Flesh-eating bugs become cancer killers: “Injecting the bacteria into patients may sound crazy – but the only danger may be that they destroy tumours too fast.” New Scientist

Right whales teeter on the brink: “But a new population model suggests saving just two females a year would halt decline of the highly endangered north Atlantic species.” New Scientist

‘Is the Internet a revolution? Is it a linguistic revolution? Beyond the visual panache of the presentation on a screen, the Internet’s “linguistic” character is immediately obvious to anyone online. As the Internet has become incorporated into our lives, it is becoming clearer how it is being shaped by and is adapting language and languages. Language and the Internet is the first book by a language expert on the linguistic aspects of the Internet. Opening up linguistic issues for a general readership, (David) Crystal argues that “netspeak” is a radically new linguistic medium that we cannot ignore.’ Cambridge University Press

Plotting Along — Best-Selling Authors Are Richer Than Ever. So Why Is Prose From These Pros So Poor?

…short-spurt grafs.

Sometimes in choppy sentence fragments. Other times with no verbs. Or maybe. Single. Words.

These are the new masters of the No-Style style.

The article: heart-stopping prose! a page-turner! I couldn’t put it down…

Washington Post

North America’s Most Dangerous Mammal: How best to deal with the menace of Bambi.

Hunting solutions, from Reason magazine’s science correspondent:

Hunters traditionally want to kill bucks with big sets of antlers. In the past century, state game managers have persuaded hunters to leave does alone to reproduce. However, an innovative program called Quality Hunting Ecology advocated by Brent Haglund, president of the Sand County Foundation in Wisconsin, is being adopted by some states. The idea is that hunters must kill two does before they can shoot a buck. This program reduces the number of fertile females. One apparent side effect of having fewer female deer is that testosterone levels rise in bucks that must compete for access to the remaining females, thus making them bigger trophy animals. Preliminary results of the Quality Hunting Ecology program in Wisconsin show that it does reduce the deer population and improve forest quality. Pennsylvania has just adopted a similar program for this current hunting season.

In a loose segue: Predators key to forest survival: “A forest without predators may not be a forest for long – that is the ominous conclusion of a unique new study by an international team of scientists. The team has found that when predators vanish, herbivore populations can explode, leading to the mass destruction of plant life.” New Scientist

Michael “Skeptic” Shermer in Scientific American:Baloney Detection — hints to distinguish science from pseudo-science:

• How reliable is the source of the claim?
• Does this source often make similar claims?
• Have the claims been verified by another source?
• How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world works?
• Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only supportive evidence been sought?

And in part II:

• Does the preponderance of evidence point to the claimant’s conclusion or to a different one?
• Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and tools of research, or have these been abandoned in favor of others that lead to the desired conclusion?
• Is the claimant providing an explanation for the observed phenomena or merely denying the existing explanation?
• If the claimant proffers a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old explanation did?
• Do the claimant’s personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusions, or vice versa?
  

Artificial Heart Patient Dies: ‘Robert Tools, the first person to receive a fully self-contained artificial heart, died Friday after suffering a setback a day earlier. He was 59 and had lived with the device for 151 days.’ CBS

Notable Fiction Books of 2001 from the New York Times. And the editors’ choice of the best of the best, including Booker Prize winner Peter Carey, this year’s darling Jonathan Franzen, Alice Munro’s latest, and the intriguing W.G. Sebald in fiction choices. Louis Menand’s portrait of the Metaphysical Club (somewhere in my pile of books to get to) and the new Oliver Sacks memoir hold down the nonfiction end, along with the McCullough biography of John Adams (in which I have no interest).

Germ Defense Said to Cost Nearly Twice Bush Proposal — ‘ As Congress

debates how much to spend to bolster the

nation’s defenses against bioterrorism, two

leading federal health officials today put the

figure at roughly $2.8 billion, almost twice the

$1.5 billion the Bush administration has proposed.’ NY Times

Engineers Suspect Diesel Fuel in Collapse of 7 World Trade Center: “Amost lost in the chaos of the collapse of the

World Trade Center is a mystery that

under normal circumstances would probably have

captured the attention of the city and the world.

That mystery is the collapse of a nearby 47-story,

two-million-square-foot building seven hours after

flaming debris from the towers rained down on it,

igniting what became an out-of-control fire

…As engineers and scientists struggle to explain the

collapse of 7 World Trade Center, they have

begun considering whether a type of fuel that was inside the building all along

created intensely hot fires like those in the towers: diesel fuel, thousands of

gallons of it, intended to run electricity generators in a power failure.” NY Times

Rivals Mobilize Alternatives to U.S. System — ‘Around the world, countries are mobilizing to build independent satellite navigation networks, troubled that the Global Positioning System, the only functioning worldwide network, is run by the U.S. military and controlled by the government.’ International Herald Tribune

Fifty Nobel laureates in science write an open letter to the Congressional leadership urging us not to abrogate the ABM treaty. For a brief moment after Sept. 11th, I shared the hopes of some pundits that the attacks had put the lie to the mongering of more exotic fears of ‘rogue states’ which had been the pretext for the Bush Dictatorship’s national missile defense program. But no such luck, and with Putin won over it looks like this program of technological unfeasibility, fiscal boondoggle and destabilizing madness will be realized without even the flimsiest of rational justifications..

Journal axes gene research on Jews and Palestinians. A keynote research paper by a Spanish geneticist has been pulled from the journal Human Immunology, after being accepted. Indeed, some copies of the journal issue with the paper have already been sent out, and the editors are urging recipients to rip the offending pages out and destroy them.

By studying immune system genetic variations among Middle Eastern populations, the team found no data to suggest that the Jewish ‘race’ is genetically distinct from other Mediterranean peoples. This is not a novel conclusion and supports a number of earlier research results finding no genetic basis for Jewish distinctiveness. The cultural offense is that this can be seen to undermine the meme that “the Jews are a special chosen people and that Judaism can only be inherited.”

After accepting the paper, the journal’s editors now claim it provoked a firestorm of complaints based on its political bias and the ‘inappropriateness’ of suggestions that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is based in ‘cultural and religious, but not in genetic differences.’ The paper’s lead author has reportedly not seen or been given an opportunity to respond to such criticisms. He does concede he made some unfortunate choices of inflammatory language.

