Foot-and-Mouth: First Virus Unable To Spread Through Microsoft Outlook SatireWire

Update on the Bremerton, Wash. keyless remote mystery [via Robot Wisdom]

News to dance to: Milosevic ‘under arrest’. “Slobodan Milosevic, the indicted war criminal responsible for 10
years of war and bloodshed in the Balkans, was reportedly
arrested by Serbian authorities last night, six months after his
regime was toppled by a popular uprising on the streets of
Belgrade.” Apparently prompted by a U.S. threat of economic penalties if Serbia does not meet an impending deadline for cooperation with the Hague war crimes tribunal, the arrest is the culmination of a power struggle between President Kostunica, a firm opponent of handing Milosevic to the Hague, and Prime Minister Dzindzic, eager to see Milosevic in custody. However, that he is being arrested for his war crimes may be only the egocentric assumption of the West. This BBC analysis enumerates a number of other claims against him which might actually be the basis of the warrants. The Guardian

Scientists Stunned by Gender-Bender Chromosome: “Surprised scientists said Thursday that nearly half of all genes related
to the earliest stages of sperm production reside not on the male sex
Y chromosome as expected, but on the X chromosome, universally
considered the female sex chromosome.

The finding… may cause scientists to have second thoughts about the gender identity of the X chromosome.”

Blogger’s been down for an upgrade for awhile, so there have been no new posts recently. Watch this space…

Anti-abortion activists were exercising free speech rights when they published wanted-style posters branding abortion providers as “baby butchers,” said the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Throwing Out a Major Anti-Abortion Verdict. I’m as vehement a free speech advocate as anyone, and support the ACLU (as you know if you read this weblog regularly), but the court is just wrong here. The court feels that it’s speech, not an action like, say, conspiracy to murder (which is performed by words too), because the publishers can’t be responsible for what an anonymous reader does. “If defendants threatened to commit violent
acts, by working alone or with others, then their
statements could properly support the verdict.
But if their statements merely encouraged
unrelated terrorists, then their words are
protected by the First Amendment.” But it’s impossible for me to see any purpose in publishing the names, home addresses and license plate numbers of abortion providers, as the publishers of the “Nuremburg Files” webpage in question did, unless you’re suggesting that someone in your audience hunt them down and terrorize or kill them. And, as you know, three doctors whose names were on the list were indeed assassinated, their names triumphally crossed off the list after each deed.

March 19-24, 2001 Aurora Gallery The action began Monday, March 19th, when a coronal mass ejection from the Sun hit
Earth’s magnetosphere. Three days later on Thursday, March 22nd, a weak interplanetary shock wave –the leading edge of a
coronal mass ejection that left the Sun on March 19th– buffeted Earth’s magnetosphere. The impact
sparked a period of high-latitude auroras that dazzled Alaskans and other northerners.

Dept. of ‘Heely’ sightings: “I live in the Bay Area, northern
California. Saw my first heel-wheel about three weeks ago. This early
adopter was a boy about ten. Saw my second last Sunday. Another ten year
old boy. Both sighting were in malls. A new thing to ban.” Thanks, and keep those reports coming in. The pushpins are going up on the map.

Hot brains. Researchers in Hong Kong compared teenagers on an attentional taks, and found that the variable that correlated best with whether they did well o rmore poorly was whether they owned a mobile phone. Phone users did better, whether their phones were switched on or not during testing. Previous studies had suggested that cognitive functions are enhanced with exposure to microwave radiation at wavelengths similar to that emitted by cellular phones. But was it their phone use per se that enhanced the performance on this task, or merely some other factor — probably demographic or socioeconomic — that correlates with phone ownership? It would be interesting to see if the degree of performance enhancement in a large sample population correlated with the length of ownership or volume of use — some variable that might get at accumulated lifetime microwave flux — of a cellular phone. New Scientist

The first split second. A mindboggling rundown of ways to look back at the first 1/10^38 (that’s “one over ten to the thirty-eighth power”) second of the universe’s existence. New Scientist

How Secure Is Digital Hospital? A showcase all-digital hospital being built by Oracle and healthSouth in Alabama may have ‘major security flaws’ relative to its electronic medical records. Wired

The MIT Media Lab has created the concept of meme-mail, a way for readers of those frequently-forwarded pieces of “internet lore” we get in our inboxes so frequently to have accumulated anonymous data about who else has seen the message already. “We hope that by providing this information,
these messages will establish a stronger sense of their audience and community.” Here’s what the meme-mail FAQ, which is what the link above links to, answers the question, “Why are you supporting Internet chain letters? Aren’t these a waste of resources?”

We think frequently forwarded email has become an important grass roots way for individuals to circulate meaningful information to a wider audience.
Because messages are only forwarded widely when many people find them interesting, it actually employs a reasonably efficient, decentralized means of
resource allocation. MEMEmail enhances the decentralized nature of these messages by allowing people to get a sense of the messages’ audience. Previously,
this only happened when a centralized, mass medium like TV or a newspaper decided to report on the popularity of some piece of Internet lore.

Did anyone notice whether my post yesterday on E-Prime was itself written in E-Prime? An FmH reader, who writes for a living as a reporter himself, emailed me to say he’s written several articles in E-Prime, including one that can be found online, although his editor inserted an ‘is’ verb in that one and ruined the effect.

