George Bush is sorely mistaken if he thinks there’s nothing that Britain and the rest of the world can do about US renunciation of the Kyoto accords on greenhouse gas emissions. Boycotts, restitution, withdrawals and expulsions, will follow. And any Briton who visits the US will be expected to drive on the left. The Guardian

Socially inept, self-involved and geeky? Temple Grandin, “perhaps the world’s best known sufferer of Asperger’s Syndrome”, recognized a fellow traveler in Kevin Mitnick when she watched him in a TV interview about a year ago. She, and others, have been thinking about whether AS is an indication that a child is at risk of becoming a hacker. Mitnick himself identified with a fellow hacker imprisoned with him and diagnosed as having Asperger’s. Some counter that Asperger’s is closely associated with rigid rectitude; if not hackers and crackers, how about a link between AS and nerdiness in general? USA Today

Lightly Braised Adverbs. Pay attention to the verbiage of the modern menu to learn when you should run, don’t walk, from that jovial eatery before you waste your money. Irish Times

Distant Supernova Dark Energy. “Light from a star that exploded over 10 billion light-years away is revealed in… a cosmic snapshot of the most distant
supernova. The ancient stellar detonation was detected by digitally subtracting before and after images of a faint, yellowish, elliptical galaxy included in the
Hubble Space Telescope Deep Field image… Remarkable in itself as the farthest known supernova, its measured brightness
provides astounding evidence for a strange universe – one which eventually defies gravity and expands at an accelerating rate. The unseen force driving this
expansion is dubbed dark energy and discovering the fundamental nature of dark energy has been called the challenge of this millennium. Astronomy Picture of the Day

The real computer virus is the Internet’s unmatched capacity for distributing misinformation. When the mainstream media prints an item that seems, in an old newsroom phrase, “too good to check”, it probably is too good to be true.

…In recent months I have found myself quietly
checking the validity of almost everything I find in
cyberspace and whenever possible doing it the
old-fashioned way: consulting reference books in
libraries, calling professors or original sources on the
phone, double-checking everything…

Seven years ago, AJR warned that an over-reliance
on Lexis-Nexis was leading to a “misinformation
explosion.” Since that time, the number of journalists
using the data retrieval service has increased
exponentially; at many news organizations, libraries
have been phased out and reporters do their own
searches. This has led, predictably, to an entire subgenre
of phony quotes and statistics that won’t die. American Journalism Review

“How did everything get to be so complicated? For most people,
a rueful exclamation; for Stuart Kauffman, the most interesting
question about the universe.” A review of Investigations:

Kauffman’s approach to explaining how such things can be is
unconventional. A philosopher turned doctor turned theoretical
biologist, he works out of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico,
where the house style is computer simulation of just about
anything. In his last book, At Home in the Universe , he outlined
the power of self-organisation, arguing that there are laws that
can generate order where we don’t expect it. In Kauffman’s
computer-generated universe, stable structures appeared where
intuition predicted a mess. Wherever he looked – in networks of
interacting genes, in vats of chemicals or in the patterns of
decision that tie producers to consumers in the marketplace –
he saw “order for free”.

In Investigations, one puzzle he wants to cast in a new light is
how to read the energy exchanges that underpin all these
processes.

…The book
is undeniably heavy going in places. Some of the chapters take
for granted science that another writer would explain at length.
Although there are plenty of concrete examples, much of the
core argument keeps trying to turn back into mathematics. Yet
Kauffman’s obsessive probing of the limits of understanding is
pretty gripping, in its way. The book may be science. It may be,
as he suggests hopefully, proto-science. It is certainly a crash
course in how to think like Stuart Kauffman, which is a great
way to see blind spots in the science that already exists. The Guardian

“Holier Than Thou” morality study shows why you probably aren’t as nice as you think. “We knew something had to be wrong when the average person thinks he or she’s a better person than the average person, when the majority of Americans
consider themselves to be members of an elite moral minority. We wanted to know whether people feel holier than thou because they underestimate others’ moral goodness, or because
they overestimate their own.”