The Guardian comments: “Such a drastic act of self-censorship is unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of scientific work that questions Biblical dogma.”

Safety in the Skies: Malcolm Gladwell, on target.

The better we are at preventing and solving the crimes before us, the more audacious criminals become. Put alarms and improved locks on cars, and criminals turn to the more dangerous sport of carjacking. Put guards and bulletproof screens in banks, and bank robbery gets taken over by high-tech hackers. In the face of resistance, crime falls in frequency but rises in severity, and few events better illustrate this tradeoff than the hijackings of September 11th. The way in which those four planes were commandeered that Tuesday did not simply reflect a failure of our security measures; it reflected their success. When you get very good at cracking down on ordinary hijacking — when you lock the stairs at the back of the aircraft with a Cooper Vane — what you are left with is extraordinary hijacking.

New Yorker via gladwell.com [thanks, David]

Intimations of the great unlearning: interreligious spirituality and the demise of consciousness which is Alzheimer’s. “What remains after the unraveling of mind, language, and knowledge in Alzheimer’s was there in the beginning.” CrossCurrents

Turns Out It’s Not the Black Cats You Have to Watch Our For. Although it in no way means that he’s a less inhumane man, it’s a little simplistic to characterize Ashcroft, as Andrew Tobias does here, as “telling (us) that we have to endure unimaginable pain.” And Tobias’ recounting of a Jerry Groopman anecdote aside (a straw man, with nothing directly to do with Ashcroft or his policies), whether the Oregon “assisted suicide” law is reversed or not, doctors will continue ministering compassionately to the agonized terminally ill regardless of the moralizing of the pig-ignorant.

Ape brains show linguistic promise Three members of the family of great apes have a crucial speech-related brain feature previously thought unique to humans.” The finding, essentially a left-right asymmetry in the part of Broca’s area that subsumes speech production in humans, was revealed through a project doing MRI imaging of great apes’ brains and may be related to the apes’ prominent use of gesture in their communication. BBC

If you weren’t already familiar with this (it only recently came to my attention; I heard or read nothing about this when my children, now 3 and 7, were infants), it is a recent trend in some circles to teach preverbal children sign language as a tool for communication enhancement and intellectual enrichment in general as well as to facilitate the inclusion of those with hearing impairments in society.

Goffmania: an FmH reader debuts a new weblog with a social science bent, dedicated to social psychologist Erving Goffman, whose Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was one of the more influential books I read in a certain era. [Add to that Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, Levi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind, Berger and Luckman’s Social Construction of Reality and Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger and you have a weltanschaaung…] Godspeed, Neel.

DOJ’s Already Monitoring Modems: ‘The Department of Justice already is using its new anti-terrorism powers to monitor cable modem users without obtaining a judge’s permission first.’ Wired

Fezzes, Sphinxes and Secret Handshakes — “What do Mozart, George Washington, J. Edgar Hoover and Michael Richards of ‘Seinfeld’ have in common? Membership in the mysterious, and dwindling, fraternity of the Freemasons”.Washington Post

Russia Checkmated Its New Best Friend

But, while the Bush administration was busy tearing apart Afghanistan to find Bin Laden, it

failed to notice that the Russians were taking over half the country.

The Russians achieved this victory through their proxy–the Northern Alliance. Moscow,

which has sustained the alliance since 1990, rearmed it after Sept. 11 with new tanks, armored

vehicles, artillery, helicopters and trucks.

To the fury of Washington and Islamabad, in a coup de main the Russians rushed the Northern

Alliance into Kabul, in direct contravention of Bush’s dictates.

The alliance is now Afghanistan’s dominant force and, heedless of multi-party political talks in

Germany going on this week, styles itself as the new “lawful” government, a claim fully

backed by Moscow.

The Russians have regained influence over Afghanistan, avenged their defeat by the U.S. in

the 1980s war and neatly checkmated the Bush administration, which, for all its high-tech

military power, understands little about Afghanistan. LA Times

Will ‘It’ Finally Be Revealed? Wired

Jeffrey Isaac: Doing Things with Words

In the weeks, months, and years ahead, it is important that each of us is very clear about what we are doing with our words. We will be pressed to make declarative statements. And such statements will have their place. But it is just as important to remember that the qualifications, and the questions, and the ambivalences have their place. We need to make sure that they have their place in our individual minds. And, even more important, we need to make sure that they have their place in our public culture. The struggle against terrorism is a struggle on behalf of security and of life. But it is also a struggle on behalf of freedom and democracy. Right now the defense of our democracy requires us to be attentive to the things we do with weapons. But above all, democracy requires us to be supremely attentive to the things we do with words.

Brainstorming for Peace:

Campus Activists Reconsider Their Slogans

: “Between sloganeering and flag-waving, I wonder what’s left sometimes.” The American Prospect

Another reader comments on Safire:

A libertarian is a conservative who’s been wiretapped. Safire has had a

strong libertarian streak at least since he found that Kissinger was

snooping on him, but if you look back, you can find a number of attacks on

police and intelligence excess, and he did a marvelous piece about his

revulsion at the Republican Party in 1992 when Pat & Pat were calling

shots. He’s looked worse in recent years because he’s deranged on the

subject of the Clintons, but so is Christopher Hitchens over on the other side.

I think in retrospect I hadn’t given Safire enough credit, and hadn’t followed his exploits carefully enough, and was tarring him with a broad brush as an unnuanced “conservative”, or I wouldn’t’ve been so surprised at his recent outrage… Thanks to all who wrote to point this out to me, compassionately.

jerrykindall pointed to this Interview with Neil Gaiman from January magazine. As usual, Neverwhere is glossed over or ignored. I’ll go out on a limb here and say I enjoyed it more than American Gods, its inventive, tight control as opposed to the sprawl of the latter.

I was surprised to find there have been claims, which I hadn’t previously heard, that Harry Potter was derivative of some of his work:

What was it of yours they were accusing her of stealing from you?

My character Tim Hunter from Books of Magic who came out in 1990 was a small dark-haired boy with big round spectacles — a 12-year-old English boy — who has the potential to be the most powerful wizard in the world and has a little barn owl.

