co-founder and CEO and Blogger developer Evan Williams, from his weblog evhead, offers assurances that he’s going to continue to work on and support Blogger, but a shudder passes through me considering the possibility of being without it, or having to migrate FmH to a different platform. Because it’s web-based, if Blogger is down, as it has been for the past day or so, it’s nearly impossible for me to post to my weblog; you may have noticed the dearth of new content for the past day or so, if you’re a regular reader. I’d been sitting on my hands thinking about my dependence on Blogger even before hearing about the demise of Pyra.

I wish Ev all the best in his future endeavors and, unabashedly, hope Blogger will remain among them as he promises. I was heartened by the response from the weblogging community to his recent fund drive for new servers, and hope he takes it as an indication of the support of his user base. I’m eagerly awaiting the souped-up Blogger Plus he has projected, not only for the promised enhancements but because his plan to charge for it may contribute to the stability of the platform. If Blogger’s been “shareware”, the trial period is certainly over and it’s time to register.

Congratulations to the winners of the Bloggies, especially Wockerjabby, the winner in the best-kept-secret-weblogs category (where Follow Me Here was a contendah).

The California GOP is seriously considering drafting Arnold Schwarzenegger for Governor. As Chuck Taggart put it at Looka!, ” Jesus H. Christ on a
bike. Our most talented satirists couldn’t make up anything as
absurd as this.” He also spewed some four-letter words at the prospect, which I’m tempted to echo.