Carbon clock could show the wrong time: “Carbon dating is a mainstay of geology and archaeology – but

an enormous peak discovered in the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere

between 45 thousand and 11 thousand years ago casts doubt on the

biological carbon cycle that underpins the technique.” .PhysicsWeb The implications of this are profound. It highlights the precariousness of the web of assumptions on which our scientific ‘certainties’ rely.

Radical plan to send US arms bill soaring

: “…major change in military

priorities as Washington shifts its sights from Europe to Asia

and from spending on the army to spending on the navy, the air

force and on hi-tech weaponry including missile defences.” The Guardian The broken promise: “Why is

Bush cutting the

budget for

anti-nuclear

proliferation

programs when he

said he’d increase it?” Salon National Missile Defense: An Indefensible System. “Although it is now

technically feasible to “hit a bullet with a bullet” on the test range, adversaries would be able to take

straightforward steps to defeat this system, not only preventing it from achieving the high levels of

effectiveness claimed for it, but also precluding any significant security benefits. Worse still, deploying

such a system would open a Pandora’s box of problems for the United States, unraveling decades of

efforts to reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles and to limit proliferation of nuclear weapons and

ballistic missiles worldwide.” Foreign Policy

Men More Likely to Divorce Ill Spouses: “Men are more likely than women to

divorce their spouses when the spouse suffers a

serious illness such as brain cancer, a new study

suggests.” ABC

Dr. Menlo agonizes more directly than most about the current anti-corporate struggle to keep information free on the Web. An idiosyncratic, powerful if sometimes abit obscure voice…

What progressives can do during the Bush years. Sam Smith: “Some of the following originally appeared in the Progressive Review under the same

headline exactly 12 years ago. Unfortunately, it is still applicable.” Progressive Review

High court strikes down medical use for marijuana. “The Supreme Court handed medical

marijuana users a major defeat Monday, ruling that a federal law

classifying the drug as illegal has no exception for ill patients.

The 8-0 decision was a major disappointment to many sufferers of

AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis and other illnesses. They have

said the drug helped enormously in combating the devastating

effects of their diseases. ” In essence, the Court’s opinion, written by Clarence Thomas, said that medical necessity is determined by how federal law classifies the substance regardless of medical opinion on its benefits. CNN

You can soon get a wireless Palm VII for $99! USAToday

Thanks to whoever (can no longer figure out who) pointed me to this discussion of remedies for hot pepper burning. Years ago, I too made the mistake of cleaning chili peppers barehanded; luckily it was before I wore contact lenses. I’m not saying this would work for burning hands, but Andrew Weil, in The Marriage of the Sun and Moon (1980), a collection of essays pondering altered states of consciousness, wrote about the hot pepper high that Westerners have difficulty with hot food because we try and fight and quell the burning sensations. Instead, you can get exhilarated by going with the flow, in essence surfing the crest of the wave of capsicum heat.

How to go about digging deeper on the Web: web miner’s tools. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

I thought I ought to link to the Head-Shaver’s Information and FAQ (given my masthead above). [via Random Walks] But how about shaving the inside of your skull?

Blogger was out of service for a few days there; the few posts below accumulated and waited to be published. Here’s Ev’s explanation of what was going on:

A perplexing bug

came up Thursday, and I spent literally all night trying to fix it. I was scheduled to leave town on Friday

afternoon for my grandfather’s funeral. I skipped my first flight, and finally took the last one out that would

get me there, only after thinking I’d fixed the Blogger problem.

When I got to my destination, I found out that I hadn’t, so I spent as much time as I could — over very

lacking connectivity — working on it the next day or so, thinking I had alleviated it at least.

The fixes where short-lived, so I got on an earlier-than-scheduled flight home yesterday, but ended up

getting stuck in stand-by hell for 12 hours, unable to get online.

I finally figured out the problem when I got home late last night. It was a database driver I had installed that

had a connection limit they didn’t tell me about. So I’m waiting for the new driver from the company now

and hoping I haven’t permanently betrayed your confidence.

A number of users of blogger.com did some very spoiled complaining about the dysfunction, if you ask me. While I was inconvenienced like the rest (or more so; see last paragraph below), I am of the same mind with those who posted to Blogger’s discussion boards suggesting people quit whining, appreciate Ev for the singlehanded job he does for free to keep the service running, and examine why they’re feeling so godawful entitled. No, Ev, you haven’t betrayed my confidence; in fact, affirmed it!

Thank you to the readers who responded to my query about my surprised observation that my daily hits jumped up last week from the usual 300-400/day to around 900, clueing me into the Wired article below and the fact that FmH was a “Blog of Note” on May 7th.

Just when three times as many people as usual are checking out FmH, I had the kind of a week (writing a lecture to a short deadline, and then Blogger giving out for several days) that greatly attenuated the quality and quantity of the postings here and is probably leaving any new readers scratching their heads about why all the fuss over FmH. Win some and lose some, I guess…

Court Stories: A Tale of Betrayals Unfolds in a Montana Drug Trial. “Even in the biggest cities, drug investigations are often built on betrayal. But in a

small community like Columbus, the duplicity has a special power, as spouses,

friends and business acquaintances turn on one another. In a place where almost

everyone knows almost everyone else, the waves from a big case can wash over

an entire town.” New York Times