The destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan had been reminding me of Sheldon Kopp’s book, If You See the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him. Just then, Jim Higgins sent me a pointer to Sheldon Kopp’s Escatological Laundry List. (“The only victory lies in surrender to oneself.”)

Higgins also writes:

The New York Review of Books online is carrying neurologist Oliver Sacks’ introduction to Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter’s Life with Autism, Clara Claiborne Park’s 2nd book about her daughter Jessy, a person with autism who has grown up (with much help from her parents) to be a talented artist. The NYRB package online also includes several pieces of Jessy Park’s artwork.

If you have followed Sacks, you know that autism is one of his special interests. True to form, he is interested not only in the limits of a person, but also the soul and the paradoxical gains that come from having a certain illness or disorder.

To my great pleasure, I discovered that Dr. Sacks has a personal website here, with goodies such as links to artwork by people Sacks has written about and links to interviews with Sacks or feature articles about him.

Adbusters’ Fools Festival: “On April 1st, party rules apply. Anarchy will be
enforced. Abby Hoffman proved, on the floor of
the New York Stock Exchange, that throwing
money at the problem works — when the
problem is conformity.

Let’s do it again — for real!

Let handfuls of dollar bills rain down on the
trading floor of your local stock exchange or,
failing that, shopping mall.

Are you fool enough to do it?” If you shower down $100 in small bills at your local Temple of Mammon and document the resulting mayhem on video, Adbusters will reimburse you your $100.

Hoaxbusters, a service of the Computer Incident Advisory Capability (CIAC) of the U.S. Department of Energy. “In addition to describing hoaxes and chain letters found on the Internet, we will discuss how to recognize hoaxes, what to do about them, and some of the
history of hoaxes on the Internet.

Users are requested to please not spread chain letters and hoaxes by sending copies to everyone you know. Sending a copy of a cute message to one or two
friends is not a problem but sending an unconfirmed warning or plea to everyone you know with the request that they also send it to everyone they know
simply adds to the clutter already filling our mailboxes.” […but you knew that already, right?]

Napster Blocking Creates Dan Quayle Effect: “America doesn’t need to worry that Napster will teach children to steal, but thanks to
the RIAA, it will create a whole array of new vocabulary!” InfoAnarchy

Psychiatry in the Media: The Vampire, The Fisher King, and the Zaddik. I was delighted to find this essay by Dr. Ron Pies, who I know to be an insightful psychiatrist and who turns out to be an observant critic as well, in the latest Journal of Mundane Behavior. In essence, he says the media portrayal of psychiatrists is anything but mundane.

Picture of the imminent $10 paper cellphone. Made possible by a new technqiue allowing the printing of circuits on paper with magnetic ink, you buy it like a phone card and throw it away when its prepaid calling quota is used up.

Oscar winners to express thanks online. The producer of the televised Oscar awards show suggests that award recipients confine themselves to a 45-second acceptance speech. A list of all the people they want to thank would then be run on oscar.com under the winner’s picture. But, alas, this is a suggestion only, not a requirement… My question: would the price of the gowns come down any if they were only going to get onscreen for 45 sec.?

Teacher punishes child with firing squad: “A Spanish schoolteacher has been reported to the
police for conducting a mock firing squad in the
classroom.” Ananova

Russians approve the use of
bananas during sex. “The change in policy came after party members
decided the fruit could not transmit Aids.

Party officials decided to adopt the change in policy
after a heated debate over the practice. African
peoples have a long tradition of ritually deflowering
virgins using bananas, the party’s state session in
Vologda heard.” Ananova

The Human Body Shop Dozens of groups in industry and academia are… working on
techniques for fashioning new organs out of cells
from embryos, cadavers or patients themselves,
combined with special biomaterials. Most current
work in the commercial realm focuses on tissues, valves and other components of organs. Already, there are a handful of tissue-engineered products
on the market—skin, bone, and cartilage implants and patches—the first successes in a young
field. MIT Technology Review

Cult fear hits Bush plan to fund by faith: ‘George Bush’s plan to channel US government aid to
“faith-based” religious charities is being held back by the
fear that it could end up funding controversial groups such
as The Church of Scientology, Hare Krishna and the
Unification Church – the Moonies..

