The Neurology Web Forum is hosted by the Harvard Medical School Dept. of Neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, but is an unmoderated forum to discuss and comment on neurological topics without any input from MGH professionals. Inevitably, it turns into the sort of peer diagnosis and virtual prescribing that is what’s wrong with self-help groups (although, as the friend who sent me the link suggests, many of the stories have a poignancy to them). “Please help; is it MS?” “What could ‘abnormal EEG’ mean?” “Please help — back is getting worse.” “Epilepsy or am I sick?” [thanks, Pam!]

Bin Laden ‘may never be caught’. ‘Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, said that tracking him down would be “a very difficult thing to do” and it would be a mistake to focus the war on terrorism on one man.

He said in an interview with the USA Today newspaper: “It’s a big world. There are lots of countries. He’s got a lot of money; he’s got a lot of people who support him. I just don’t know whether we’ll be successful.”

Mr Rumsfeld was speaking 24 hours after Tony Blair said that bin Laden was unlikely to be brought to trial, expressing the hope that he would be killed during a bombing raid or attack by troops.

The suggestion that bin Laden might never be caught was in marked contrast to the earlier claim by President Bush that the leader of the al-Qa’eda terrorist organisation would be taken “dead or alive”.’ Telegraph UK

Israeli killings of Palestinians escalate in response to the assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rechavam Ze’evi last week. Kill nine in West Bank raid: “An Israeli raid on a West Bank village, launched to nab the assassins of a Cabinet minister, yesterday turned into a bloody gun battle in which nine Palestinians were reported killed.” NY Post Five Palestinians killed in latest Mid East violence: “Israeli soldiers have shot dead five Palestinians during worsening unrest in the West Bank.

The Israeli army has sealed off the village of Awarta.

Troops with loud speakers have warned residents that they will be shot if they leave their homes.

The raid comes after Palestinian gunmen opened fire at a car carrying Israeli civilians at a nearby Jewish settlement.

No-one was injured in the ambush, but security forces are on alert.

” ABC

‘During the past week, more than 40 Palestinians have been killed.

On Thursday, four Palestinians were killed in Bethlehem and another in Tulkarem, Palestinian security sources said. Three other Palestinians — including a 2-year-old child — were wounded by sniper bullets in Azza refugee camp, the medical services said.

The Israeli Army said it was provoked by a group of Palestinians who had fired at them.’ CNN Doubts emerge, within the Israeli domestic opposition as well as external critics, about whether these incidents are provoked as Israel claims.

Privileged Children Of Millionaires Square Off On World Stage. No joke: ObL vs. GwB. The Onion

Online Images That Stay True to Form on Any Screen: “Last month the World Wide Web Consortium, which promotes Internet standards, recommended a graphic technology that is designed to make many Web images fit any screen, including the tiny displays on wireless phones. Known as Scalable Vector Graphics, or SVG, and developed with contributions from leading software and hardware companies like Adobe, Corel, Apple and Microsoft, the format is text-based. This allows the graphics to load faster and enables search engines and screen readers to locate printed matter in images.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Panned! Account of death by adventure could use some serious CPR: “Ever wonder what it feels like, really feels like, to drown? Or to suffer hypothermia? Or dehydration?

Keep wondering. While Peter Stark’s supposedly nonfiction account purports to reveal what it’s like to die 11 different ways, all of them adventure-related, what Last Breath really does is perpetrate a fraud upon the book-buying public.” Boston Globe

All creatures great and small The living world is governed by laws based on fractal geometry and on the sizes of organisms, some scientists claim; is there a biological ‘theory of everything’? Nature

Toxic Taste — ‘Morbid repulsion to a particular food, clinically known as taste aversion (also known as “the Garcia-effect,” after John Garcia, the UCLA psychologist who was the first to quantify it), is a common psychological phenomenon well known to dieticians, food manufacturers, pesticide manufacturers, restaurateurs, and physicians. The condition has been observed for centuries, but only in the past 30 years has it been studied in depth by scientists.’