U.S. Won’t Follow Climate Treaty Provisions, Whitman Says. Yesterday, I mentioned the New Scientist editorial advising the rest of the world to get on with implementing the Kyoto accords without counting on the US. The editorial mentioned that it was probably too late for the US to get onboard with the accord because of the changeover in administration and the lagtime for Congressional approval of treaties. Now it’s clear that the US won’t even try. New York Times

At the White House, Parse-Fail Grading? Ari Fleischer is stacking up as one of the more disingenuous White House spokespeople in recent history, exerting aggressive spin and semantic hairsplitting to discredit accurate stories that paint the administration in a harsh light. Fleischer’s staff has also started calling the media to complain about photographs depicting the Illegitimate Son in a less than flattering way… which is going to keep him busy, since — recall that series of photos that came out during the campaign juxtaposing a series of his facial expressions with those of our primate cousins? — he continues to strike me as simian-looking every time his picture is taken. Washington Post

South Korea Cool to Europe’s Offer. Reportedly disappointed by a cool reception when he met with Dubya two weeks ago, South Korean president Kim may have signalled the EU that he would welcome their ministrations on behalf of the stalled reconciliation process with North Korea, but a South Korean spokesperson is now backing away from European offers to intercede. Dubya may have been irked by Kim’s standing firm about reservations about the NMD program; in any case, the Shrub appears to have expressed his stereotypical kneejerk skepticism about whether the Communist North could be trusted in the peace process. Attaboy, George, another sophisticated blow for world peace. I’ll bet the U.S. has placed pressure on Kim not to embarrass us publicly by going with the European, more conciliatory view. International Herald Tribune

This, and all foreign policy moves by the Shrub’s admiistration, have to be watched through the lens of the now-well-publicized divisions among his foreign policy team. New York Times Recall, at about the time we were all worried about the Ashworth nomination for Attorney General, I took note of analysts who suggested that Donald Rumsfeld’s accession to the Defense Dept. was really the one progressives should have tried to defeat. It appears that Rumsfeld is collecting a group of hardliners who scoff at Colin Powell’s more thoughtful and, literally, diplomatic — although by no means liberal — approach at the State Dept. Foreign policy theaters in which their doctrinal differences will be tested include engagement in the Balkans, the European rapid deployment force, arming the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein, reform of our sanctions program in Iraq, the destabilization of the arms race with Russia and to a lesser extent China by the national missile defense proposals, selling advanced weapons systems to Taiwan, and the above-mentioned Korean issues, where the Clinton administration proposed the North give up missile programs in return for our provision of several nuclear reactors. VP Cheney may well turn out to be a power broker in this internal conflict, and is assembling a powerful foreign policy team around himself as well. Analysts see him as tilting toward the Pentagon’s position. So far, where Condoleeza Rice situates herself in the hurly-burly is not clear. What’s a poor President to do? It ought to be entertaining to watch, at least … if it doesn’t get us all killed.

“Major League Baseball will begin charging fans to
listen to audio broadcasts of its games over the Internet , a stark
illustration of how content owners are trying to find business
models that work in the online medium.

The subscription plan, which will cost users $9.95 a season,
signals an end to the ability of fans to get radio feeds of
baseball games free on the Web… The decisions, from two of the three largest sports leagues in the
United States, signify that content providers think the Internet,
traditionally a medium for the free exchange of information, is
sufficiently mature for people to begin paying for valuable
services.” The Register

Indictment Charges Pair With Murder in Mauling. Recall this horrific case of a woman mauled to death by two attack dogs kept by the neighboring attorneys who, it turns out, were working for Aryan Brotherhood prison inmates breeding such dogs for a dog-fighting ring and/or to guard illicit methamphetamine-manufacturing operations. Not to mention the fact that the couple’s adoption of their inmate client was finalized just days after his dogs’ victim died. Sounds like a plot from Oz, but unfortunately all too real. New York Times

The psychoexgirlfriend.com site, which I found too pitiful and abit too cruel to blink to, has apparently captured the (too pitiful and abit too cruel?) imaginations of many people, according to The Register: ” The woman, who gets more and more hysterical as the messages
progress, also seems to have captured the imagination of
America’s youth. Students at Boston University have already
devised a drinking game that entails logging onto the site and
knocking back a shot every time they hear the unfortunate ex use the
F-word, spinthebottle.com reports.”

Surfers confused by ‘Dying Cam’ prank: ‘The prankster last week promised to show “a person dying live on
your computer”. But the inquisitive and sadistic elements of
cyberspace were this afternoon disappointed to find the following
statement on the site by Callahan in the place of the promised “Edge
Exhibit”:

“We are all dying. I am, you are (even as you read this)- all of us are.
A clock keeps track of what is lost ( you were viewing me, a person
dying of natural causes).

“I believe those who view life in such a way are less likely to waste
time. Life is a terminal illness. Time wears us all away…From the
moment of birth or before, depending on your own views, we begin
the process. Most never realize they are slowly progressing to the
edge, but we are. I believe in making the most of a day and enjoying
it to the best of your ability at the time.” The Register

“This is not a plea for homespun ‘family values’ and virtues. ‘Family values’ discourse may
actually contribute to our cultural apathy about marriage by obscuring the more radical, startling,
and unsettling characteristics of monogamous marriage.” Courtship today: the view from academia. Concerns about the emergence of ‘a new grammar of intimacy’ and the societal, and academic, lack of interest in the study of ‘pathways to marriage’.

The dynamics of initiating and developing close, sexually based relationships are a major
preoccupation of close-relationship theory. Articles and monographs cover a very wide range of
topics: “falling in love,” romantic love, attachment patterns, “love styles,” interracial and
interethnic dating, physical attractiveness (body shape, health status, hair length, height, voice
intonation), age preferences, jealousy, love triangles, dating infidelity, fatal attractions,
family-of-origin influences, socioeconomic status, self-disclosure processes, topic avoidance,
deceit, nonverbal signals, the use of humor, coping with peer and parental criticism, relationship
dissolution, and romance grieving processes.

