Net Access: Socket to Me. “Imagine surfing the Internet by simply plugging your computer into the wall outlet.

That’s the idea behind power line communications, which use low voltage electrical lines to transmit
voice and data signals.

Proponents say the technology beats the socks off other broadband methods by offering transmission
rates up to five times faster than cable modems for about half the price. Fast, cheap, ubiquitous
Internet. It’s a geek’s wet dream.

But before you start the heavy breathing, consider this: Although the technology has been hyped since
the late ’90s and companies from Argentina to Israel have been racing to get it up and running, the
future of powerline seems murky at best. And if you’re an American, your possibilities of ever getting broadband access through
the outlet next to the john are next to zero.” Wired

Narco News site being sued by prominent Mexican banker it accuses of being drug trafficker.

Narco News (was) launched a year ago to cover the war on drugs
in Latin America. For the past year, Giordano’s been producing Narco News from
“somewhere in a country called América,” as he signs his dispatches, taking on
powerful icons ranging from the New York Times and the Associated Press to the
governments of the United States and Mexico.

Among the icons with whom Giordano has tangled is Hernández, the principal
owner of Banco Nacional de Mexico, more commonly known as Banamex, which
Hernández bought from the Mexican government in 1991. Last August, Hernández
and Banamex sued Giordano, the Narco News Bulletin, and Mexican journalist
Mario Menéndez Rodríguez, accusing them of libel, slander, and “interference with
prospective economic advantage.”

The reason: Giordano and Menéndez, both in interviews last year with the Village
Voice and WBAI Radio and in a public appearance at Columbia University,
charged that Hernández is a drug trafficker whose profits helped to finance the
purchase of Banamex. Giordano also published those charges in Narco News. Boston Phoenix

Lone Guns Set Sites on Spam: “A self-appointed global army has taken on the mass Internet mailings that
annoy users and crash systems. It is a demanding and risky hobby.” LA Times

Emerging Disease News: States Regroup on West Nile Disease: “It is spring, and an epidemiologist’s thoughts turn
to the West Nile virus – the germ that arrived in this
country two years ago, imperiling lives and causing alarm along the
East Coast.” I had been wondering whether concerns about WNV would re-emerge this spring. The article has links to other coverage of West Nile worry.

Despite Appearances, Whitman Says She and Bush Agree on Environment: ‘(In) a recent interview in her office, she argued that she had felt
nothing at all after learning of the president’s reversal.

“It had nothing to do with me personally,” she said. Conceding that she “had
been in a different place” at first, she said she had come to accept the
president’s view that such regulation would be too costly to the economy and to
consumers.

“He was right, all things considered,” Mrs. Whitman said. “We’re in an energy
crisis, no two ways about it.”

She never considered resigning, she said.” The lady doth protest too much?? New York Times

Joey Ramone, Punk’s Influential Yelper, Dies at 49. He and I graduated from the same high school in the same year, but were only faces to each other.

Blogger, the tool I use to produce FmH, has struck a deal with Trellix that sounds like it will assure Blogger’s survival and, hopefully, improvement. Blogger functions will be packaged with “other (Trellix) site- building tools, bringing the
Web log concept to a wider audience”, as The New York Times (link above) puts it… for better or worse. The renowned Dan Bricklin was apparently instrumental in getting this to happen; here’s his account, from his (non-Blogger) weblog. While we’re on the Blogger subject, The Guardian UK has a step-by-step guide to the simple act of creating a weblog with Blogger.

The dialogue among four real-life psychoanalysts about the psychotherapy subplot on The Sopranos continues.

The four of us, as professional shrinks, keep raising a nagging
question, but none of us has thus far tried to answer it in detail.
Namely, does it make sense to try to treat a sociopath like Tony
in therapy? For one of the maxims of clinical experience that
everyone repeatedly hears in their training is that it is extremely
difficult, if not impossible, to treat sociopaths
psychotherapeutically. Although the meaning of this adage may be
clear to us–and I’m not sure that’s even true–we can’t just
assume that the readers of our exchanges know what we are
getting at.

So I will take a stab at trying to put the problem in nontechnical
terms. The question we have to ask ourselves about all our
patients is whether there is a healthy enough core to their
personalities–formed through the experience of being loved and
cared for as a small child–for them to become engaged in a
psychotherapeutic relationship.

The way analysts think about treatment is that it is the elucidation of unconscious processes — motives, conflicts — that improves a patient’s life, but that there is profound resistance (also unconscious) on the patient’s part to examining such issues. In psychoanalytic psychotherapy and classical psychoanalysis (which is not depicted on The Sopranos, and is more intense, involving sessions several times a week often using the “classical” couch, free association, the silence and impassivity of the analyst etc.) the therapist’s skill lies in knowing how to help the patient to get better despite her/his profound attempt to subvert the effort. This relies in large measure on entering into a relationship with a patient which will inevitably recreate all the patient’s dilemmas and conflicts in negotiating all their relationships, while the therapist remains aware enough of her/his own unconscious issues in doing business with others that they do not interfere. The shorthand terms for these two aspects of the relationship are, respectively, transference and countertransference. Examination of the patient’s complexities of feelings and reactions in this context is how learning and change take place.

These four psychoanalytic commentators find the TV depiction, in a sense, trite, because there is so much “acting out” on the part of the patients —

in other words, they are avoiding any sort of in-depth
look at their complex feelings (envy, hostility, dependency,
longing, etc.) toward their therapist and the therapeutic
relationship by seducing someone who’s the “next best
thing”–another patient of their therapist’s.

— but also on the part of the therapist, who “inadvertently” double-booked Tony and the Annabella Sciorra character, with predictable consequences. One would interpret this as representing Dr. Melfi’s unconscious way of extricating herself from the erotic bind between herself and Tony, and it compounds her actions of the previous week in sending Tony’s wife Carmela to a “hatchet man” therapist who, in premature bluntness unthinkable to any seasoned therapist (but presumably expectable to Dr. Melfi, as he was her teacher), pushed her to leave Tony.