Chris Mooney:
Smart — and Stupid — Profiling. Guess what he thinks of Peggy Noonan’s

WSJ proposal — albeit “an impressive piece of journalism” — for doing it. The American Prospect

China’s Designated Terrorists — ‘China is using the war on terrorism to brand the Uyghurs of Xinjiang

… Since (Colin Powell’s Sept. 21 meeting with the Chinese foreign minister to discuss cooperation between the US and CHinese counter-terrorism specialists), the government has stepped up rhetoric and action in the region. On October 12, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry appealed for international help with their “terrorists” from “East Turkestan” — a Turkic name for the region the Chinese only use when linking its inhabitants to terrorism. The Ministry also suggested there was evidence of Uyghur links to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization. Echoing global press coverage, the state-controlled Chinese press has been telling its population that there is a war on terrorism in Xinjiang.’ The American Prospect

Mother sends son’s ashes to company processing student loan in effort to have it discharged: “Tired of the red tape involved in proving her son dead, a woman sent a baggie containing some of his ashes to the company processing his student loans.

The baggie and accompanying letter arrived at Sallie Mae’s office in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Oct. 12 as concern was growing about anthrax-tainted letters.” SF Gate

Ted Nugent may not be a real Bad American, or he may not be the only one. ‘The Bad American’ has been attributed to alot of other folks. According to the invaluable Snopes (thanks to a number of Followers): “Just about any unsourced list of witty observations about our politics and social mores gets credited to humorist George Carlin these days, even when it doesn’t really sound like anything he would write. Carlin may sometimes use the format of stringing together a few dozen pithy comments about a wide variety of topical subjects, but the tone of his humor is nothing like this reactionary piece. If any doubt remained, Carlin himself swept it away by announcing on his web site that he is not the author of the article.

If not Carlin, then who did write it? This piece has also been credited to a number of decidedly conservative, outspoken media figures, such as rock star Ted Nugent, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, and actor-comedian Denis Leary, but the even if the article may seem to echo the political opinions of these men, it doesn’t quite match any of them, nor does the language used sound quite right for any of these figures. (Leary, like Carlin, has been credited with creating some other Internet favorites, such as a vituperative discourse on e-mail chain letters and the “Are You Man Enough?” essay.”

Contradicting Some U.S. Officials, 3 Scientists Call Anthrax Powder High-Grade — “Scientists in and out of government said

yesterday that the anthrax strike on Capitol

Hill involved an advanced, highly refined

powder that is quite dangerous and not the

primitive form of the germ that some federal

officials have recently described.”

qq

Assertions by some federal officials that the material was not the type that would be used in weapons are

“nonsense,” (one) said. “The only difference between this and weapons grade is the size of the production.

You can produce a very good grade of anthrax powder in the lab. The issue is whether those efforts can

be expanded in scale, so you can make large quantities.”

Richard Spertzel, a microbiologist and former head of biological inspection teams in Iraq for the United

Nations, said he, too, had talked to federal investigators about the Senate powder.

“There’s no question this is weapons quality,” Spertzel said. “It has all the characteristics — fine

particles and readily dispersible.” Particles must be small to penetrate deep into human lungs, where they

can start a lethal infection.

NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Home Front Is Minefield for President: “If the war at home seems more fumbling and disorganized than the war in Afghanistan, there may be a

simple explanation: Americans are watching each anthrax case live on television, where every

contradictory story and bureaucratic misstep is on display, while they are getting the Pentagon’s sanitized

version of the unseen battles half a world away.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Media Beat: The Televised Greatness of George W. Bush: ‘Today’s television environment is, more than ever, warmly hospitable to simple — and simplistic — declarative statements. That’s just as well for Bush, who has

shown a distinct tendency to get entangled in a morass of fragmentary linguistic riffs. Last year, on many occasions, he seemed painfully anxious to make his

way to the end of sentences without further embarrassment. But now, for the most part, it’s a very different story.

For insights about recent shifts of George W. Bush’s persona on television, I contacted media critic Mark Crispin Miller, whose 1988 book Boxed In: The

Culture of TV was a groundbreaking analysis of the tube. In the book, he disputed the customary image of the U.S. president as a “mighty individual” —

and identified that image as “a corporate fiction, the careful work of committees and think tanks, repeatedly reprocessed by the television industry for daily

distribution to a mass audience.” ‘ FAIR