This complex body of theories probing a baffling array of topics might appear to resist general
commentary and review, but certain common themes do emerge: Marriage is knocked off its
pedestal, and its purpose of child-rearing gets short shrift. And the transcendent ideal of love is
replaced by the “love styles” of individual selves seeking sexual satisfaction in episodic
relationships. Courtship, rather than leading to marriage, becomes just one damn relationship
after another. The Public Interest [via Guardian weblog]

Metaphysical Movies. He’s doubly cursed — a beef farmer in the UK, and a Ph. D. in phenomenological philosophy. But he’s made a self-financed short film, Krasny — with characterization and plot, no less (although they sound bizarre, involving an investigation into a strange cult) — that serves as a dense pedagogical tool to convey abstract philosophical concepts about perception, subjectivity and the relationship between mind and ‘external reality’. The essayist comments on the treatment of similar themes in The Matrix last year. The Philosophers’ Magazine

Explore, if you will, the world of E-Prime. Arising from the thinking of Alfred Korzybski and the International Society for General Semantics which he founded, E-Prime consists of the subset of the English language left after expunging it of the use of the verb ‘to be’ in its two major functions of connoting identity (“I am a weblogger”) and predication (“I am nice”). Proponents feel that these uses of ‘to be’ cause major confusion of thought and consequent social problems; to start with, consider how such usage readily obscures the distinction between opinion and fact; and lends itself to stereotypy and inflexibility. This paper claims that using “E-Prime in Negotiation and Therapy” can challenge dogmatic viewpoints, clarify confusion, and defuse conflict in daily life. I don’t conduct myself as a strong proponent of E-Prime in my life; awkward circumlocutory constructions arise whenever I try to write in that way. But the difficulty in using it perhaps speaks to how early we were engrained with the associated thought patterns. Language doesn’t determine what we can and can’t think, but it does readily shape what can be thought with ease as opposed to with difficulty, IMHO. Does the challenge involved in thinking ‘outside this box’ perhaps indicate the importance of doing so? The blinks above have plenty of further links if you want to explore your identifications and predications more thoroughly.

I’ve decided, at least for now, to eliminate the Blogvoices discussion function on FmH. The comments have been sparse and, with some exceptions, have been of limited quality, and it has not apparently served as a medium to get lively discussion going. More than anything else, I found it significantly slowed down the loading of the blog page;there seems to be a long delay in accessing the Blogvoices server at most hours of the day. If you want to comment on a post, consider posting it to the FmH mailing list, where it’ll be seen by at least a handful of other interested parties besides me. You don’t have to subscribe to the mailing list (see sidebar) to post to it, but of course if you don’t, you’ll never see others’ replies. Should I keep the little ‘discuss’ icon at the end of each blog entry and have it link directly to emailing to the list?

If there’s a raucous outcry from those of you who miss Blogvoices, I’ll consider reinstalling it. Too bad it didn’t work better; it seemed like a bright idea at the time…

Home of the brave? A New Scientist editorial suggests the rest of the world get on with the business of cleaning up greenhouse gas emissions without the participation of the US, now that the Clown Prince has reversed his campaign promise on CO2 emissions.

They said it would be like negotiating with Exxon. And so it is proving. With the redneck sultans of fossil fuel in charge at the White House, George W. Bush has pulled back on even the hedged commitments to control emissions of greenhouse gases that he made during his election campaign.

Last week, he announced that a new Clean Air Act would not, after all, include controls on carbon dioxide. He blamed fears of rising fuel prices and more blackouts, as well as pleading continuing scientific uncertainties about climate change.

Forget the excuses. Bush is doing the bidding of his funders and friends, and the world be damned. His statement does not formally count the US out of the Kyoto Protocol talks on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But it does mean Bush has vetoed use of the most effective mechanism for the US to meet its promises.

How serious a blow is this? Privately, American negotiators have been saying for some time that it could already be too late for the US to meet its Kyoto commitments for 2010, because of the time it would take to get a Clean Air Act through Congress and into force. Now it’s clear that Bush isn’t even going to try.

At least the rest of the world knows where it stands, and can stop the elaborate game of trying to keep the US on board the climate train. True, the US is responsible for a quarter of the world’s CO2 emissions, but that still leaves the three-quarters that comes from everywhere else. The world can get on with the task at hand–saving the planet’s climate–and is quite capable of implementing the Kyoto Protocol without the US.

In a spin over heeler-wheelers: ‘Heeled wheels, shoes that roll, the footwear to rival scooters
– or “Heelys”, to give them their official, patent-pending title
– are steadily becoming the latest craze in Los Angeles. The
shoes have a single “stealth” wheel housed in the heel of the
shoes, allowing users to walk or run and then change to a
roll. The wheels are detachable, transforming the shoes into
fashionable streetwear.’ Why am I first hearing about these from the Irish Times?! It’ll be interesting to see how (if) this fad spreads. Drop me an email the first time you see someone wearing a pair of these outside Southern California, and I’ll post the news.

Ill Uranium Miners Left Waiting as Payments for Exposure Lapse: “A decade ago, Congress recognized the
contributions of … uranium miners and passed the Radiation
Exposure and Compensation Act of 1990, (which)
established one-time payments of up to $100,000 to miners or their families
and to people who lived downwind from the nuclear test sites in Nevada. Last
year, Congress increased the payout to $150,000, added new medical benefits
and expanded the number of workers eligible.

But after years of smooth operations, the program is broke. Scrambling last year
to pass President Bill Clinton’s final budget, lawmakers never debated the Justice
Department’s request for additional money to cover the expanded program
even as new applications were pouring in, and by May, nothing was left. And
Congress has been reluctant to act until it decides how to apportion the federal
surplus and how much to cut taxes.” New York Times

Human Body Recall! Design Problems : “…Commonplace signs of physical deterioration prompted three
experts on aging to propose a redesign of the human body, inside and out, that
could enhance its ability to last to age 100 without falling apart.” New York Times

Once, in the Jungle. A pair of filmmakers induced the now-80-year-old New York painter Tobias Schneebaum to recreate the journey he made in 1956, hitchhiking to Peru and walking into the Amazon jungle to ‘go native’ with a then-as-yet-undiscovered indigenous tribe, and the terrifying denouement in which his romanticism came crashing to the ground. New York Times Magazine

I didn’t watch ’em either.