The question is raised whether the writers are competently depicting an unsophisticated and out-of-control therapy or incompetently attempting to depict a sophisticated one. In any case, if you’re interested, you’ll learn alot about how psychoanalysts think by listening to them muse about the same show you’ve watched; scroll down to the first of the readers’ comments at the bottom of the column for an astute comment about what you might learn about yourself too. [Is this — by which I mean both the psychiatric plot and reading the commentary on it — interesting to any viewers of this show besides mental health professionals like myself? One FmH reader has already weighed in emphatically in the negative…]

Slate

Windows XP Hits Home. I don’t know who Andy Patrizio is, but he really likes the public beta of the Windows XP Home Edition. “Windows XP in its current state is an improvement over Windows ME
and a much better choice for a stable OS than Windows 2000. When it’s
finally released this fall, it will likely be worth the upgrade.” Wired

Not Quite What the Doctor Ordered: a testament to an obsession with Dr. Pepper; lists and rates the dozens of imitators, most of which are named “Dr. something-or-other“. Who knew??

Pulitzer Prizes in Arts Awarded: composer John Corigliano, playwright David Auburn (Proof), W.E.B. DuBois biographer David Levering Lewis, historian of the American Revolution Joseph J. Ellis, poet Stephen Dunn (Different Hours), novelist Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), and Herbert P. Bix for Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan in nonfiction. The interesting thing about this New York Times article is that it dwells in an unprecedented gossipy manner on descriptions of the winners’ reactions to the news.

The early-adopter wars: “Stodgy companies are
paying big bucks to
learn about the
trendsetting tastes of
‘alpha consumers.’

The problem with all this is fairly obvious. There’s no doubt
that trendsetters (if any still exist after the bursting of the
new-economy bubble) are swell people: They create cool
art, sell ingenious drugs and open boutiques on Elizabeth
Street that specialize in things like inflatable burlap dresses.
What’s less clear is why mainstream conglomerates like
Taco Bell and Motorola should use their recondite
preferences as a basis for brand positioning.

[The article gives a rundown of what you ought to be finding ‘wired’ and ‘tired’ if you’re a trendsetter. Me? never heard of virtually any of the cool stuff…] Salon

“Crisis Inflames Bias Against Asians; Ethnic stereotypes in broadcast, print media prompt protests.” David Anderson at Metaforage pointed to this article in the same breath as he reflected on my coverage of Johnny Hart’s fundamentalist boldness in “B.C.” . He finds it all a sign of things to come now that the likes of Li’l George rule the roost. But the jingoistic anti-foreigner vitriol which makes me feel so embarrassed to be an American has happened every time there’s an international crisis with a nation whose people don’t look, talk, or worship like us. I still cringe when I think of the anti-Arab sentiment I heard during the Gulf War. And we have never seemed to grasp the distinctions between a people and their rulers, hating the one for the evils or failings of the other. Hating, and usually killing them with our sanctions…

Bush’s Budget: The Winners and The Losers. Washington Post

“To rely on the
[Federal] Reserve as a remedy for an emerging recession is optimism carried to
the point of foolishness.” — John Kenneth Galbraith. The Cult of Greenspan: He’s been worshipped as a god since he became Fed chairman in 1987 and, even though extremely offensive to populist sentiment, seemingly above criticizing. But it seems to be coming apart at the seams abit. Boston Phoenix

Field Guide to the FTAA Protest in Quebec City: ‘If you want to join us in Quebec City from April 20 to 22 (2001) to protest FTAA, this guide is for you. We suggest that you print it and bring it with you to Quebec
City. Make sure to have the latest version of this guide as it will evolve over time. We also suggest that you print the guide “Guess What We’ve Got Rights!”. ‘

Warm water. Because thermal transfer to the oceans has been hard to model, climate scientists until recently focused for evidence of global warming on the atmosphere, and failed to find that its higher levels have warmed significantly. This discrepancy cast doubts on the doomsayers’ scenarios. But now a new model can account for the heat absorbed by the world’s oceans. This reveals that the waters of the earth are indeed “the dominant part ofthe Earth’s climate system for storing heat,” according to the NOAA scientist who led the study. The observed rise in the oceans’ temperature over the past four decades ‘matches greenhouse predictions better than the smaller heat sink of the atmosphere’ and ‘adds up to “strongest evidence to date” that humans are causing global warming.’ New Scientist

Hearing is Believing: The blind writer describes his aurally-based awareness.

“Those of us who are born blind discover, as we grow up, that we can tell a
great deal about our environment. Usually at about seven or eight years
old we begin to put this knowledge into practice. When we tell sighted
people about this skill they usually misunderstand and often think we
possess some remnant of sight. When I was a small child I was guided by
my mother, my aunts, and occasionally my dad, who was less comfortable
with the task. Before long I began to notice that I could tell certain things. I
could tell when I was passing a car, when there was an open space near
me, when I was heading straight for a wall, or when there was a big
obstacle like a truck in my path—and I could tell all these things without
knowing how.” bent

Field Guide to the FTAA Protest in Quebec City: ‘If you want to join us in Quebec City from April 20 to 22 (2001) to protest FTAA, this guide is for you. We suggest that you print it and bring it with you to Quebec
City. Make sure to have the latest version of this guide as it will evolve over time. We also suggest that you print the guide “Guess What We’ve Got Rights!”. ‘

Just coming up: Navy Panel Urges No Court-Martial for Sub’s Skipper. “The Navy’s court of inquiry into the collision between an
American submarine and a Japanese vessel has recommended
that the submarine’s skipper not be tried by a
court-martial, senior Pentagon officials said.” A reprimand and early retirement are likely instead. It makes sense to me not to scapegoat the commander too directly, but not for the Navy’s reason, which is to maintain morale in the Pacific Fleet. The blame probably lies higher up, with those who turned a lethal high-performance war machine into an amusement park ride for high-rolling political campaign comtributors.

The testimony indicated that the submarine went to sea that day only for the
sake of the 16 civilians on board, three of whom were seated at some of the
controls at the time of the collision.