So there were commonalties, for sure.

Well, yes and as I finally, pissed off, pointed out to an English reviewer who tried to start this again, I said: Look, all of the things that they actually have in common are such incredibly obvious, surface things that, had she actually been stealing, they were the things that would be first to be changed.

I had actually pondered less trivial parallels between Potter and Neverwhere when I read it several months ago — the notion of the unrecognized commingling of the magical and mundane Londons, as in Diagon Alley or Platform 9 3/4, and specifically the way one walks through seemingly solid walls to cross between worlds.

A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist, Swedish cultural historian and author of Exterminate All the Brutes.

Sven Lindqvist is one of Sweden´s most innovative writers, fast building a cult following for his unorthodox, fiercely moral works of cultural history. Desert Divers and Exterminate All the Brutes exposed the depths of European imperialism and racism in Africa; now Lindqvist turns his clear inquisitive eye on aerial bombing, and the profound and terrible effects of its aftermath on the 20th century.

Drawing on a rich range of sources, from popular fiction, to first hand accounts by the victims and perpetrators of bombing, from official government documents, to his own personal experiences as a child, parent and grandparent, Lindqvist unearths the fascinating history of the development of air power. He exposes the racist assumptions underlying colonial bombing campaigns in North Africa, and France and England’s use of bombing to subdue postwar independence movements; and he probes the psychology of Bomber Harris. He sets out the recipe for napalm, and the science of smart bombs, and he asks some uncomfortable questions: did bombs ever produce the expected results? Is bombing civilians a war crime, and if so why have the laws of war and international justice proved so impotent? Why can´t the truth about Hiroshima be told in the Air and Space museum in Washington?

Lindqvist has constructed the book in an ingenious way: as a sort of labyrinth in which the reader is offered a number of paths through a century of war. This makes for a fascinating reading experience, allowing us to grasp the chaos of history, and the way in which different narratives attempt to make sense of it.

” This book is a labyrinth with twenty-two entrances and no exit. Each entrance opens into a narrative or an argument, which you then follow by going from text to text according to the instruction To + the number of the section where the narrative is continued. So from entrance 1 you proceed to section 166 and continue reading section by section until you come to 173, where another To takes you back to entrance 2.

In order to move through time, you also have to move through the book, often forwards, but sometimes backwards. Wherever you are in the text, events and thoughts from that same period surround you, but they belong to narratives other than the one you happen to be following. That’s the intention. That way the text emerges as what it is-one of many possible paths through the chaos of history.

So welcome to the labyrinth! Follow the threads, put together the horrifying puzzle and, once you have seen my century, build one of your own from other pieces.”

Grenade factory in backyard annoys neighbors. Ananova

The Belligerent Bunch: Rabid Journalists and Pundits Push Bush to Extremes

By calling for Bush to step up the war effort, curtail civil liberties, consider torture and imagine the deaths of tens of millions of Muslims, these writers and TV personalities have dominated the intellectual debate. By grossly distorting the positions of critics, they have helped to give Bush a free ride and undermine healthy discourse. This pundit group has upped the ante for the Bush administration, either pushing it further to the right, or providing it with cover to keep pushing the envelope. No matter how far the Bush administration goes in expanding security power and remaking the international landscape, the war boys will still be calling for more. AlterNet [via Blowback]

Oh heck, blogback doesn’t seem to be working either. I just looked back over a week of entries here and there has not been a single comment. I’m excising the code; click on the comment icon [ ] beneath any post to send me an email comment on that post.

By the way, the other icon [ ] — which is supposed to be a pencil — is not there for you. It’s just for me to “remotely” edit my posts, i.e. edit them from my browser window without surfing over to blogger.com. If Blogger’s remote editing weren’t broken, as it appears to have been for months, you wouldn’t even see that icon unless you had permission to edit remotely, i.e. unless you were me. I leave it there for its enormous convenience to me, even though it has been confusing to some readers (who, for instance, have clicked on it to post a comment to me and found, to their consternation, that they were presented with some obscure login prompt).

But I’m curious — I never see any remote-editing links when I read any other Blogger-based weblogs. Does that mean that people have gotten remote editing to work properly, so the links are invisible to readers like me? Or does no one else use the remote editing mechanism at all? If you’re a Blogger-based blogger who’s gotten it to work properly, please write back and, if you please, share the relevant code. I’d love to make that icon go away and clean up the interface further while maintaining my functionality. TIA.

Mental gymnastics increase biceps strength — ‘It is a couch potato’s dream – just imagining yourself exercising can increase the strength of even your large muscles. The discovery could help patients too weak to exercise to start recuperating from stroke or other injury. And if the technique works in older people, they might use it to help maintain their strength.’ New Scientist

The Hotline World Extra, daily from The Atlantic, is an interesting collection of source news related to the war and connected issues. Here are todays’ four lead items, f’rinstance:

Forget anthrax. Bin Laden scientists working on way to disseminate cyanide via weather balloon.

The “Who’s Next” Watch:

Somalia seen as more likely than Iraq.

Trust But Verified?

India says U.S. patrolled their nuke site.

A Novel Idea!

Saudi prince’s proposal calls for holding actual elections in the country.

Jennifer Homans on Dance: Dancing in the Dark — “Osama bin laden may have destroyed the World Trade Center, but he has saved American dance. I know this sounds a little grotesque; but so you would suppose, to hear the pronouncements of leading figures in the New York dance world.” The New Republic

Routes of Least Surveillance — ‘It’s not the journey or the destination; it’s the getting there unseen that counts.