Free for all: “Should all research papers in the biosciences be
placed in one, free-access, web library? Yes,
say 12,000 scientists.” New Scientist

NYU neuroscientist examines how brain responds to fears that are imagined and anticipated, but never experienced. “Using fear conditioning, the neural systems of fear learning and expression have been eloquently mapped with both human and animal research.
This research has indicated that a brain structure called the amygdala is critical to the expression of a conditioned fear response. But is the
amygdala involved when you encounter a fear-invoking event that you have merely heard about?” EurekAlert!

Fake Fans, Fake Buzz, Real Bucks: ‘The 34-year-old computer whiz in Silver Lake got a
phone call from the friend of a friend–the head of publicity
for a movie studio. The offer was $10,000 a week for an
Internet “project.”
Was he interested? Absolutely.
Details quickly followed from the studio’s department of
new media. The computer whiz discovered he would soon
be “purposely forgetting everything I knew about design.”
The job was to construct a phony fan Web site for a new movie.
He selected ugly lettering, the better to mask his sophistication. He scanned in
photos from magazines, just like fans do. He wrote blushing and gushing copy.’ LA Times

Town has had strict gun control law on the books since 1982 — requiring a gun in every household. Marietta Daily Journal

U.S. High Court to Weigh Death-Row Appeal, reconsider wisdom of U.S. execution of mentally retarded murderers. International Herald Tribune

Ethel the Blog is chockful. Checking in tonight revealed, among other things:

reflections on the California “utility crisis”;

concern about the vagaries of Amazon.com’s censorship policy, relating to the Shrub book A Charge to Keep;

consideration of how we should treat First Ladies with real, or putative, blood on their hands;

the first couple of entries in his project to port his vinyl LPs to .mp3;

contemplating The Haggis;

vituperation about conservative columnist Bob Novak’s revisionist history;

a listing of streaming jazz channels on the web

a digression on the avocado

‘Insipid civility’ dominates U.S. politics for good reason, says David Sirota. “…(I)n Washington the compelling motivation has become, as George W. Bush
would say, keeping things ‘civil.’ And the reason is clear: in such
money-flooded politics, it is best for the powers that be to keep politics
boring. That way, politicians never have to really face up to tough questions
about the influence of money, and citizens won’t really engage enough to
care about the fact that their government no longer really represents them.” Tompaine.com

“This year will see the outbreak of price war in the desktop and
notebook PC markets as vendors battle for customers, market
researcher Gartner Group has warned.

To blame are the recession and the depressed state of computer
sales. That, reckons Gartner, will force the direct vendors to cut
prices to build – or at least maintain – their marketshare relative to
the well-known brands.” The Register

Promoting Propagandists. The Illegitimate Son nominates Central American dirty-tricksters for major diplomatic posts. Tompaine.com

Mystery In Bremerton – Why Don’t Keyless Remotes Work?. Starting abruptly last Thursday morning, the keyless remotes of nearly all cars — domestic and imported, new and old, including unsold cars on dealers’ lots — in the Bremerton WA area stopped working. When a car is driven outside the local area, the remote works again. Aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson returned to port in Bremerton from seven weeks at sea at almost exactly the time this started, but the Navy says the ship has been swept for emissions and “…doesn’t appear to be emitting any frequencies that might have an effect on these remote control devices,” said a spokesperson. Sunspot and solar flare activity are near their cyclical peak, but there would be no reason any disruption of transmission would be restricted in frequency, geographically localized, or consistent across so long a period of time.

Discovering Archaeology: New clues to the Easter Island mystery… Surprising archaeological accuracy of the Mummy movies …. New light on Herodotus’ accusations of cannibalism among neighboring peoples.

Microscopic midwives “Long maligned as mere blobs, amoebas turn out to have a
caring, sharing side.” New Scientist

Girl of four leads share-buying test. She was given an imaginary £5000 to invest, as were an experienced private investor and a self-described financial astrologer. Her portfolio, picked at random, is worth more than either of her competitors’ at the halfway point in the two-week experiment. Probably not statistically valid over such a short run, though…

Skeletons in the Closet. Renovations of Odd Fellows’ Halls reportedly frequently reveal startling discoveries.

“Skeletons … reside in closets, drawers, attics and crawl spaces in Odd Fellows lodges nationwide. The fraternal order uses the skeleton in its initiation ritual as a symbol of mortality. Interest in the Odd Fellows has waned in recent years, and as lodges have closed more of the skeletons have emerged from their hiding places.” But where do they come from? Local Odd Fellows have cooperated in some of the resulting investigations, in at least one case pledging the police to secrecy. Fox News

3-D Web Sites with Atmosphere

85 Ways to Tie a Necktie. Two mathematical physicists from Cambridge University invented a mathematical notation to describe the tying of necktie knots, then generated a list of all possible knots within the restrictions imposed (on the number of loops a knot can have) by the length of a tie. Exactly 85 possibilities exist, and it turns out that 10 of them are “good”, including six newly-discovered designs. Their paper about the issue made it into the scientific journal Nature and is now posted, with diagrams, on the Internet. Since I wear a tie every day to work, I’m game.

War Against Cliché. An excerpt from Martin Amis’ foreword to his forthcoming collection of essays and reviews in which, among other things, he laments the passing of genuine criticism and heralds a kinder, gentler Amis:

“Readers of the present book are asked to keep an eye on the date lines which end these
pieces, for they span nearly thirty years. You hope to get more relaxed and confident over time;
and you should certainly get (or seem to get) kinder, simply by avoiding the stuff you are unlikely
to warm to. Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it
when you realise how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember. . .”