The Greeneville’s regularly scheduled training mission had been canceled as
unnecessary, so a third of the crew stayed in port during the exercise, and the
commander did not take measures to reassign other members of the crew to
cover the absentees. He was also unaware that 9 of 13 sailors manning watch
stations had switched positions without telling him.

Some equipment was not functioning properly, but the commander did not
discuss that with his senior officers, according to the testimony. Because of a long
lunch with the visitors, the submarine was running behind schedule, and was
rushing to make up time. As a result, four safety procedures, ranging from the
way the Greeneville tracked nearby ships to the way it surfaced and used its
periscope, were skipped or abbreviated.

After the accident, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered a halt to the
practice of letting civilians take the controls of military equipment.

How to mollify Japan, with which we could never get away with the brand of lying diplomacy we recently perpetrated on the Chinese in the spy plane incident, will remain an interesting challenge. New York Times

The B.C. comic strip flap: Here is the Jewish Defense League’s call for adherents to appeal to local newspapers “not to allow this insult to be printed”, as it is scheduled to be tomorrow. Of course, the color supplements to the Sunday papers were printed a long time ago and the strip cannot be pulled at this late date, respond the newspapers. A copy of the strip appears on the site. The JDL says:

B.C. is pushing Replacement Theology (the theory that
Christianity has replaced Judaism as “The Chosen” because the Jews do not accept Jesus
as messiah) down the throats of the readers — many of them children — of the Sunday
comics. As the candles burn, the menorah (a sacred and venerated symbol of the Jewish
people) is obliterated and turns into a cross (the symbol of Christianity).

The Anti-Defamation League, at a different place altogether in the Jewish spectrum, does not call for the retraction of the strip but finds it

insensitive and
offensive. While not anti-Semitic, the comic
strip’s message is reminiscent of the
theology of contempt, which for centuries
played a central role in fomenting Christian
violence and hatred against Jews. It is even
more troubling because the comic strip
appears during Passover, a season that
Christianity had historically used as an
excuse to defame the Jewish religion with
charges of blood libel, Jews as
“Christ-killers,” and pogroms. Sadly, we
thought that the Christian-Jewish dialogue
had moved us beyond such crude
expressions of contempt.

Time magazine has some background on Hart’s proselytizing here.

A Google search on (“Johnny Hart” and B.C. and Christian) looks like this.

1000journals Project distributes 1000 blank journals, they pass around the world with each recipient adding documentation of time and place, stories and drawings and then passing them along. Would love to hear what becomes of this. [via boing boing]

Keyless mystery returns: “Bremerton (Wash.) residents and businesses
once again reported a mysterious failure
of vehicles’ keyless entry devices for
several hours Thursday afternoon…

In March, the keyless entry failures began
at the same time the aircraft carrier USS
Carl Vinson returned to Bremerton.
Thursday, the outages began one day
after the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln
arrived at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.” Bremerton Sun [via Robot Wisdom]

The following is a very early draft of the letter sent by United States Ambassador to China Joseph H. Prueher to Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Tang prior to the release of the crew of the American surveillance plane. The letter was obtained by Rough Draft from sources in an alternate universe. (By Joel Achenbach, Washington Post)

Dear Mr. Minister:

We are sorry that our plane crashed on your island without obtaining the expressed written consent of your government at least 48 hours prior to the emergency.

We are very, very sorry that your brave pilot attempted suicide by flying his nimble fighter jet into our lumbering surveillance plane as it cruised through international airspace on autopilot.

We regret that aerodynamic principles required that we construct our plane out of metal, rather than out of cotton or silk or polyester or some other lightweight fabric that would have caused less damage in the collision your pilot instigated.

We are extremely sorry that this incident has strained the great friendship that has existed between our countries as a diplomatic fiction since the Nixon administration. We look forward to the resumption of the trust, good will and intensive espionage that is the historic foundation of our relationship. We are pleased that this unfortunate episode did not culminate in World War III, which we would have won easily.

We are a tiny bit sorry, but not really all that sorry, that we destroyed the electronic gear on our jet before allowing it to fall into your possession. We merely did not want you to feel sorrow yourself when you discovered that our military technology is not nearly as sophisticated as we claim it is in the written documents your spies have previously stolen.
Do what you will with the Polaroid cameras, sketch pads, binoculars and opera glasses we left behind. Note: The 24 pairs of “X-ray vision” glasses on board were obtained from the back of a comic book, and do not work worth a dang.

We are very sorry that, in a moment of overreaction to the crisis, we transferred the giant pandas from the National Zoo to the Sing Sing prison in New York State. We assure you that the conditions in the prison laundry and the license-plate manufacturing plant were relatively humane.

We are very happy to reflect that our countries share many similarities, such as the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, when our professors lectured naked before marijuana-addled long-hairs, and your professors were exiled to “re-education” camps in a spasm of totalitarian horror. We are very, very sorry that you had that little problem with the Gang of Four. We’ve had some characters on our side, too.

We are pleased to report that, as a cultural gesture, Mao’s Little Red Book will finally be published in our country in Large Print Format.

We sympathize with your need to translate any and all portions of this letter as you see fit, even if it means turning the phrase “we did nothing wrong and wish you weren’t so paranoid” into “we prostrate ourselves before your mightiness and beseech your forgiveness.”

We are very, very, very sorry that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did not win Best Picture.

Sincerely,

Ambassador Joseph H. Prueher [thanks, Paula]

(“I confess that this
psychographic niche — the Christian,
free-software-writing, Emily Dickinson-identifying
raver on the attack sub — was new to me”, says the essayist.) What Is It Like to Be a Bat Listening to Santana? “The latest crop of MP3
plug-ins give you a whole
new way of looking at
music. Will anyone ever
drop acid again?” Feed The title is a play on the classic 1974 philosophical essay by Thomas Nagel, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (and the thematic relationship is not trivial).