Or so goes the thinking behind a new mapping utility created by civil libertarians to guide New Yorkers through Manhattan along routes with the fewest surveillance cameras.’ Wired

Bad Memory — why Afghans take revenge: ‘Then my driver squatted down next to the prisoner and said, “Fuck off, Osama. Osama’s the husband of your mother. I hate you. Why did you bring Pakistan and the Arabs here to destroy our country? You killed our great Ahmed Shah Massoud. If I’d captured you, I would have killed you. But now we’re telling these soldiers not to hit you because we are kind.” ‘ The New Republic

Guinness ‘Clouds’ Fill Irish Sky. Part of an interactive web project by Irish artist Grace Weir, inaugurating a new Guiness-sponsored art gallery that will be a centerpiece of an emerging digital district in central Dublin sponsored by the Irish government, the virtual cloud is visible from many places around the streets of Dublin. Wired

Dead men walking… ” The Islamic world after the terrorist attack of September 11th is teetering on the edge of massive change. There may well be global realignment as extensive as the collapse of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact in 1989. In retrospect Osama bin Laden may be seen as the most effective terrorist since Gavrilo Princip killed the Hapsburg heir Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914…

What will it really matter if the American coalition conquers the rocky wasteland of Afghanistan only to find Al Queda in control of nuclear-armed Pakistan, or the oil riches of Saudi Arabia — and with strong popular support?” Thomas Lipscomb, Jewish World Review

The Post-September 11 Environment. Public watchdog group OMB Watch is compiling a running list of public information to which the government is removing access since the attacks.

John Berger: A Gratitude Hard to Name: ‘Is it still possible to write more words about him? I think of those already written, mine included, and the answer is “No.” If I look at his paintings, the answer is again—for a different reason—“No”; the canvases command silence. I almost said plead for, and that would have been false, for there is nothing pathetic about a single image he made—not even the old man with his head in his hands at the gates of eternity. All his life he hated blackmail and pathos.’ The Threepenny Review

Keeping a Who’s-Naughty List: ‘London police are planning to register children who exhibit criminal potential in an effort to prevent them from developing into full-fledged lawbreakers… Teachers, social workers, health care professionals, law enforcement agents and other authorities who have contact with troublemakers will contribute information to the database program, which will be rolled out in 11 London boroughs before being implemented nationally, according to a copy of the speech. Special squads formed by police and community workers will supervise the actions and behavior of children included in the registry.’ Wired

Malaria and Cancer Cells Yield to the Same Garlic Compounds: the multiplicity of health benefits of garlic has been indisputable but the basis of its effectiveness mysterious. New research sheds light on the common strands in conditions that may be garlic-sensitive. Scientific American

“Behind the jargon about failed states and humanitarian interventions lie thousands of dead.” The incendiary John Pilger on how liberals tolerate the suffering of innocents as we prepare for the next phase of the good terrorists’ war on the bad. New Statesman

When do we take the flags down? “The question is as complex — and American — as the nation’s relationship with patriotism”, writes Paul Lieberman, a staff writer in the New York Times‘ New York bureau. LA Times On a related topic, and with apologies in advance to any of you Followers who are also flag-fliers, has anyone else noticed that the people who drive like madmen on the road, weaving in and out and cutting others off, etc., the ones I call all kinds of foul names from behind the safety of my closed windows, all seem to be the ones who are flying flags on their cars? It used to be I only had to look out for the people who wore their baseball caps backwards…

Mark Rasch, formerly head of the U.S. Department of Justice Computer Crime Unit, writes on Ashcroft’s Global Power Grab: “A little-noticed provision in the new anti-terrorism act imposes U.S. cyber crime laws on other nations, whether they like it or not… An amendment to the definition of a “protected computer” for the first time explicitly enables U.S. law enforcement to prosecute computer hackers outside the United States in cases where neither the hackers nor their victims are in the U.S., provided only that packets related to that activity traveled through U.S. computers or routers.” Security Focus

Experts Rip Cloning ‘Story’ “Scientists say they’ve cloned the first human embryo, but critics are calling the announcement a shameless cry for funding.”

” Wired The New York Times news analysis piece I posted earlier today more than hinted at the opportunism in the timing and the manner of ACT’s announcement too.

Alien Atmospheres: ‘Astronomers using the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope have made the first direct detection and chemical analysis of the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system. Their unique observations show it is possible to measure the chemical makeup of extra-solar planetary atmospheres — and potentially to search for chemical markers of life far beyond Earth.

The Jupiter-sized planet orbits a yellow, Sun-like star called HD 209458 that lies 150 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. Its atmospheric composition was probed when the planet passed in front of its parent star, allowing astronomers for the first time ever to see light from the star filtered through the planet’s atmosphere…Transit observations by Hubble and ground-based telescopes confirmed that the planet is primarily gaseous, rather than liquid or solid, meaning that it is a gas giant, like Jupiter and Saturn.’ science@NASA

Food for Thought : Decaf May Not Always Be Best — ‘Data from a pair of large studies reported in November at the American College of Rheumatology meeting in San Francisco now suggest that a woman’s choice of brew may affect her joints.

The good news for coffee lovers: Both new studies find that caffeine poses no problem. Regular consumption of decaffeinated brews, however, in each study raised a woman’s risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis.’ Science News

The Little Engine That Could Be: ‘At about one thousandth the size of a regular power station, the engine-on-a-chip will create about 1 millionth the power level, producing 20 watts of power at 2.4 million rpm from its cubic centimeter-sized package.

“It will give 10 times the amount of power that is generated by the best lithium battery”…

And when the engine runs out of juice you just fill ‘er up again. There’s no need to wait to recharge or run out to the store for new batteries.’ Wired

Israeli Analysis Raises New Doubt About Arafat’s Power

As the Bush administration begins its first intensive drive for peace here, senior Israeli officials have concluded that no solution will be possible until new leaders replace Yasir Arafat at the top of the Palestinian movement.

Palestinians present a mirror- image argument: that no agreement is likely or even possible with Ariel Sharon as Israeli prime minister.

On the Israeli side, there has been a subtle but important shift in the statements of recent days, from a claim that Mr. Arafat is simply unwilling to crack down on militants to an argument that he also feels too weak politically to do so. NY Times analysis

Afghan South: Different War Than in North

For all the Pentagon’s talk about waging an unorthodox war, the campaign in northern Afghanistan has been fairly conventional, culminating today in the fall of the city of Kunduz. But the situation in southern Afghanistan, where hundreds of United States marines are now deployed near the Taliban’s last stronghold, Kandahar, is strikingly different.