We’re all up to speed on the health hazards of fast “food”, especially after the exhaustive concerns raised in Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: the dark side of the all-American meal. Here’s a rundown on further dangers of the drive-through window. The National Post

Author suing ‘Harry Potter’ creator has book reissued. Nancy Stouffer claims J.K. Rowling plagiarized her because a series of her children’s books in the mid-’80’s used the term muggles, had a character named “Potter” and a “Keeper of the Gardens” (the Harry Potter books have a “Keeper of the Keys”). Now several of her out-of-print books will be re-released over the next year. Sounds like they might make enjoyable reading with my children, but it also sounds like there are no more than superficial similarities with Rowling’s work. Stouffer admittedly created her characters with a view toward licensing them and probably hoped to sell the film rights before her publisher went bankrupt. She seems to have waited for Rowlings’ movie deal to add Warner Bros.’ deeper pockets to her infringement suit. My biggest question: will the author’s photo on the back of the dustjacket show the dollar signs in her eyes? Nando Times

In other Harry Potter news, Rowling just put out two little $3.99 paperback “Hogwarts textbooks” — Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Quidditch Through the Ages — whose proceeds will benefit the British social charity Comic Relief. My son has his nose buried in the former this weekend, since we bought it.

Is Life Analog or Digital? Freeman Dyson: “I started thinking about the abstract definition of life twenty years ago,
when I published a paper in Reviews of Modern Physics about the
possibility that life could survive for ever in a cold expanding universe. I
proved to my own satisfaction that survival is possible for a community of
living creatures using only a finite store of matter and energy. Then, two
years ago, Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman, friends of mine at Case
Western Reserve University in Cleveland, sent me a paper with the title
“Life, the Universe, and Nothing”. They say flatly that survival of life for
ever is impossible. They say that everything I claimed to prove in my
Reviews of Modern Physics paper is wrong. I was happy when I read the
Krauss-Starkman paper. It is much more fun to be contradicted than to be
ignored.

In the two years since I read their paper, Krauss and Starkman and I have
been engaged in vigorous arguments, writing back and forth by E-mail,
trying to pokes holes in each others’ calculations.” It appears to Dyson, that the answer to his question depends on how you define life. Dyson uses Moravec’s transhuman condition and Fred Hoyle’s black cloud as contrasting paradigms of what might happen to life in an end-stage universe. The Edge

85 Ways to Tie a Necktie. Two mathematical physicists from Cambridge University invented a mathematical notation to describe the tying of necktie knots, then generated a list of all possible knots within the restrictions imposed (on the number of loops a knot can have) by the length of a tie. Exactly 85 possibilities exist, and it turns out that 10 of them are “good”, including six newly-discovered designs. Their paper about the issue made it into the scientific journal Nature and is now posted, with diagrams, on the Internet. Since I wear a tie every day to work, I’m game.

Romania builds Dracula Land: “The Romanian Government has announced
plans for a theme park in honour of the
controversial figure of Count Dracula.

Tourism Minister Matei Dan told journalists the
park – Dracula Land – would open in the
summer of 2002, at an as yet undisclosed
location, widely assumed to be in Transylvania.” BBC

Vintage Violence: “What does old-time music have in common with gangsta rap?

But old-time music and gangsta rap have more in common than their homicidal tendencies. Both
forms were born of poverty and cultural isolation. Both have a mercenary attitude towards tradition,
which the individual artist pillages, strips of its context, and reconfigures into something original. Both
are marketed to affluent whites via their gritty, “authentic” appeal. Both are racially charged, to say
the least. Both began as party music, but ended up meaning something more. The more you listen,
the more similarities emerge.” Feed

One of the weblogs I read (I’m sorry, I don’t remember whom to credit) linked to this page on the folklore of the sneeze. But it’s only one of 132 pages, each on a category of superstitions and folklore. Here’s the index.

“Men with chronic schizophrenia lose brain volume at a faster rate than the normal aging changes seen in men without the
mental illness, a study by a researcher at Yale shows.” Studies for a long time have shown lower volumes of brain tissue than matched controls in some schizophrenics, but I and others who study schizophrenia have thought this was a static finding representing the neurodevelopmental aberrations that underlie some schizophrenia. Instead, this study followed patients with progressive MRI scans over an average four-year interval, demonstrating tissue loss. And the extent of this progressive change correlated with the severity of their illness in the interim. This suggests ongoing neurodegeneration.

Lamb with ‘human face’ perishes after birth. Ananova

Enjoyed this succinct and pointed observation from Metaforage/Metaphorage: what’s a meta for?: “The methodical re-engineering of the United States by conservatives
continues, as I predicted. This puts the lie to both the Naderites,
who said it does not matter who is elected, and the Republicans,
who pitched Bush as a moderate.” And, I’d add, to the Democrats, so bumblingly overconfident that they could save us from this outcome.

Welcome to From Hunger, “the web’s most taciturn cyberzine”, from HungerSoft Technologies, “where quality is an illusion.” This includes a link to their hilarious Ulysses for Dummies, of which many have taken notice.

How to make a thought screen helmet: “The thought screen helmet blocks telepathic communication between aliens and humans. Aliens
cannot immobilize people wearing thought screens nor can they control their minds or communicate
with them.

Results of the thought screen helmet are preliminary. As of June, 2000, aliens have not taken any
abductees while they were wearing thought screen helmets using Velostat shielding.” [via boing boing]

Click Here for Earthquake

Annals of the Age of Ignorance (cont’d.): Arkansas considers banning evolution from textbooks. Here we go again. But this time state-sanctioned textbooks can’t even mention radio-carbon dating data on plants or animals! CNN

Brain image database benefits research and education worldwide. “Brain scans are an important tool for medical science, basic research and education, but this expensive technology is often out of reach for many
institutions. Now a team at Dartmouth College has developed a repository for images of human brain scans that is available free to researchers
and educators worldwide.

The National Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Data Center was established with a grant of $4.7 million over five years from the
National Science Foundation (NSF). The scientific research and education community recently gained access to the first data sets, which are made
available by Dartmouth on CDROMs.” EurekAlert! If you’ve been reading FmH for awhile, you’ll know that I’ve been blinking to the — literally — illuminating findings of fMRI studies whenever I can find them. Here’s a primer about how MRI and fMRI work. Here’s a Google search to take it further.