Rules of Disorder: on the American obsession with self-help books. “If the German craves discipline, the Italian
loves women, and the Russian lusts for vodka,
what does the American desire? Freedom comes
to mind, but judging by our cultural exports —
and the choice between Coke and Pepsi
notwithstanding — it’s not absurd for foreigners
to conclude that what Americans really love are
rules. Stretching from Dale Carnegie to Dr. Spock
to Ellen Fein, the modern tradition of rule-based
self-help books has edged out the short story as
the nation’s greatest contribution to world
literature.” Feed

Continuing my intermittent theme of the effect of language, this is an interview with Jonathan Miller in which he reflects on the book that would shape his worldview for the next forty years, philosopher JL Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. ‘ “For me, reading How To Do Things With Words is like having
a very, very good Swiss army knife with lots of blades and
scissors and things for getting pebbles out of hooves. Armed
with this, you can unpick an otherwise impenetrable problem.”

Austin’s breakthrough has had far-reaching effects on
post-1960s anthropology, child psychology and the legal
system. Miller applies his mentor’s teaching “at least daily, and
to every aspect of life” and finds it particularly illuminating
working in the theatre. ‘ The Times

Magic study scientists disappear to Las Vegas. “Two British scientists are to fly to Las Vegas to investigate magicians’ use
of psychology.

Dr Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire and Peter Lamont of
Edinburgh University believe that magicians exploit subtle details of how
the brain perceives the world to mount elaborate deceptions…

The magicians, who include Lance Burton and Max Maven, will be
videoed. A specialised eye tracker will then be used to investigate how
they manage to distract the attention of their audience with pacing, eye
contact and deliberate gestures. Dr Wiseman said: “This is their greatest
skill – attention manipulation. Close-up magicians doing coin and card tricks
are superb at making us look where they want us to.”

They will also study the magicians’ talent for lying to investigate if they
have better control over the subtle cues that we use to detect deception. Dr
Wiseman said that it was once thought that sleight of hand was all about
speed of movement. But it turns out that magicians do not rely on the hand
being faster than the eye, but on using slower – and less obvious –
strategies.

These are related to visual illusions, which occur when there is a breakdown
in the rules used by the brain to create a seamless 3D picture of the world
from the 2D information received by the eyes.

The Telegraph

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

Chinese Claim a Moral Victory, Describing a Bigger Battle. Fascinating. The letter of ‘apology’ was negotiated in English only, allowing for different nuances of Chnese translation in describing it to the Chinese public. Depending on how you translate “very sorry”, it either implies culpability or not. In case there was any doubt, Li’l George issued a statement as soon as the plane’s crew were safely out of Chinese clutches making clear we had done nothing wrong. Sino-American relations just got a whole lot more interesting. New York Times

“Browsing takeaway pizza websites will never be the same again: you’ll soon be able to download and print the pizza’s aroma and taste. A company called TriSenx of Savannah, Georgia, will launch a device next month that looks like a desktop printer but which can ‘print’ smells and tastes. The $269 printer is loaded with a cartridge containing more than 200 water-based flavours that are deposited in varying combinations by a print head onto fibre-based cardboard to make over a thousand different smells. The company is adapting the device to print on an edible paper-like wafer, allowing it to print out tastes too. Included in the price is software to help you avoid combinations that don’t smell or taste too good.” New Scientist

N. N. Holland’s Seminar, Brain & Literary Questions:

” I plan to open up these topics: personal styles; what goes on when we read; Chomskyan and post-Chomskyan ideas of language; cognitive theories of metaphor; the mammalian and neo-mammalian brain; kinds of memory; whether language ability evolved; culture and the child’s growing brain. In this seminar, we shall explore ways in which these new discoveries bear on our understanding of literature and the literary processes of creation and response. We shall be reading such people as: Noam Chomsky, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Hanna and Antonio Damasio, Jerry Fodor, Heinz Lichtenstein, Steven Pinker, Terrence Deacon, Gerald Edelman, some psychologists of reading, and some people who have begun to apply these ideas to literary questions: Richard Ohmann, Mark Turner, Ellen Winner, and myself.”

In a different world: Simon Baron-Cohen, a
clinical psychologist at Cambridge University who runs a clinic for Asperger’s syndrome, heads a team which has come up
with a simple test for autism, suggesting a fresh approach to the social difficulties (and strengths) of AS sufferers.
Here are the items on the inventory, the Cambridge Lifespan Asperger Syndrome Service (CLASS). “Before you panic–or
feel relieved to have found a possible explanation for your problems–ALL 10 descriptions must apply to you, and your
difficulties must be significantly interfering with your daily life”:

I find social situations confusing

I find it hard to make small talk

I did not enjoy imaginative story-writing at school

I am good at picking up details and facts

I find it hard to work out what other people are thinking and feeling

I can focus on certain things for very long periods

People often say I was rude even when this was not intended

I have unusually strong, narrow interests

I do certain things in an inflexible, repetitive way

I have always had difficulty making friends

New Scientist.

“Circling the earth in the orbital spacecraft I marvelled at the beauty of our planet. People of the world! Let us safeguard and enhance this beauty — not destroy it!” — Yuri Gagarin. Today is the fortieth anniversary of his historic first manned spaceflight. Several articles commemorate the occasion by commenting on how we’re doing. First:

Moratorium Asked on Suits That Seek to Protect Species. Latest betrayal of America’s heritage and future on the docket. “The Bush
administration has asked Congress
to set aside, at least for a year, a provision
of the Endangered Species Act that has
been the main tool used by citizens’ groups
to win protection for plants and animals.

The request, spelled out in a section of the
budget document that President Bush sent to
Capitol Hill on Monday, would make it much
more difficult for citizens to use the courts to
force the Fish and Wildlife Service to act on
petitions to list a species as endangered.” Democratic opposition pledges to “any and all” tactics including, finally, filibuster threat, to prevent this, according to spokesperson Sen. John Kerry. New York Times

Related news: “George W. Bush has added a weird twist to his proposed budget. To promote
his goal of oil drilling on public lands, he has made the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge a kind of hostage. In a message that could have been
pasted together from words cut out of a magazine, Bush is telling the
environmental community that if it wants money for energy conservation and
non-polluting energy sources, it will have to let Bush and his allies
drill in the untouched Alaskan wilderness. Either drill in the Arctic
refuge or face deep cuts in renewable energy research.