The Pentagon lacks a strong proxy ground force in the south and has a more demanding mission there: to take the fight to the adversary’s heartland and roust Osama bin Laden, his Qaeda fighters and the Taliban from their sanctuaries and pursue them, even if they flee into caves and mountains that make Afghanistan one of the most rugged places in the world. NY Times

A Harvard Professor’s Baffling Vanishing

Gregory Verdine, a professor of chemical biology at Harvard, said, “If bioterrorists were to abduct Don Wiley, they’d be very disappointed,” because his research was in studying the component parts of viruses, and “that doesn’t really help you make a more dangerous version of the virus.”

Meanwhile, scientists ponder limits on access to germ research.

NY Times

Michigan ‘Invites’ Men From Mideast to Be Interviewed NY Times

A Breakthrough on Cloning? Perhaps, or Perhaps Not Yet “Some scientists even suggested that what the company was doing was not cloning at all.

But if there is a future in human cloning, either for reproductive purposes or to create cell lines for use in treating diseases, people may one day say it started in Worcester.” NY Times analysis

Rina Amiri, a research associate with the Women Waging Peace

Initiative at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, writes in a New York Times op-ed piece, Muslim Women as Symbols — and Pawns: ‘It has come to be assumed in much of the Muslim world that to be a proponent of

women’s rights is to be pro-Western. This enmeshing of gender and geopolitics

has robbed Muslim women of their ability to develop a discourse on their rights

independent of a cultural debate between the Western and Muslim worlds.’ NY Times

All the Virology on the WWW “seeks to be the best single site for Virology information on

the Internet. We have collected all the virology related Web sites that might be of interest to

our fellow virologists, and others interested in learning more about viruses. Additionally, we

have created an index to virus pictures on the web, The Big Picture Book of Viruses, which also

functions as a resource for viral taxonomy. A collection of some of the best Online Virology and

Microbiology Course Notes available can also be found here. If you’re interested in even more

information, we have The Virology Bookshop, an on-line microbiology and virology bookstore

with a significant discount for our users.”

The Poster Police: a 19-year-old student activist is questioned by police and Secret Service for a poster in her home critical of Dubya’s Texas capital punishment record. Yes, rudely critical:

Brown got it at an “anti-inauguration” protest in Washington, D.C. Distributed to hundreds of activists, it depicts George W. Bush holding a length of rope against a backdrop of lynching victims, and reads: “We hang on your every word. George Bush: Wanted, 152 Dead”–a reference to the number of people executed by the state of Texas while Bush was governor.

It occurred to me to say that this story makes me want to go out and find an anti-Shrub poster to hang on my wall. Then it occurred to me that I’ve been at least as rude, if not as eloquent as the poster, about our risible President most days here in FmH, and in the public record no less. Should I expect my Secret Service visit soon? Would it help if I playfully suggested we could start referring to them by their initials, “S.S.”? I know you, or your ilk, are out there, with your Echelon and your Carnivore, trolling for verbiage like this…

Here’s a link to the National Lawyers’ Guild pamphlet Know Your Rights — what to do if agents come to question you.

[via Medley]

Jerry Westerby wrote me in response to my Safire query:

I can’t remember (and a cursory search of my files was fruitless) who first speculated this but the hypothesis goes that Safire is furious at Karl Rove et.al. for using him and his column to disseminate the “we had solid information that the White House was going to be attacked” lie that was used to justify W being sent to an underground bunker on 9-11. If you remember the lie, the person who called in the threat had knowledge of some kind of inter office codes that made the threat creditable. Safire then speculated in print that there must be a terrorist mole in the White House. Rove confirmed the story to Safire. When the story was exposed as a huge lie, Safire was apparently irate, not only at being lied to, but also for being used like some common reporter for disinfo, being made to look the fool for the mole nonsense, and being left out in the cold by his friends as if he had made it all up himself. This story is plausible, but then again Safire has always had a discernible if slight libertarian streak in him, so maybe his criticisms of the administration are nothing but sincere horror.

William Safire continues his broadside: Kangaroo Courts: “President Bush’s initiative to

create military tribunals turns

back the clock on all

advances in military justice,

through three wars, in the

past half-century.” NY Times [My cynical side, a.k.a. the iceberg beneath the tip, conjectures that there’s something beyond just journalistic integrity and the courage of convictions behind Safire’s public denunciation of an administration whose values would appear to be so close to his heart. If anyone knows, or can point to, more detailed analysis, I’d love to hear it. TIA. –FmH]

The Wrong Time to Fight Iraq: “The world would be a safer place with

Saddam Hussein’s cruel dictatorship

removed. At this point, however, there are no

good short-term options for getting rid of

him.” NY Times editorial

Eric Tilton writes (and permits me to reprint):

Seeing the PinealWeb logo on your blog was a strange experience. I’ve been a longtime reader of your (excellent) page, and I really enjoy the wide ranging list of thought-provoking links you provide. So, when I saw PinealWeb sitting there, I at first didn’t register it — I’ve grown so used to seeing the image at the bottom of my own page, I just filtered it out. You see, I created the image.

PinealWeb grew from a few colliding memes. Too much Illuminatus, for one thing. The foiled idealism of an early attempt at an HTML style guide (“can’t we all just write browser independent HTML?”), for another. It was hard to resist a little culture pranking when earnest and lazy web “designers” were busy optimizing for Netscape or IE and leaving those of us with weirder machines in the cold (Mosaic on BSD Mach in 1997 was a trip, let me tell you. Internet Explorer on a Mac in 2001 isn’t too much better).

I’m curious how you came across the image. I know it’s scattered here and there on people’s personal pages. I used to be a member of the Flat Earth Society mailing list, which was certainly one vector; I also still seem to get hits on an early, sketchy HTMLification of the Principia Discordia, which is doubtless another.

FDNY action figure sells

briskly as department

markets name and logo The Salem Evening News

Human embryo clone created — ‘ United States company says it has created a

human embryo clone … the

first time a research

institute with an

established track record

in the use of cloning

and other novel cell

technologies has come

forward with this sort of

announcement.

The company, Advanced Cell Technology

(ACT), is stressing that its aim is to use the

embryo as a source of stem cells – not to

create a human being.’ BBC

‘The structure will develop small, helicopter-like

accessories, which will fly down in autumn’.There’s no work of art as fascinating as a

tree. Independent UK

Photos of Afghan liberation

Ha’aretz editorial: On the way to school:

Five children killed is an intolerable price, the fruit of the policy according to

which Israel sets itself very loose limits in its war against Palestinian violence.