The initiative, launched with great fanfare at a White House
prayer breakfast in the president’s second week in office,
has stirred up a hornet’s nest of accusations across the
spectrum of religious groups and is being radically
redrafted.

The decision to delay its introduction was taken at the end
of last week after an unexpected war of words on the
religious right threatened to derail the entire scheme.’ Guardian

Boston Ballet lawsuit over anorexic death dismissed: “A judge has thrown out a wrongful death lawsuit brought against the Boston Ballet by a woman
who claimed her anorexic daughter died because ballet officials pressured her to remain thin.”

CNN obtain photo of Taliban destroying statues “The news that an international outcry had failed to save the
monuments, carved more than 1,500 years ago, came from the
Unesco director general, Koichiro Matsuura, whose special envoy,
the French diplomat Pierre Lafrance, confirmed that the statues
had been destroyed.” CNN

US Said To Export Torture Weapons. “Dozens of U.S. companies sell weapons and other
equipment used overseas for torture, Amnesty International said Monday,
calling for a ban on the sales.” APB News

Hot on the heels of the axe-in-the-head project comes the “I Can Eat Glass” Project, “the result of high technology in the hands of people who have no idea what to do with it.”

Handspring gets skinnier with its handheld. I previously discussed this upcoming PDA with excitement. Notch the excitement down by one now with this news that it’ll have a black and white screen, unlike Palm’s upcoming color successor to my Vx. ZDNet

St. John’s Wort Plus Prescriptions Equal Trouble. While this paper reports only on one particular type of interaction, it illustrates a general problem. Many patients don’t think it’s significant to tell their MDs about the over-the-counter medications or natural remedies they take, yet these can have significant and sometimes detrimental interactions with their prescribed drugs. And many physicians are neither interested in or knowledgeable enough to assess these effects.

Scientists Test Hallucinogens for Mental Ills New York Times

Thurmond’s Wife Is Insistent: No Service in Senate for Her. The deteriorating health of Strom Thurmond, at 98 the oldest member of the Senate, is a matter of intense political focus and expectancy because the Democratic governor of South Carolina would probably appoint a Democrat as his replacement, giving the Democrats a 51-49 majority. Thurmond, who is probably too enfeebled to do his job already but hangs in there, reportedly secretly offered the Governor his resignation if his wife would be appointed to complete his term, but she has just indicated her unwillingness to do so. New York Times

Jim Crace’s Layered Being Dead Wins Critics Circle Fiction Award New York Times This is on my rading list.

Even Without Evidence, String Theory Gains Influence “String theorists keep saying that
they’re succeeding. The rest of us can wonder whether they are walking along the road to
triumph or whether in 20 years they’ll realize that they were
walking into this enormous, beautiful, mathematically elegant cul-de-sac.”

String theory has constantly changed since it first emerged several decades
ago, and even its ardent adherents concede that they still do not understand
more than what Dr. Gross called “the tail of the tiger,” or a few suggestive
parts of what is believed to be a complete theory. Until recently the physical
crux of the theory was thought to be vibrating, 10-dimensional loops of string
roughly a billion trillion times smaller than a proton. Different modes of
vibration of the strings (made of what, no one is sure) represented different
particles in nature.

Now physicists believe the ultimate objects are 11-dimensional membranes.
Either way, the extra dimensions beyond the usual four would be curled up so
as to be nearly imperceptible. And because the vibrations would include the
graviton, the particle thought to transmit gravity, as well as particles involved
in the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism, string theory
offered the prospect of unifying physics.

But with that aesthetic attraction came deep problems. First, in the 1980’s, it
seemed that the strings had a basic inability to cope with known differences
between particles and their mirror images, and other such broad facts of
nature. But closer study showed that, contrary to all expectation, various
terms in the theory canceled each other, fixing the problem. New York Times