Yet, Bush’s bizarre decision to hold the Alaska refuge hostage is only one
part of a federal budget that has the look of a battle plan against the
environment. ” The Consortium

Ile-Alatau Journal: Pristine Park Draws Poachers to Central Asia. “Throughout the five nations of Central Asia, a struggle is under way to save
unspoiled ecosystems like this one. There are 32 nature preserves that were
spared the nuclear testing, exploitation of resources and general environmental
insensitivity of the Soviet era.

The new assault comes not from development and growth but from neglect and
desperation bred of poverty. Many people in Central Asia are poor, and
poaching, subsistence ranching and small-scale logging in these fertile enclaves
are matters of survival for many of them…

For the most part, the governments lack the resources to protect these isolated
preserves. Well-intentioned bureaucrats cannot compete with people trying to
find food. Few international organizations are involved, and environmentalists
say assistance is needed badly.” New York Times

Chimps have culture; researchers observe them to imitate local customs when they change groups. Recall last year’s report about the cultural activities of humpback whales as reflected in the spreading popularity of an unfamiliar whalesong introduced by visitors from a different region. New Scientist

Driving with a soda as risky as a cell phone. SF Gate

Personalize me, baby “The Net is finally
delivering on an old promise: Introducing us to new music
that we really, really like… Another company has emerged from
Boston: Media Unbound. Like Firefly, Media Unbound is
offering a personalized recommendation system that will
suggest bands you might enjoy, based on ones that you
already like. Unlike Firefly, Media Unbound does what it
promises to do: introduce new, obscure bands you’ll actually
like.

And Media Unbound isn’t alone — there’s also Mubu.com,
which offers a similar service; and MoodLogic, which takes
a more search-engine approach. Similarly, the
music-discovery search engine Gigabeat was purchased by
Napster two weeks ago.

And that’s where it gets interesting. If personalization that
works truly has broken through, it’s possible to imagine a
future in which obscure bands do get more time in the sun.
Because personalized music recommendation technology in
combination with file-trading services like Napster or
Gnutella could be an amazingly potent brew.” Salon

R.I.P. Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth; “Car Designer, Cultural Icon Created Rat Fink” LA Times

The Music of the Internet: “This site converts the IP-Address of your computer(or any internet address you enter) to music. The sound is created online
from the four nodes of your IP address with a fractal composition program…” There’s also a link to download the composition program, MusiNum, itself.

The Vocabula Review: “A society is generally as lax as its language.”

OtherSide City Search: enter a city name and it’ll tell you what’s on the exact opposite side of the globe, i.e. where you’d end up if you dig straight down and keep going. Since this site was mentioned on Metafilter, it’s so busy its search script chokes and it gives you an error, but sooner or later you’ll get it to work, I’m sure. This site, jessamyn.com, does pretty much the same thing, and is less busy. Write me if you think you’re the FmH reader closest to the exit from my tunnel starting here in Boston; we can arrange to meet halfway and split the effort, okay?

Floating clinic will offer the sick offshore euthanasia The Guardian

How to E-Mail Like a C.E.O. New York Times Magazine More articles from the “How-to” issue of the New York Times Magazine.

Orwell Would Revel in ‘Collateral Damage’, says communications director of the American-Arab
Anti-discrimination Committee:

Timothy McVeigh, who is scheduled to be executed May 16, has solidified his
position as the poster boy of cold-blooded villainy. The Oklahoma City bomber has
once again outraged the American public when he described the 19 dead children
among his 168 victims as “collateral damage” in an interview.

Although it scarcely seemed possible, this appalling comment has made
McVeigh an even more despised figure in American society. It produced
widespread and justified expressions of revulsion and anger at his lack of regard for
even the most innocent of his victims.

There is no doubt that McVeigh is an exceptionally malevolent and brutal
criminal. Yet the rest of us may not be as distant from his propensity to rationalize
the killing of innocents as we prefer to believe. All too often, good people allow
themselves to believe that the end justifies the means, that “war is hell.” Or they
find some other means to dismiss the deaths of those who did nothing to deserve
being killed.

It is worth recalling where McVeigh got this chillingly antiseptic phrase
“collateral damage.” It was coined by the Pentagon during the Gulf War to describe
the deaths of innocent Iraqis during the massive bombing campaign in 1991 and
was an attempt to obscure and rationalize these deaths through Orwellian jargon.
“Collateral damage” during the Gulf War included, in only one instance, 313
people incinerated at the Amiriya bomb shelter in western Baghdad, which was
deliberately attacked.

When asked about the extent of Iraqi casualties toward the end of the Gulf War,
then-military Chief of Staff Colin Powell blandly remarked: “That is really not a
matter I am terribly interested in.” LA Times

Four psychoanalysts comment on the therapy scenes in this Sunday’s Sopranos:

“My other thought about Dr.
Krakower is that his technique of ignoring Carmela’s defenses
and confronting her right down to her marrow served multiple
functions, not the least of which was ridding himself of a patient
that he didn’t really want to see. As analysts, we always have to
reflect upon the meaning of starting a treatment with telling a
patient how she must live her life and also laying out that they can
expect no help from us for anything short of following through on
our expectation. I’m not saying that we analysts don’t ever
confront; of course we do, but usually only after we have
established a relationship in which a patient feels known and
understood. In my own career and in all of the supervision I have
done with other analysts, when someone does what Dr. K. did,
they are really interested in taking care of themselves. I don’t think
that this is bad; obviously it indicates that this would be an
abysmal therapeutic match, even though it is a great dramatic one.”