An interview with Kari Stefansson, who founded deCODE genetics in Iceland and thinks he knows the secret of how to find disease-causing genes. The controversial project, which faces Icelandic court challenges but has completed a successful $244 million IPO, is creating a “phenotype database” of the Icelandic population by correlating a
collection of the health records of all 280,000 Icelanders with Iceland’s extensive public genealogy records to “find
disease-causing genes, aided by the relatively homogenous genetics of Iceland’s population”. Discovered genes would be turned into drug targets. Stefansson:

“The database has been controversial mostly for the wrong reasons. There are
all kinds of reasons to be skeptical of collection of personal information, and I think that we can
never be too careful when we do that. But most of the controversy was focused on
misinformation, the insistence that we were working on biological samples without informed
consent and things of that sort.”

He feels that majority approval, rather than unanimous informed consent, is sufficient to proceed with the project. Public sentiment in Iceland ran around 3:1 in favor when polled, and the endeavor was authorized by an act of the Icelandic parliament. Here’s further coverage of the controversy about this and similar projects that are being done in other populations. Harvard’s geneticist and resident gadfly Richard Lewontin typifies these endeavors as conversions of “the health
and genetic status of the entire population into a tool for the profit of a single enterprise.” MIT Technology Review [thanks, higgy]

Signs of Life: Vote to Reverse Abortion Rule. Democrats may be turning the tables on the Blank Stare. Earlier this month, Republicans used a rarely invoked Senate rule — that can force a vote to rescind executive branch regulations — to reverse Clinton administration workplace safety protections. Now Senate Democrats, with the reported support of at least five Republicans (Olympia Snowe [ME], Jim Jeffords
[VT], Susan Collins [ME], Arlen Specter [PA] and Lincoln Chafee [RI] ), will use this maneuver to reverse Bush’s ban on US aid to advocates of abortion abroad. Recall that this was Bush’s first significant — and malignant — executive action after his inauguration, and that his responses to subsequent questions about the decision demonstrated his lack of understanding of its implications. Reuters

“Why would kids from a place like that do it? Because they can, because it’s been done.” From Classrooms to Chat Rooms, All Threats Turn Serious. One of the tragedies of modern life is the pitiful unoriginality of even violent pathological attention-seeking. ‘ “I think that we have reached a point where
this has become part of the repertoire of
acting out,” said Charles Patrick Ewing,
professor of law and psychology at the
State University of New York at Buffalo and
author of Kids Who Kill.’ And I’m amazed to hear about the modern equivalent of the ludicrous duck-and-cover exercises which in my grade school years were supposed to protect us in the event of a nuclear blast — drills in which students prepare for an imaginary terrorist attack by finding safe havens and escape routes from their schools. Is this preparedness or absurd hypervigilance which gives troubled kids a built-in avenue to act out? New York Times

To the Moon, Alice Cooper. Digital satellite radio from space for $9.95/month: will anyone listen? Wired

Bushonics speakers strike back; “We’re mad as hell and we won’t be
misunderestimated anymore!” Salon

Several interesting blinks arise from catching up with wood s lot:

PR to improve the freemason’s image: “Tired of being ‘mugged’ by the media, the
United Grand Lodge of England has appointed
a PR agency to improve the image of
freemasonry. But can the spin doctors allay
suspicions that the secretive organisation is
pulling strings in the police and judiciary?” The Guardian

The gospel according to Luke (Skywalker): “If 8,000 New Zealanders have heeded an
e-mail asking them to declare Jedi as their
faith on this week’s census forms, then Star
Wars will have spawned an officially
recognised religion.” BBC

Will Bush Kill Us? “Though it is only a few short months into the Bush administration, it is hard to
imagine how he could have moved any more quickly to make the world a far more
dangerous place than it already was. ” Daily Brew

R.I.P. David McTaggart, 69, Canadian co-founder of Greenpeace and pioneer of direct action for the environment.

Jorn Barger at <a href=”http://robotwisdom.com/
“>Robot Wisdom will link prominently to your website if you’ll support UC Berkeley students’ Israel divestment campaign. ‘ “The people who run our universities are not just tacitly supporting but are actually benefiting from the exploitation of Palestinians,” said Snehal Shigavi, a UC Berkeley graduate student.

What UC Berkeley students demand is that the school system pull shares from companies that either have branches or subsidiaries in Israel or do $5 million per year or more in business there. So far 13 such companies have been identified.’

“Thelonious Monk was — is — the most fascinating figure in the history of jazz. Yet few Monk
biographies have been written, and they tend to rehash the same material. That’s partly
because Monk was a hard man to pin down. He rarely spoke to writers – or anyone else, for
that matter – and when he did, he responded to most questions curtly, if at all. It was partially a
game and it was partially a mental-health issue, but it prevented people from seeing Monk
beyond his music. Of course, that’s how he wanted it.

Biographies of the pianist and composer have tended to disappoint; Laurent de Wilde’s Monk’
(1996) is remarkably unrewarding. But now we have an intriguing idea, and a rich reading
experience, in The Thelonious Monk Reader. Here, Monk comes alive, through old magazine
stories, newspaper profiles, interviews, liner notes, record reviews, concert critiques,
remembrances, and essays. Not only do we get reminiscences on Monk’s music and life, but we
get to read what people were writing about him before and while he was at his peak.” Boston Globe

Please don’t call me Theo

Modes of address are thus not so much being lost from our culture as
being deliberately expunged.

This familiarity is a sign of the ever greater vulgarity and shallowness of
British life, of an unwillingness to exercise judgment in making distinctions.
Not all relationships are those of friendship, but they are now all those of
familiarity. This naturally results in a world in which false bonhomie is
tempered by outbursts of insensate rage. The Spectator

Mir‘s Last Gift. “Great sites crop up to track Mir‘s demise.” Byte

Catastrophe or cure? Are fetal grafts safe? New Scientist

Division is rife over schizophrenia gene
claim, about which I posted below. BioMedNet

Shouting at your kids can damage their brains, as well
as hurting their ears, according to US child
psychiatrists. The Guardian On the other hand, ‘Preschoolers who are “in touch with their feelings”‘ may be less
likely to have serious learning or behavior problems in later years, results of a study suggest.

