1,300 Media To Cover McVeigh Execution. It’s projected to be not only a media circus but a bonanza for local commerce.

isometric screenshots: “A series of drawings from an isometric perspective, in the style of a computer game. The subject of each drawing is the image, or
images, that created a popular cultural event. Historical events (like the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel)
are used interchangeably with fictionalized events (like the picnic scene from The Sound of Music).” Click on each picture to seee the full 800×600 image, which the artist executed in Photoshop. Go to the FAQ for identifications of each picture you don’t recognize.

Government’s 50 Greatest Endeavors: An Opinion Survey for the Brookings Institution: “…a project on
what the federal government tried to do and what it achieved. The project began
with a cataloging of major laws passed since World War II, followed by the
grouping of these statutes by their objective, and the selection of the top 50
endeavors for a national survey of historians and political scientists. The survey
results identify government’s greatest achievements and failures taking success,
difficulty and importance into account.” When was the last time you believed your government could achieve difficult, important objectives for the good of the country or the world?

We Can Always Hope: ‘Heat vent’ may diminish global warming: ‘The Pacific Ocean may open a “heat vent”
above it that releases enough energy into
space to reduce projected climate warming
caused by the build-up of greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere.’ BBC

‘Snuffy Smith’ cartoonist Fred Lasswell dies at 84.

The picture is cribbed from the “vast repository of toonological knowledge”, Don Markstein’s Toonopedia.

But Markstein’s site has neither hide nor hair of some of my favorites, Dan O’Neill‘s “Odd Bodkins” and the late Vaughn Bodé‘s Deadbone (“…a billion years ago, across the winter blue past, there is
a ugly mountain standing in the cold afternoon wind. It is
the first place to look for the roots of western sanity… “) etc.

Duke researchers reverse damage of heart failure with gene therapy. “After previously demonstrating that they could use gene therapy to prevent heart damage in rabbits with
congestive heart failure, Duke University Medical Center researchers have now gone one step further to use gene therapy to
actually reverse the damage already done to the rabbits’ heart tissue.” EurekAlert!

Moderate earthquakes rattle Acapulco. More clustering? Does the earth groan in discontent?

Members of Blue Man Group say they haven’t sold out. Guerrilla theatre does Intel and Grammy. Nando Times

Data Accessory Musings: Handspring hopes to gain an “edge”. “The new device will have an all metal case, PalmOS 3.5, 8MB RAM, a
lithium (ion or polymer are uncertain) battery, a detachable Springboard adaptor, and it will be the the lightest
& thinnest Visor yet” … Especially if it comes with a color display, the combination of that and the expansion slot might make me abandon brand loyalty and upgrade from my invaluable Palm Vx, even with the rumors of a color version coming this spring. On the other hand, there’s the Kyocera Smartphone, which integrates a Palm organizer into a cellphone neatly; this has apparently just been spotted in Verizon stores. This degree of integration of my two most important data accessories is appealing. I’ve tried some wireless web access on my current cellphone but it’s a brain-dead process with the small screen size and crippled data entry via the twelve-number keypad; I cancelled web services on my cellular account after a trial month. Here’s a primer on short messaging service (SMS), the wireless instant-messaging technology that’s very popular with the European market and, apparently, especially with the young. I honestly can’t see this catching on with me, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve scoffed at geeky developments I later came to depend upon.I don’t even see any use to instant messaging on my wired desktop, like ICU or Yahoo’s instant messaging client. As the article describes it, this appeals mostly to the Britney Spears set. Here’s an article on using an instant messaging client with a connected Palm device. Then there’s the two-way paging world of the Blackberrys etc., which I haven’t even thought about. If not a dot.com executive, I hear I’d have to be a nightclubbing NBA star for that. Your next net appliance, however, is of course going to be your car…

Update: From Robot Wisdom comes thsi pointer to Simson Garfinkel’s rave about the Handspring Visorphone PDA-cellphone combination in Salon.

Student kills 2 classmates, wounds 13 near San Diego CNN; New York teen kills father after noise dispute Nando Times; News analysis: When Children Kill BBC

Convergences: The essayist writes, “In the late 1960’s, as a college junior, I drove John Fahey through
Massachusetts for a week. He was playing a series of gigs
from Williamstown to Wellesley. Well after midnight,
somewhere on the Mass Pike, he began to ramble on about
his music and the odd and often inappropriate places it had
found a home. He told me that there were mental hospitals
in Massachusetts where his music was played over
loudspeakers as part of the therapeutic regime; psychiatrists
had decided it had the power to soothe the more agitated
patients.

‘I’m always amazed it doesn’t drive them to immediate
suicide,’ he said, cackling.”

“Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a
thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a
pufferfish.” — Bruce Sterling [via apathy] It turns out this was from a speech, “The Wonderful Power of Storytelling”, from the Computer Game Developers Conference in San Jose CA in March 1991.

Who Hit Who? Apart from the grammar, there are problems with this piece I’ve seen linked to by others. The author, Robert Morningstar, a “computer systems and imaging specialist”, says he wrote this on behalf of the captain, crew and passengers of the USS Greenville “all of whom had the duty and the right to be there.” He goes to great lengths to assert that the sub and the US Navy could not possibly have been remiss in the incident, claiming that the Ehime Maru was not really an innocent fishing vessel but probably had stealth capability, was stalking the submarine for Japanese intelligence-gathering and R&D purposes, and that it hit the sub rather than vice versa. He uses “patriot” phraseology which identifies him with the radical right. (He says he’s written for the “American Friends and Patriots Network”; a web search on that comes up with nothing, but the “American Patriot Friends Network” [“we believe Patriots should rule America”] is there and clearly comes from militia territory on the political map.)

Quinacrine Non-surgical Method of Voluntary Female Sterilization: “…already used by over 100,000 women with no reported deaths or life
threatening complications.”

“Delivered by a trained midwife or MD in any office, using a modified
IUD inserter, a 252 mg dose of 7 tiny quinacrine pellets is placed at the
fundus of the uterus. The pellets dissolve quickly. The fluid causes
inflammation and then scarring at the opening of the fallopian tubes.
This prevents further births. With two treatments a month apart, studies
show low failure rates with no evidence of cancer. As the drug is
off-patent, the cost of the pellets and inserter is under $5. Surgical
sterilizations often cost well over $2000 in the United States.” However, the method has been banned in Vietnam, India and China after unfavorable publicity, including suggestions of carcinogenicity, its proponents call a “vast disinformation
campaign by uninformed feminists and traditional family planning
opponents (which) has now been fully discredited by sound scientific
investigations and a long favorable experience with QS in Chile.” I googled (I’ve started seeing this as a verb recently; what do you think?) on “quinacrine AND sterilization” and the words that leap out at me from the results include “controversial” (over and over again), “dangerous”, “painful”, “forced sterilization” and “guinea pigs”. [via Caught in Between]