Ten Reasons for Reparations: “Conservative muckraker David Horowitz has been verbally mugged for peddling
an ad to college newspapers giving ten reasons why reparations are racist. But the
name callers have done little more than canonize Horowitz as a martyr for truth and
free speech. Even worse, they’ve failed miserably to tell why reparations merit a
serious look. There are ten compelling reasons it does.” AlterNet

Media Gives Bush a Free Pass: ‘The incident occurred in Fort Worth on Feb. 25 when a “very intoxicated” college
student was arrested at a rowdy fraternity party and was, according to the county
sheriff, “very vocal” that his girlfriend was George W. Bush’s teenaged daughter,
who’d also attended the party. After the student used his cellular phone to make a
call from his cell, Secret Service agents quickly arrived to get him out. Bush’s
daughter reportedly waited outside the jail in a Secret Service vehicle.

The White House wouldn’t comment on the matter, and the story disappeared from
the news in a day.’ AlterNet

(Ariana Huffington’s overthrowthegov.com)

“It made me feel like a very cool cyborg surgeon…” It’s in the Eyes. Surgeons complain of being distracted by having to look up from their operating field to view data on a computer screen. Now doctors at the Mayo Clinic are finding “useful and not distracting” a retinal-scanning device that “paints” images and data directly on their eyes, allowing them to review crucial information without ever having to look up from the patient. ‘The main computer sends the needed data to miniature
horizontal and vertical scanners in the control module that then
project the image through the headpiece’s optical element,
where a laser beam places it directly onto the user’s retina.

James says the data looks like it’s being projected onto a “big,
transparent TV screen that’s floating in space about an arm’s
length away from you.” ‘Wired

It reminds me of a scene from Spy Kids, which I saw with my son this weekend. The big sister is outfitting her little brother with his spy gear as they gear up to save their captured secret agent parents. She slips onto his face a set of sunglasses with a computer display on their inner surface superimposed on the visual field. He immediately says “Yecchh!” and she asks him what he sees. “You!” he replies (I guess you had to be there…)

Have You Hugged the Internet Today?. Today has been ‘Back the Net Day’, “a
one-man campaign to revive e-business by
encouraging people to buy online. Or send
online cards, or buy worthless tech stocks
… whatever, just log on now! The Internet
needs you!” Empathize with your local ex-dot.com-billionaire. The Standard

Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): Stepmother Forces Boy to Stitch Up Mouth

W’s Brave Old World: ‘New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd – who made endless fun
of Al Gore for his earth-tone sweaters, his Palm Pilot and his
connection to the book Love Story – isn’t one for making apologies.
But she’s come close to admitting that her election-year ridicule of
Gore might have helped put a dimwitted reactionary in the White
House.

“Forgive me, Al Gore,” Dowd wrote in a column on Bush’s drive to turn back the
clock on the environment and foreign policy. “I’m going hungry for a shred of
modernity.” With her second thoughts about making a mockery of Al Gore and his itnerest in the future, Dowd might not be alone.’ The Consortium

The Macedonian extremists may be dangerous, but they’re not crazy; peace is not the only option. by Paul Glastris, a senior fellow at the Western Policy
Center, who served as a speechwriter for President Clinton
and covered the war in Bosnia for U.S. News & World
Report. Slate

‘Yeti’s hair’ defies DNA analysis. “British scientists on the trail of the Yeti have found some of
the best evidence yet for the existence of the mythical
Himalayan creature — a sample of hair that has proved
impossible to identify.

Genetic tests on the hair, which was gathered from a tree in
Bhutan, have failed to match its DNA to that of another animal.
The findings, which have surprised sceptical researchers, raise
the strong possibility that the sample belongs to an as yet
undiscovered species.” The Times of London