“…(P)reschool children’s abilities to recognize and interpret emotion cues in
facial expressions have long-term effects on social behavior and academic competence,”
according to lead study author Dr. Carroll E. Izard of the University of Delaware and his
colleagues.

In a study of 72 children from low-income families, Izard and colleagues found that the ability to
read others’ emotions at age 5 predicted the youngsters’ social behavior and learning skills 4
years later. ‘

Judge Sentences Supremacist Pastor in Abduction of Grandchildren. “A white
supremacist pastor was sentenced to 30
years in prison for abducting six of his
grandchildren and keeping them at his farm to
indoctrinate them.” The children, now 9 through 16, had been held for five years until found in a police raid in May. It took four days to persuade them to come out of a small basement roon where they were barricaded, authorities say because of the depth of their indoctrination. They have since undergone mental health treatment in North Dakota.

Unusual Competency Debate Surfaces in White House Shooting Case. “The man accused of firing shots outside the White
House last month pressed a judge to let him stand trial. A federal
prosecutor argued the accused, Robert W. Pickett, should be sent to a
prison hospital.” He finds a finite prison sentence — he faces 25 years — preferable to an indefinite hospital commitment. The defendant reportedly has a history of mental illness but he and his defense attorneys insist that there is no basis for the judge to require a competency hearing. There are suggestions that, by waving a gun at federal agents outside the White House, he was trying to get law enforcement officers to kill him. APB News

Smartphone a Hot Seller in S.F. “Kyocera’s newly released personal digital assistant smartphone is sold out in San Francisco.

Retailers are apparently unable to keep up with the demand for Kyocera’s QCP 6035 — a converged PDA
smartphone that runs on the Palm operating system — since its release three weeks ago.” Wired But “only early adopters are snapping up the PDA cell phones in the United States —
and even these users seem to be carrying around more than one device.

PDA cell phones just aren’t light enough and don’t cost what consumers are willing to dish
out, the industry says. In other words, these PDA phones will languish along with the other
high-end cell phones and PDAs floating around the marketplace today.

‘I’m not willing to make a prediction for more than five years,’ said Palm’s developer Ted
Ladd. ‘I carry my cell phone and Palm. There are times when I want one or the other.’ ” Several other contenders vie with the Kyocera phone as combination devices, using various OS’s for their PDA components. Wired The trick would be if PDA cell phones avoid doing two things badly, because we already have devices that do each of the two things well.

A ‘Tiger’ of a Different Stripe. Crouching Tiger, a hit in the US because it’s so Chinese, is a flop in China because it’s so Chinese… and because it’s a hit in the US. “Put bluntly, almost every major cultural export from China over the past 25 years that has made it in the West has flopped in China…” Washington Post

With an administration full of his Daddy’s people who last did any foreign relations when we were accustomed to thinking of Russia as the Devil Incarnate, it’s no surprise the Blank Stare is taking us back into the Cold War with the biggest expulsion of suspected spies since Reagan took similar action in 1986. Reuters It’s not as if both countries haven’t been spying on each other in the interim. A Russian Foreign Ministry official’s comment that the order “went much deeper than a mere expulsion” should be seen in light of the US’ destabilizing move of meeting with Chechen representatives, and of course the broader context of our planned unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty to build the NMD (national missile defense) system. Russia signalled its intention to respond 1:1 to the expulsions. As usual, the Shrub and his handlers “do protest too much”, finding it necessary to assure us that he was in charge of this decision. The ‘spin’ aims to persuade us that the President has a new, hard-line, “realistic” way of looking at our foreign adversaries.

MSNBC.com photo contest turns into Israeli-Palestinian battle. “A Web site’s photo contest that
became a cyberspace battleground between Israelis and Palestinians has been pulled because users were
voting for the same image multiple times, officials with MSNBC.com said.” Nando Times

USDA Seizes Vermont ‘Mad Cow’ Sheep. One of two flocks in which sheep had tested positive for TSE (transmissible spongiform encephalopathy), the generic term for the class of “prion diseases” that includes sheep scrapie, BSE, and new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans, was seized in a commando-style raid, the shepherd says before he could mount a challenge to what he says was an improper testing process. These diseases are probably just species-specific names for one process; the prions can be passed across species by consuming infected tissue, and cause an inevitably fatal neurodegeneration after a scarily long incubation period responsible for the former name for the conditions, “slow virus diseases”. What this may mean is that there are multitudes of cases currently incubating; perhaps a die-off of epidemic proportions is in store for us.

The Other Red Meat? “No beef? Try ostrich. Yes, ostrich. Gripped by ‘mad cow’ madness, many Europeans are rejecting beef for
healthier alternatives—and redefining their culinary traditions.” Time Europe

CDC’s internal climate report and forecast: phthalates up, lead levels down, cotinine down, mercury alarming. And, if the Shrub has his way, it’ll be up with arsenic and radionucleotides.

DMT: The Spirit Molecule, by Dr. Rick Strassman.From the author’s blurb: “In 1990, I began the first new human research with psychedelic, or
hallucinogenic, drugs in the United States in over 20 years. These
studies investigated the effects of N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, an
extremely short-acting and powerful psychedelic. During the project’s
five years, I administered approximately 400 doses of DMT to 60
human volunteers. This research took place at the University of New
Mexico’s School of Medicine in Albuquerque, where I was tenured
Associate Professor of Psychiatry.

I was drawn to DMT because of its presence in all of our bodies.
Perhaps excessive DMT production, coming from the mysterious
pineal gland, was involved in naturally occurring ‘psychedelic’ states.
These might include birth, death and near-death, psychosis, and
mystical experiences. Only later, while the study was well under way,
did I also begin considering DMT’s role in the ‘alien abduction’
experience….