“He was certainly a stark contrast to the “moral
relativism” of psychiatry that Jennifer’s husband complains about.
Peggy also raises questions about why Jennifer would pick him as
the analyst to whom she refers Carmela. Since he was her
teacher, she must have known that he would take the kind of
hard-line, moralistic approach that we saw. Could she have even
guessed that he would tell her to leave Tony? If so, was Jennifer
unconsciously disposing of her rival? Was this a
countertransference enactment in that sense? All of you noted the
problem with telling Carmela what to do after one session. It
reminds me of the cartoon about managed care that features
one-session therapy: The therapist says to the patient, “Whatever
you’re doing, stop it!” Dr. Krakower knows that dispensing this
kind of advice is not going to work because he knows that
Carmela has complicated reasons for staying involved with Tony.
Despite his lamenting that psychiatry has become a kind of
victimology, his message to Carmela seems to be that she is a
victim of Tony and the only solution is to remove herself from the
victimizer.” Slate

College admissions essays focus on Columbine. “The massacre at Columbine High School two years ago this month penetrated the psyche of American
teenagers in much the way John F. Kennedy’s assassination or astronauts walking on the moon did for their
parents’ generation.

The very word Columbine is shorthand for a complex set of emotions ranging from anxiety to sadness to
empathy. Nowhere is this knotted mix of feelings as clear as in the essays young people write as they apply for
admission to college.

From New Jersey to Virginia to Texas, Columbine is cited as life’s defining moment.” College admissions officers are considering asking applicants to write about something else already. Philadelphia Inquirer

Euthanasia Bill debated in Netherlands. Further evidence that the “We Deliver!” sensation was a hoax; the legalization of euthanasia is just now being debated. Nando Times

Violent TV Shows Wipe Out Memory of Commercials: “While there is growing concern about
the effects TV violence has on children, the bloodshed and mayhem
continues–in large part because advertisers want to reach the
under-34 crowd that watches violent programs. But new research
suggests these advertisers are shooting themselves in the foot.

Violent shows seem to make people forget they ever saw the
commercial breaks, according to a review of 12 studies published in
the April issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Across the studies, which included about 1,800 individuals, people
were less likely to remember sponsors’ brand names and advertising
messages when they viewed violent programs than when they
watched violence-free shows.” Reuters

Mountain Gazette returns. This monthly eco-literary magazine had a great
run between 1972 and 1979, when it published such noted authors as
Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and George Sibley. I was a charter subscriber, devoured every issue, and cried in my beer when it folded. The newly resurrected
Mountain Gazette is a grassroots effort by a former contributing editor at Backpacker and a former editor of The Aspen
Daily News who drive all over the
Rockies and the Sierras to deliver the newsprint-stock magazines. A reader explains:

‘What’s most appealing about the Gazette is its refusal to pander to the
Mountain Dew generation, with its Xtreme sports mentality that shouts, “Get
out of my way.” The Gazette fosters an anti-Xtreme mind-set. Several hundred thousand mountain
lovers have already read enough magazine stories about 20-year-olds
kayaking off 100-foot waterfalls.’

Study challenges ‘crack baby’ phenomenon: “The ‘crack
baby’ phenomenon is overblown, according to a
study that suggests poverty and the use of
cigarettes, alcohol and other drugs while
pregnant are just as likely as cocaine to cause
developmental problems in children.

Blaming such problems on prenatal cocaine use
alone has unfairly stigmatized children, creating
an unfounded fear in teachers that ‘crack kids”
will be backward and disruptive, according to the
study, an analysis of 36 previous studies.” SF Gate

Egyptian ‘Islam Line’ profits from religious advice. “In this country, where people consult their religion several times a day for guidance, authoritative
answers can be as hard to find as Pharoanic treasures entombed in the Giza pyramids. But a new
24-hour hot line called Islam Line makes it as easy as picking up the phone.

Islam Line has been so successful since its August launch that the owners plan to expand to the rest of
the Arab World, and eventually to Europe and the United States. Just last month it became available to
mobile-phone users in Jordan.

The hot line, dubbed ‘Dial-a-Fatwa,’ averages 300 callers a day from men and women of every age and
social class. Callers simply dial a number and leave their questions on a recording. Within 24 hours they
can call, punch in the number designated for their question, and listen to the answer. The phone service
is staffed by six highly respected, moderate clerics trained at Al-Azhar, a thousand-year-old university
that’s considered the cradle of Islamic learning.” The Nando Times

“Long-term users of ‘ecstasy'(methylenedioxymethamphetamine [MDMA]) tend to experience memory impairment, according to a study reported in the April 10 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of
Neurology.

Fifteen MDMA users, ranging in age from 17 to 31, participated in the year-long study. Participants of the study took the drug an average of
2.4 times per month. The testing regimen included measures sensitive to intelligence and every day memory functioning.

Over the period of one year the test scores either declined or kept static, but did not improve. …For example, the ability to recall a story after a brief delay declined by approximately 50
percent between the first and second assessments. The drug affects the hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with learning and the
consolidation of new memories.”EurekAlert!

Researcher finds retroviral ‘footprint’ in brains of people with schizophrenia; “…strongest evidence yet that a virus may contribute to some cases
of schizophrenia.

In this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (Johns Hopkins) Children’s Center neurovirologist Robert Yolken, M.D., and his colleagues report
the molecular “footprint” of a retrovirus in the cerebrospinal fluid of about 30 percent of people with acute schizophrenia and about 7 percent of
people with a chronic form of the disease. The footprint was absent in the brains and cerebrospinal fluid of all people who did not have
schizophrenia. ” EurekAlert! The study was conducted at Johns Hopkins’ Stanley Neurovirology laboratory, which focuses on “the elucidation of the role of infection and immunity in the etiology of schizophrenia and bipolar
disorders.”

New research finds that vitamin treatment brings dramatic improvements for one form of the rare neurological disease, hereditary ataxia.

Spying From Space: U.S. to Sharpen the Focus

Anyone wondering where U.S. military investment is
headed need look no farther than the next generation of spy
satellites that are being built now and will start going into orbit
in 2005.

The estimated 20-year price tag is $25 billion, making this
program the most expensive venture ever mounted by U.S.
intelligence services. In comparison, the Manhattan project, the
World War II crash program to build the atomic bomb, cost
$20 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.

For its money, Washington expects to get a new system of
electronic cameras that can be trained on potential trouble spots
anywhere on the planet on a couple of hours’ notice or less. It
will be “an incredible improvement” in America’s ability to spy
from the sky, a U.S. official said in Washington. He said the
satellites would be able to track objects as small as a baseball
anywhere, anytime on the planet.

