Nursing neurons: “The first gene therapy trial for Alzheimer’s
disease begins.”

In treating neuro-degenerative diseases, gene therapy
provides an alternative to implanted neurons derived from
human embryos or fetuses. Gene therapy avoids this ethical
problem, but was severely tarnished by the death of teenager
Jesse Gelsinger during a 1999 gene therapy trial, which aimed
to correct a liver defect.

New Scientist

Safety in numbers: “Biodiversity is not just good for the soul – it
could help save the planet from global warming
too.” A University of Minnesota scientist warns that human destruction of biodiverse ecosystems destroys the potential escape valve from buildup of greenhouse gases. New Scientist

World’s most thrilling games you can play involving your search engine

Before the Big Bang BBC

Children attending the annual White House Easter Egg
Roll — a custom that dates from the 1870s — will be frisked
for stun guns by the Secret Service. The Times of London

School’s Mathematics Don’t Add Up. “I walked out of there, and I
tell you, my head was spinning. It
was like a cult. It was like they
were selling Amway or
something.” New York Post

Unsavory Practice. A homophobic Arkansas viewer received a rude reply when his complaint about a lesbian plotline on the ABC TV show The Practice was routed to the webmaster of ABC’s site. He threatened to publicize it broadly, and ABC management apologized deeply and fired the respondent.

The Name Game. The US Supreme Court ruled that Missouri couldn’t exclude the KKK from its adopt-a-highway program, but few would argue that the state doesn’t have the right to rename the highway the Klan is sponsoring!

Blogging may be passé for the most vainglorious among us; now you can host your own Internet Talk Radio show, with real callers, for free. Lycos

Harry Potter trailer not free at cinema chain. “General Cinemas movie theaters, which have been showing a new trailer for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, will not give refunds
to impatient fans who go to theaters, watch the trailer – which is less than two minutes long – then ask for their money back.” AP

The Wisdom Trap: A little self knowledge may be a dangerous thing; if you’re weak-willed, for example, it may be better to be naive about your failing than sophisticated, two economists argue. Lingua Franca

Not-so-free speech: 10 given ‘Jefferson Muzzle’ awards Nando Times

Why Mathematicians Now Care About Their Hat Color. “It takes a
particularly clever puzzle to stump a
mind accustomed to performing mental
gymnastics.

So it’s no ordinary puzzle that’s spreading
through networks of mathematicians like a
juicy bit of gossip. Known as the hat
problem in its most popular incarnation, this
seemingly simple puzzle is consuming brain
cycles at universities and research labs
across the country and has become a
vibrant topic of discussion on the Internet.” New York Times

Writers at Work: how to write the perfect author bio for the back flap of your book jacket… or maybe your weblog? Moby lives

Footnotes to History: “The nations you didn’t learn about in high school geography.”

How Bush Had to Calm Hawks in Devising a Response to China ‘Within his party, and even his administration, many chafed at China’s obstinacy,
and even at the administration’s decision to use the words “very sorry” to
describe Washington’s reaction to an incident that the Pentagon painted as
entirely China’s fault.

Yet in his first serious foreign policy challenge, Mr. Bush quickly suppressed his
initial instincts — which had led him to step out of his office and demand the
immediate release of the crew and the plane, with barely a nod to China’s
sensitivities.

He quickly took a more conciliatory approach that required tamping down some
of his administration’s hawks and many uniformed commanders. He even kept
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, whose troops were being detained,
from having any public role.’ New York Times

Doctor at Antarctic Station Is Stricken. For the second time, the only physician working at the Amundsen-Scott station at the South Pole has been stricken and had to do self-diagnosis. Dr. Ronald Shemenski appears to have acute pancreatitis, has done an abdominal ultrasound on himself, inserted a nasogastric tube, etc. Recall Dr. Jerri Nielsen’s October 1999 emergency evacuation after she was stricken and diagnosed her own breast cancer. New York Times

Fury.com: AOLiza. Hilarious transcripts of AOL chat-room denizens trying to engage a version of ELIZA. ELIZA was Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1966 creation, a program that simulates a Rogerian therapist by parsing excerpts from its interlocutors’ comments and reflecting them back as questions.

Using a publicly available Perl version of ELIZA, a Mac with nothing better to do than
play psychoanalyst, a few applescripts, and an AOL Instant Messenger account that has a high rate of
‘random’ people trying to start conversations, I put ELIZA in touch with the real world. Every few days
I’ll put up the latest ‘patients.’ Names have been changed to protect the… well, everyone.

Some claim that ELIZA passes the Turing Test, in which subjects cannot determine if they are talking to an actual human being. I’m not sure these AOL chatters pass the Turing Test themselves, though, after reading this…

Deconstructing the Essential Father.

“Neoconservative social scientists have claimed that fathers are essential to positive child development, and that responsible fathering is most likely to
occur within the context of heterosexual marriage. This perspective is generating a range of governmental initiatives designed to provide social support
preferences to fathers over mothers; and to heterosexual married couples, rather than to alternative family forms.

The current article proposes that the neoconservative position is an incorrect or oversimplified interpretation of empirical research. Using a wide range of
cross-species, cross-cultural, and social science research, the authors argue that neither mothers nor fathers are essential to child development, and that
responsible fathering can occur within a variety of family structures. The article concludes with alternative recommendations for encouraging responsible
fathering that do not discriminate against mothers and diverse family forms.”

The processor industry-backed company developing extreme
ultraviolet lithography chip-making equipment has demonstrated its
first prototype.

The machine etches circuits on a wafer of silicon. The microscopic
‘wiring’ is 0.01 micron wide – just 5.6 per cent of the width of the
circuits in today’s top-end 0.18 micron CPUs.

That, researchers reckon, will allow Intel, AMD, IBM, Motorola and
co. make chips that run up to 10GHz and up by 2005. The Register