But not everything is permitted, not even in the war against terrorism, or against

the mortars that are trained on IDF camps and on the settlements at the

extremity of the Gaza Strip.

One thing that’s not permitted, for example, is to plant explosive devices on a

path used by children on the way to school. That has to be beyond the pale,

utterly forbidden, without ifs or buts, because of the danger posed to civilians by

the bombs. Whereas in the West Bank Israel seems to have set itself a few red

lines, the impression is that in the war to defend the vacuous settlements in the

Gaza Strip it has abandoned all restraint. In Gaza, far from the eyes of the Israeli

media, the game has different rules. The explosive devices Israel has planted

there is proof of that. After the liquidations, the arrests without trial, the shelling

of homes and the wholesale kidnappings, now come the bombs, which don’t

distinguish between children and terrorists.

On the slippery slope that Israel’s moral character is sliding irreparably, this is a

new nadir. A state places explosive charges where children are likely to pass

and then claims that only the other side practices terrorism? We have to admit

that an act of this kind can be considered an act of terrorism, because it strikes

at the innocent and doesn’t discriminate between the victims, even if the

intention was not to kill children and even if the goal was the war on terrorism.

What’s American About American Poetry? Campbell McGrath:

“Personally, I consider myself an American poet, because I’ve been shaped and molded by the culture in ways both known and hidden to me. Thematically, I write primarily about American culture, history, and landscape; but even when I’m writing about parenthood or palm trees I understand my vision to be colored by my sociocultural identity. My poetry may be an extreme case, but I often wonder what value it holds for a reader unversed in Americana, a reader unfamiliar with 7-11s and cable TV.”

“For a while — a short while — it seemed possible that the twin towers attack and the subsequent war might have jolted the affluent West out of its claustrophobic, neurotic materialist mindset. The massive shock could have liberated us from self-absorbed timidity and jolted us into remembering older values… (However,) the new era is, alas, still some way off.” The essayist is disturbed that “the malingerers, the players of the system, the special-pleaders who renege on clear working contracts, the claimers and blamers who want money for what a sane world would classify as bad luck” are still coming out of the woodwork, seemingly unconstrained by higher aspirations to which the terrorist attacks should have inspired our society. The Times of London

Hudson Institute commentator says we have little to fear from ‘next-phase’ guerrilla Taliban. “Taliban leaders say that abandoning the cities and taking the fight to the mountains was always part of their plan. Sure it was. Throwing away weapons was also part of the plan, right? What better way to deceive us?

Still, it’s important to ask what threat the Taliban may pose as guerrillas. The answer appears to be: Not much.” National Review

The State of the War: ‘Whatever happens in Afghanistan, the United States must not lose sight of its top goal: preventing further attacks within America’s borders.’ StratFor

Virtual Rape: The conviction of a 51-year-old New Jersey man of aggravated sexual assault onb a 10-year-old child with whom his only contact was over the phone may change the way we conceive of rape, Wendy Kaminer writes. NY Times Magazine

Questions for Ian McKellen on Why There Are No Childish Roles

Q: What’s the difference between preparing for a fantasy role like Gandalf and preparing for a serious and adult role, like Edgar in Strindberg’s ”Dance of Death,” which you’re currently playing on Broadway?

Well, Gandalf is five or seven thousand years old. He has been sent down by the higher powers to help Middle Earth. How on earth do you act those inhuman qualities? What you go with is the intense humanity of the character, the old man tramping around the countryside and complaining about his aching bones. It’s like if you were playing Jesus Christ — never of course would I recommend this to an actor, because everybody who plays Jesus Christ ends their career with that performance — but what you do when you play the Son of God is you forget the God part and get on with being the son.

NY Times Magazine

Lou Reed, the Tell-Tale Rocker: Reed and Robert Wilson collaborate on a music-theatre remix of the works of Edgar Allen Poe.

“He’s so contemporary,” Mr. Reed added. “It would sad be if he’s consigned to some cartoon level, like the Roger Corman movies. And the language is so beautiful. I spent so many hours with the dictionary, because some of these words were already arcane when he used them. He was a show- off in that way. My God, what a vocabulary. So I spent time finding out what these things meant, and then making it a litte bit, not necessarily contemporary, but what it actually meant. But the word he picked always had a beautiful sound.” NY Times

Columbine-style high school massacre plot foiled in Massachusetts Washington Post

We’ll Pay for All This Later, Okay? Fortune columnist Rob Norton on the consequences of deficit spending to pay for the enhanced homeland security and the war on terrorism. The problems are compounded, of course, as a result of the brain-dead Bush tax cut. It appears we’re headed for a return to deficit spending of indefinite duration. In the short run: goodbye, prescription drug aid for the elderly. In the long run: goodbye, social security? Washington Post

Perfect stocking-stuffer? Caps, shirts, mugs, mousepads — all branded with the powerful but subtly understated barcoded-head logo. If any FmH-lover would like me to drop a hint to a non-FmH-reading giftgiver about your desire to display the ‘colors’, just send me their address. As far as I can tell, only one FmH fan other than me has bought anything from the FmH store. By the way, I sell these at cost and make no profit, just getting the word out…

Ghost Sites: ‘This exhibit – The Museum of E-Failure – is an attempt to actively preserve the home pages of sites that will probably disappear in the next few months. Our goal is not to laugh at these failed enterprises, but to preserve documentary images – as many as possible – before all traces of their existence are deleted from history’s view. It is my hope that these screenshots may serve as a reminder of the glory, folly, and historically unique design sensibilities of the Web’s Great Gilded Age (1995-2001). May no historical revisionists ever claim that this wacky period didn’t happen – these screenshots prove that it did!’

FBI is watching case of missing biologist: “Federal agents are closely monitoring the disappearance case of Harvard biology professor Don C. Wiley because of his research interests in a number of potentially deadly viruses, including Ebola, the FBI said yesterday in Memphis.