European nations argue that the EU ought to put up its own network of spy satellites to prevent reliance on US data. Germany has been vocal about the exposure of its troops in the Balkans to needless risk because of inadequate access to US intelligence data. International Herald Tribune

German Threat Raises Infowar Fear. Germany’s Interior Minister suggests that the German government resort to denial-of-service attacks against U.S. and other foreign right-wing websites promoting hatred and encouraging the growth of German neo-Nazism. Wired

Cypherpunk’s Free Speech Defense. Update on Jim Bell‘s first day of testimony at his Tacoma, Washington trial for “internet stalking.” Declan McCullagh’s coverage places Bell’s actions squarely in the same boat as the “Nuremberg Files” website (as I discussed last month, recently exonerated of fomenting violence by posting the names and personal details of doctors who perform abortions). Wired

Japan’s pet-friends: “The Japanese economy may be heading back
into recession, but one line of business is doing
very well despite the economic gloom.

Pet shop owners are
enjoying a bonanza as
the Japanese turn to
dogs and cats as an
antidote to all the
stress they are
suffering.” Dog owners travel more than an hour by train to get to a park where, for $12, they can let their dogs run free off the leash. A special housing complex — where the elevator has a warning light to tell others when a dog is on board — caters to pet owners in a country where most apartments forbid pets larger than a hamster. And, if the problems of ownership appear insurmountable, you can rent a dog for the equivalent of around $4 per outing. BBC

WordNet: “an on-line lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical
memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying
lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets.

WordNet was developed by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University under the direction of Professor George
A. Miller (Principal Investigator).” You can use WordNet online or download your own copy.

A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices — more than sixty, to improve the effectiveness and elegance of your writing, or to learn some obscure words that will help you solve erudite crossword puzzles. And a taxonomy of logical fallacies; recognizing and characterizing why someone’s argument does not make the point they claim it makes.

Center for Exorcistology “Never say the following: I rebuke you, I command you, or I adjure you. This will only make it personal and it may cause
you more attack. Try to leave the narcissism out of it. Don’t be lazy, learn this prayer of adjurement.” [via wood s lot]

Eyes wide apart: “Stare into Michelle Pfeiffer’s eyes, and other faces will
suffer by comparison…,” according to a paper recently published in Nature Neuroscience. The Guardian

FreeAnswers (“Ask a question just as if you were talking to a support technician”) is a natural-language search interface to the knowledge bases for Microsoft, Intuit and Adobe products. It does considerably better than, for example, Microsoft’s own front end to its knowledge bases at figuring out what it is you want to know. Brian Livingston reports on this in his Window Manager column in InfoWorld.

GOP Targets 45 Rules To Overturn Washington Post

Lyme Disease Vaccine’s Safety is Questioned. The possibility that there have been more than a hundred dire reactions to the Lyme vaccine since its FDA approval two years ago “have renewed a debate on the risks and benefits of vaccines for illnesses, such as Lyme disease, that are treatable or avoidable by other means.” Critics claim that the vaccine is being “grossly overpromoted” in parts of the country without a significant incidence of the illness, and that it is less than acceptably effective, requiring frequent booster shots to maintain at best imperfect immunity. Members of the preapproval FDA advistory committee expressed concerns about the vaccine’s potential to provoke arthritic reactions in some recipients, but what they did with these misgivings was to ask for post-approval followup by the vaccine’s manufacturer. Washington Post There is a raging debate, however, about whether Lyme disease is underdiagnosed, whether it may be responsible itself for a broader range of symptoms than generally accepted, including serious neuropsychiatric complications; and whether these serious complications really do readily respond to treatment, as is accepted in the infectious disease mainstream. I keep up on the literature about this partly because a former high school classmate of mine got in touch with me several years ago to describe how he is at the thick of the controversy because he claims he’s been debilitated by effects of Lyme disease that the medical establishment will not acknowledge. Several of the specialists by whom he’s been treated have been discredited, including, coincidentally, someone with whom I was in graduate school before either of us became a psychiatrist. The possibility that the long-term effects of Lyme infection are more dire, more common, and less-treatment-responsive than acknowledged, of course, would tip the risk-benefit calculations in favor of the vaccine.

Nemesis: Does the Sun Have a ‘Companion’? A UC Berkeley physicist is not letting go of the discredited idea that our sun has a companion red dwarf whose periodic approaches are responsible for recurrent episodes of mass extinction on the Earth. “Give me a million dollars and I’ll find it.” space.com

Working Mom? With Gov. Paul Cellucci confirmed as Bush’s ambassador to Canada, Massachusetts is abuzz about the promotion of Lt. Gov. Jane Swift, pregnant with twins. Wendy Kaminer: “We’ve
gotten used to no-show governors. Bill Weld played squash for six years; Paul Cellucci went on trade missions.
Considering the record of her predecessors, it will be hard to criticize Governor Swift if she stays home with her babies.
But living down to low standards shouldn’t make her a feminist role model. Women who want to be taken seriously as
officeholders had better take their offices seriously.” The American Prospect

Start Making Sense: “Eighty miles southwest of here, a small group of writers is plotting
to overthrow a common enemy: the monolithic, ever-oppressive New
York Literary Establishment. Tired of McSweeney’s, M.F.A.s, and
literary mooning, the Underground Literary Alliance (ULA) promotes a
straight-talking, street-smart prose of yesteryear (think Dickens)
designed to supplant the perceived products of postmodernism
(think Foster Wallace) that flood our bookstores. ULA founder and
promoter Karl “King” Wenclas disdains the “literati” for being like
“French kings and Russian czars”–out of touch and producing work
that’s irrelevant beyond New York City. He boasts that his “lowest of the low” ULA-ers (dishwashers, army
enlistees, skid-row dwellers) write with a “raw power” that’s absent from literature today.” Village Voice

Season of Carbon Action Freezerbox

Season of Carbon Action Freezerbox

Season of Carbon Action Freezerbox

The Stories You Probably Didn’t Read All About Last
Year Baltimore City Paper

“The new century’s most
important and confusing big-power dance will arguably be
between the United States and China. ” International Herald Tribune News Analysis: Both Sides in Uncharted Territory: ” ‘Americans only know one international pattern – Cold War or
friendship,’ said Robert Ross, a specialist in foreign policy at
Boston College who happened to be in Beijing last week during
the standoff. But neither path, many argue, is inevitable or
perhaps even likely with China – or, indeed, with other nations,
as complex and ambivalent ties become the norm in a world
with a globalized economy and one true superpower.”