The Spirit Molecule reviews what we know about psychedelic drugs
in general, and DMT in particular. It then traces the DMT research
project from its earliest intimations through the maze of committees
and review boards to its actual performance.”

A reader wrote wondering whether anyone is investigating whether the monarch butterfly die-off in Mexico might relate to crops genetically engineered to contain the Bt gene for pest resistance. Rampton and Stauber, in their book Trust Us, We’re Experts, reported that more than 20 million US acres are planted with Bt crops, which are poisonous to many classes of insects. So I did a Google Search: “monarch butterfly” “Bt gene” “bacillus thuringiensis”, which comes up with legions of net references to concern about the lethality of Bt to monarchs in particular. Now, is Mexican agriculture into Bt? [thanks, Holden]

The first schizophrenia gene is discovered:

“A gene variant contributing to the cause of catatonic schizophrenia in a large pedigree was discovered by scientists of the
Julius-Maximilians-University of Wuerzburg, Germany. The variant was detected when a group of psychiatrists, geneticists, and neuroscientists
around Klaus-Peter Lesch and Jobst Meyer at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy investigated genes on human chromosome 22 to
elucidate the genetic background of dominantly inherited catatonic schizophrenia, which is characterized by acute psychotic episodes with
hallucinations, delusions, and disturbed body movements. The protein encoded by this gene, which has been designated WKL1, shares some
features with ion channels. Ion channel proteins are located in the cell membrane and assist transportation of electric currents along neurons.
Mutations in the potassium channel KCNA1, another ion channel which is remotely related to WKL1, cause episodic ataxia, a rare movement
disorder lacking psychotic episodes.” EurekAlert!

South Africa: More HIV Than Thought: “One in nine South Africans is HIV-positive, the government said Tuesday, more
than previously thought in a country that already has the world’s largest population of infected people.

In the hard-hit eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, the infection rate was greater than one in every three
people, a government study said.” If anywhere near accurate, this is utterly staggering. AP

Somewhat clumsy portrait of Kate Bush. Salon

Visitors to New Art Show Draw a Blank A British art gallery has taken what constitutes art to a new extreme — by putting on an
exhibition of absolutely nothing.

Salon.com Seeks Subscriptions Depicting itself as a vital alternative to the mainstream media, cash-strapped
Salon.com Tuesday asked its readers to pay an annual $30 subscription to help keep the online newspaper
alive… Readers who pay the fee will receive a new premium service that blocks out an onslaught of larger ads that
San Francisco-based Salon has started to sell to boost revenues. AP

Breaching the Last Taboo? Heavy Petting: Bioethicist and animal liberation advocate Peter Singer comments on Midas Dekkers’ book Dearest Pet: On Bestiality. Nerve

Greatest Net Dupe in History? “A restaurant worker allegedly masterminded the largest theft of identities in Internet history and is suspected of stealing millions of dollars from celebrities, billionaires and executives such as Steven Spielberg and Ted Turner. … (The) high-school dropout, Abraham Abdallah, 32, duped more than 200 of the ‘Richest People in America’ listed in Forbes magazine by skillfully using computers in a Brooklyn library.” Wired

The boundaries of science or the
boundaries of idiocy? “Rodd Millner, an Australian
ex-commando, … intends to don a
space suit and ride a balloon 130,000 feet up to
the edge of space. Once he gets there, he will
jump. An experienced skydiver, speedboat racer,
scuba diver, and, before that, an insurance
salesman, Millner believes that he will reach a
speed of between 700 and 900 miles per hour
within one minute of leaping from the balloon. If
he is successful, he will be the first human to
break the sound barrier sans vehicle.” Feed

R.I.P. John Phillips. dead at 65. Memorable to most for his role in the saccharin Mamas & Papas, let’s not forget his vision as the chief organizer of the Monterey Pop Festival.

(For all you at the cutting-edge intersection between privacy/conspiracy concerns and space-exploration fanaticism): Spy Agency May Have Located Mars Polar Lander: “The Mars Polar Lander may have been
found — intact — by a top-secret spy imagery agency.

The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) has been
quietly scanning Mars pictures, looking for the Mars Polar
Lander since early December 1999. According to a source
close to the NIMA effort, photographic specialists at NIMA
think they’ve spotted something. But NASA officials say it’s
too early to tell.

The Mars Polar Lander (MPL) dove into the Martian
atmosphere on Dec. 3, 1999, heading for a soft landing on
the planet’s south polar region. But contact was never
reestablished after the probe was to have touched down. On
Jan. 17, 2000, after a series of efforts to communicate with
the spacecraft failed, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who
managed the mission, declared it a loss.” space.com [thanks, Abby] More about NIMA can be found here.

Martin Klein, who like myself posted the story about the massacre of the monarchs to his weblog, sent me a link to this LA Times story refuting the claim: “The Mexican environmental watchdog Profepa announced that a scientific
analysis of 300 butterfly corpses from the Cerro San Andres sanctuary in central
Michoacan state showed no traces of toxic substances from pesticides.
It concluded that the butterflies had died from the cold.” Klein, as a result, deleted the original post from his weblog. I, being the querrulous sort that I am, wonder instead whose interests Mexico’s environmental protection agency actually serves and what political power the Mexican timber concerns wield, and thus whether its announcement is credible or should be taken as a coverup. Googling on “Profepa AND Mexico” comes up with this. Here, incidentally, is last year’s coverage of concerns about the monarchs’ wintering grounds from ABC News. Klein’s blog is here. As a self-described “environmental bureaucrat” for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, perhaps he has a line on the credibility of Profepa that I don’t, but all I could think about were the scenes in Traffic about the gullible Americans’ cooperation with their corrupt Mexican counterparts in drug enforcement. Not to stereotype or anything, and why should I have any greater faith in the righteousness of, say, Whitman’s EPA?