Wiley’s whereabouts remained a mystery yesterday, a week after his car was found on a bridge over the Mississippi River. His family continued to insist that the noted biologist, whose papers explored the workings of some of the deadliest viruses in the world, would not have killed himself.” Boston Globe

From The Boondocks:

Harry Potter Is A Fraud. Muggles publication Forbes casts a jaundiced eye on how the film broke box office records: “The movie opened in 3,672 theaters and on 8,200 screens–about one out of every four screens in America; most Potter theaters played the movie on more than one screen. By contrast, 1999’s Star Wars: Episode 1–The Phantom Menace played on about 5,000 screens in its opening weekend, when it took in $65 million.

Prices have been rising steadily, too. In 1997, when the old three-day record was set, the average movie theater ticket price was $4.59, according to the National Association of Theater Owners. By 2000, the price had risen 17% to $5.39.”

Ghost Sites: ‘This exhibit – The Museum of E-Failure – is an attempt to actively preserve the home pages of sites that will probably disappear in the next few months. Our goal is not to laugh at these failed enterprises, but to preserve documentary images – as many as possible – before all traces of their existence are deleted from history’s view. It is my hope that these screenshots may serve as a reminder of the glory, folly, and historically unique design sensibilities of the Web’s Great Gilded Age (1995-2001). May no historical revisionists ever claim that this wacky period didn’t happen – these screenshots prove that it did!’

Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow excerpted:

This was the only time these three great philosophers – Russell, Wittgenstein and Popper – were together. Yet, to this day, no one can agree precisely what took place. What is clear is that there were vehement exchanges between Popper and Wittgenstein over the fundamental nature of philosophy – whether there were indeed philosophical problems (Popper) or merely puzzles (Wittgenstein). These exchanges instantly became the stuff of legend. An early version of events had Popper and Wittgenstein battling for supremacy with red-hot pokers. As Popper himself later recollected, ‘In a surprisingly short time I received a letter from New Zealand asking if it was true that Wittgenstein and I had come to blows, both armed with pokers.’

Those ten or so minutes on 25 October 1946 still provoke bitter disagreement. Above all, one dispute remains heatedly alive: did Karl Popper later publish an untrue version of what happened? Did he lie?

If he did lie, it was no casual embellishing of the facts. If he lied, it directly concerned two ambitions central to his life: the defeat at a theoretical level of fashionable twentieth-century linguistic philosophy and triumph at a personal level over Wittgenstein, the sorcerer who had dogged his career. Guardian UK

Beyond Osama:The Pentagon’s Battle With Powell Heats Up

The simmering conflict within the Bush administration over how to prosecute the next phase of the “war on terrorism” suddenly flared up last week as the Taliban fled Kabul. “Where to go next and how big it should be is what’s being argued right now—and Baghdad is what’s being debated at the moment,” said a senior Pentagon official. “This is both an internal discussion at the Pentagon, and one between departments. Our policy guys are thinking Iraq. Our question is, do we make a move earlier than anyone expects?”

…Others interviewed by the Voice report that there have been “epic shouting matches” in White House meetings over the issue of war expansion, and personnel at both Foggy Bottom and Langley have found their patience increasingly tried by the Wolfowitz Cabal. Indeed, despite the CIA’s cowboy image, the Agency’s old Afghan and Middle East hands marvel at what they consider lunacy. “The Agency as an institution would never offer up a view of these people, but if you ask individuals, they think these guys are more than a little nuts,” says a veteran of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.

Village Voice [via AlterNet]

Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life. ‘ Bad Subjects …promotes the progressive use of new media and print publications… (and) seeks to revitalize progressive politics in retreat. We think too many people on the left have taken their convictions for granted. So we challenge progressive dogma by encouraging readers to think about the political dimension to all aspects of everyday life. We also seek to broaden the audience for leftist and progressive writing, through a commitment to accessibility and contemporary relevance.’ The current issue is an interrogation of television in the post-Sept 11 context. Upcoming issues include:

• Cruising (“When the Left takes on the character of a global carnival, traveling from site to site to lob rocks at corporate overlords and smash the state – or at least, dematerialize it — mobility is more important than ever.”);
• Immigration and Diaspora (“Across the world, immigration — how to control it, its desirability, who should be allowed to do it — has become a hotly disputed topic.The Immigration issue will investigate the various forms that these politics of immigration have adopted across the world.”); and
• The Aesthetics of Violence (“Violence — even where a defensive or liberational necessity — is quintessentially ugly. Its representation involves expressive choices that collectively constitute an aesthetic that turns such ugliness to political purposes. This issue of Bad Subjects examines how the aesthetics of violence manifest themselves under the terms of contemporary transnational capitalism. To whose benefit are bodies being mutilated on screens and on streets? How do dominant cultures perpetuate their power through representations of physical domination in action? What happens when violence becomes a consumer item? How did we come to enjoy the sight of violence so, how do we love it so?”).

Guardians of the Natural Order: A 1996 web document which “outlines the Islamic approach to environmental protection.”

You’ll recall the buzz. Since then, I’d been wondering whatever happened to Dean Kamen’s “it”. Here’s some followup — essentially, it remains vaporware, it seems. Inexplicably, Time magazine includes it among its best inventions of 2001

Take the Affliction Test Today!

The new ‘pro-war liberalism’: ‘ “The North Vietnamese never bombed American cities”. Progressive congressman Barney Frank talks about why he supports the war, opposes Bush’s attack on civil liberties and thinks Clinton’s military legacy is just fine.’ Salon

Children’s Literature Responds to Terror

Since September 11, books about Islam and Osama bin Laden and dusty academic tomes about past wars have flown off bookstore shelves to the top of the best-seller lists. Among children’s literature, a similar trend is occurring, although on a slightly smaller scale. Books about Islam and war written for children have received new life in the weeks since Sept. 11th.

This hour, three authors of children’s books on Islamic culture discuss how publishing has responded to Sept. 11th and how books can help young people better understand the people and events they have been hearing about over the past two and a half months.

WBUR (Boston NPR) Special Coverage webcast.

Taliban offer $50 million for Bush’s capture — ‘Stating that all good Muslims would reject the opportunity to cash in on the bounty for bin Laden’s capture, Mohammed Saeed Haqqani, security chief of Taliban at the border town of Spin Boldak in Kandahar instead offered a $50 m prize for President Bush’s capture.