James Ridgeway: China Conflict: The Profit Motive “The Bush administration’s great China standoff has less to do with a
downed American spy plane and a missing Chinese pilot than it does with U.S. and China competing
for control of the world oil routes that cross through southern Asia. Also at stake is an electronics
gravy train for the corporate interests of Silicon Valley.

In seeking to protect shipping lanes for oil tankers, the U.S. has considered equipping nations along
the Asian routes—including Taiwan—with the military might needed to defend the surrounding seas.
China, which is also seeking greater access to fuel, has expressed anger over the transfer of arms to
neighboring Taiwan.” Village Voice Do the Illegitimate Son and his handlers understand anything as subtle as the importance of saving face in “getting to ‘yes’ ” in political negotiation, especially with China?

U.S. knew China pilot as ‘cowboy’ who taunted Americans. “The missing
Chinese pilot who collided with
a U.S. surveillance plane had
been flying extremely close to
U.S. reconnaissance aircraft for
months, even once flashing a
sign with his e-mail address on
it, U.S. officials said yesterday.

The pilot, identified in state-run
Chinese media as Wang Wei,
became so reckless that Washington twice complained to the
Chinese government, most recently in a diplomatic protest in
December, defense officials said, speaking on the condition of
anonymity.” Or at least this is the ‘spin’ the US government would be planting now to justify evading its own responsibility, at least to apologize. Seattle Times

1628 people and counting: We’re sorry! “Well, if you’ve been keeping up on the news, you
know all about the spy plane incident in China.
Apparently, China demanded an apology – nothing
more – and Bush refused! So, now exists this page,
apologizing to the entire world for our stupid fucking
president.”

dangerousmeta pointed to this New Republic piece about the budget crisis in Texas, attributable in large measure to Little George’s tax cut mania. Pity more attention isn’t given to this in the current debate.

At least Dubya’s presidency will be of unprecedented assistance to the arts!

And the New York Times today suggests that Dubya’s unsubtle pandering to the right since his inauguration ought to be reinfusing almost every facet of the left end of the American political spectrum with outrage and resolve. Let’s hope progressives, and Democrats in general, can do something with it. I worried after Dubya’s ascendency to the throne that political memory is too short, conciliatory tendencies too strong, and Bush’s handlers too unscrupulous and disingenuous for an effective opposition to grow just when this country (and the world) need it most.Now glimmers of hope, to the contrary, that Bush just might continue to be an effective collaborator in the process. Continue to follow me on this emotional roller coaster ride between political encouragement and despondency…

Barbra Streisand’s call for stepped-up Democratic Oppositon to Bush Agenda: “In late March, Barbra Streisand sent a personal memo to a limited group of leading Democratic
legislators, urging that a more forceful effort be made to resist the rush of legislative proposals and
presidential edicts from the Bush administration which threaten to undermine 30 years of progress in civil
rights, environmental protections and Political process. Since this memorandum was leaked to the
press, primarily the D.C. magazine Roll Call and The Drudge Report, and since it has been angrily
misreported by a wide range of right wing media, we felt visitors to BarbraStreisand.com would like to
read the updated text of her thoughts.” And here‘s Tom Daschle’s response [grin].

The Village Voice, usefully, collects links to all its vitriolic coverage of GB2’s early days in this ‘peek into (his) honeymoon suite’. And the Booknotes weblog neatly sums it all up, with the newfound authority the inauguration has conferred on Molly-Ivins-loving commentators from Texas:

“I just had a horrifying thought. The Bush administration might be up to
something. They spend their 100 day honeymoon ramming though their real
agenda and paying back their money backers, igonoring the polls. Then
they spend the next 3+ years polishing their image for the next election. The
American population is famous for quickly fogetting what at one time
enraged it. Think about it.
And don’t stop thinking about it until you get a chance to vote again.”

After all, somebody’s going to get inaugurated in around 45 months…

Season of Carbon Action Freezerbox

Men Sense ‘Scent of a Woman’: ‘Could love truly be in the air?
Researchers in Texas believe men become especially attuned–and
attracted to–female body odors during the most fertile stage of the
menstrual cycle.

“These findings raise serious doubts about conventional scientific
wisdom that human female ovulation is concealed…and that men cannot detect when women are
ovulating,” according to Drs. Devendra Singh and P. Matthew Bronstad, psychologist researchers
at the University of Texas in Austin.’ Reuters Health

Update: A reader asked what’s new about this news, given the well-known phenomenon of women’s menstrual cycles synchronizing when they live together. Several things. First, menstrual synchronization may be because of subliminal awareness of menstruation, not ovulation. That’s not so surprising, given that menstruation provides external, overt or subliminal, clues. Second, this study shows not only subliminal awareness, but that, as with our primate forebears’ behavior around oestrus, men find women more sexually attractive at precisely the time they are most fertile. As such, it is of evolutionary biological interest.

Scientists boost fruit fly lifespan: Humans next? The Times of India

São Paulo’s ‘Roofless’ Seize Downtown Buildings. Squatting, Brazilian-style; some estimates indicate that more than 50% of São Paulo’s population of 10.5 million live in “irregular circumstances.” New York Times

How to Harvest a Live Organ. Not the stuff of the urban legend about the victim who wakes up in an ice-packed bathtub in a strange hotel room after a night of oblivious carousing to find a note and an incision in his/her flank, but the real thing. New York Times Magazine

Mars Odyssey Scheduled for Liftoff: “NASA will
try to snap its losing streak and send
another spacecraft to Mars on Saturday
after two humiliating failures.” New York Times