“The Americans have offered $25 million for Osama. We will give $50 million for (US President George W.) Bush even though we are a poor country.” ‘ Hindustan Times

New gravity map released; you’d weigh less in India. BBC

Pacifica board agrees to resign: ‘The Pacifica National Board agreed today to voluntarily dissolve, reconstitute itself as an interim board with new members, and then to implement a democratization process for the five-station network.

Dissidents and majority factions on Pacifica’s embattled 15- member board agreed to each appoint five of their members to a new interim board. In addition, five entirely new members would be appointed by the chairs of Pacifica’s five Local Advisory Boards.

While the formula would effectively place majority control of the board in the hands of the Pacifica reform movement (four out of the five LABs are dominated by reformers), all decisions of the interim board must be agreed upon by two-thirds vote or 10 out of the 15 members.’ The move came after a dramatic confrontation with more than a hundred public radio activists at a weekend board meeting in Washington. The concessions seem to arise from the fiscal insolvency of the network and its inability to afford more damage, according to the activists.

Japanese scientists have founded a medical institute to study the male menopause. They took the decision after hearing too many complaints of sleeplessness and depression among middle-aged men. Ananova

Kissing evolved from sniffing, says academic. Ananova

Irrationalist in Chief: Chris Mooney profiles Leon Kass, the conservative University of Chicago ethics philosopher appointed to head George W. Bush’s new Council on Bioethics. Mooney says it’s lucky Kass doesn’t require Senate confirmation for his post. The American Prospect

Israeli Forces Kill a Top Leader of Islamic Group in West Bank, firing rockets from a helicopter at his van outside Nablus.

The man, Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, had

been wanted by the Israelis since at least

1995, and his escapes from previous

attempts to capture or kill him had gained

him a reputation in the West Bank as “the

man with seven lives.” Among other

terrorist operations, Mr. Hanoud was

accused by Israel of planning two suicide

bombings here in 1997 that killed 21.

Mr. Hanoud, who was in his mid- 30’s, was

the senior military leader in the West Bank

of Hamas, which pledged revenge for the

killing.

The Israelis’ choice of this moment — after the deaths of the five Palestinian schoolchildren who apparently kicked unexploded ordnance the Israelis had left in hopes of killing terrorists. and the shooting by Israel’s security forces of a 15-year-old Palestinian boy at the schoolchildren’s funeral, with the region poised for the arrival of Dubya’s envoys pursuing the Administration’s first peace initiative — certainly raises questions to this naive observer about whether they are interested in sabotaging the peace effort irrevocably.

There’s this curious paragraph in the article:

Mr.

Hanoud’s face was destroyed in the

attack, and he was identified by his shoe

size, a surgical scar on his back and a

shoulder injury from the first Intifada,

Palestinian officials said. The Israeli Army

declined to comment.

Could it be that Hanoud was not really killed but that Hamas is intent on creating that impression?

Spain Sets Hurdle for Extraditions: “Spain will not extradite the eight men

it has charged with complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks unless

the United States agrees that they would be tried by a civilian

court and not by the military tribunals envisioned by President

Bush, Spanish officials said today.” NY Times

Hunt for a Solution to Obscure Vomiting Disorder: “Doctors know frustratingly little about (cyclic vomiting disorder). And some doubt that it

exists as a distinct syndrome, though it was first identified more than a

century ago. Two studies in other countries estimate that as many as 1 in

50 white schoolchildren may suffer from it… Some doctors think it is simply an unusual type of migraine, even though

many patients do not have headaches. And other doctors have never

heard of it, mistakenly diagnosing ailments it mimics, including bulimia, flu

and reflux disease.” NY Times

Today’s NY Times op-ed columnists:
Frank Rich: Wait Until Dark: In his blundering, John Ashcroft has now handed radical Islam a propaganda coup in its war

against Israel.

Anthony Lewis: Right and Wrong: “Some of

the moral and military high ground secured by the United States is now

being given up on another front: law.”

As readers of FmH know, I love New Scientist; I have a print subscription too, although I’ve usually read everything of note online before it comes in the mail. I particularly love the droll wit of the Feedback section at the rear of each issue. There you’ll find, for example, their irregular series on nominative determinism (the doctrine that the sound of your name governs your role in life), of which they find dramatic examples. The null device just took note of this Feedback item about semiopathy:

AND continuing the theme of semiopathy –empathy with objects such as “alarmed doors”–reader Sarah Gribbin tells us that she has been studying “Biology: Brain and Behaviour” with the Open University. This has meant writing a lot of essays and taking a lot of exams, so she often finds herself sympathising with what she finds described as “nervous tissue”.

Kathy Haskard, meanwhile, tells us of the wave of sympathy that washed over her when she saw a sign on a country road in Tasmania saying: “Warning, depressed bridge ahead”. Roger Lampert, on the other hand, was perhaps suffering more from semiophobia when, at an early age, he was deeply distressed by the sight of the local “family butcher”.

Other readers’ responses to signs are more those of confusion rather than emotional involvement. Andrew Carter, for example, notes his problem arriving at a definitive interpretation of a sign near his parents’ house that states, without hindrances such as punctuation: “Dead slow children playing”.

And Tony Lovatt is surprised that his local supermarket announces unashamedly that it sells “minute steaks”–though he says that they are indeed very small.

In the countryside near where Greg Johnson lives, horse stud farms often have signs at the roadside advertising “stable manure” for sale. He is grateful for these signs, he says, because he hates to think what might happen if he were to accidentally purchase some unstable manure–which, presumably, might explode or run riot round the roses.

Meanwhile, Sandy Henderson tells us that at Dunblane, near where he lives, is a sign that reads “Hummingbird House Training Centre”. Henderson says he hadn’t realised that hummingbirds needed house training, but it was very thoughtful of someone to set up a centre to provide it.

Finally, Simon Rodgers says he came across a set of railings in Cambridge with a sign that announced: “Bicycles may be removed”. A couple of bikes were chained up to the railings. As they were clearly being offered for free, Rodgers regretted not having any bolt cutters with him–he could have saved himself a walk home.