“The sky was dancing”, as Hal Rager puts it at blivet. Up on a cold, silent dark hillside with a 360-degree horizon, crystal-clear night sky, largely free from light pollution, no need to be doing anything except letting my eyes dark-adapt, no point in directing my gaze to any special spot in the sky. I’m guessing I was seeing 10-15 per minute. At one moment, I was lucky enough to see one of these, exploding, just where I was looking. The meteor-viewing experience of a lifetime, I’m guessing… If you’re reading this early enough, go out tonight for one last chance.

Robert Fisk: Forget the cliches, there is no easy way for the West to sort this out

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‘Afghanistan — as the armies of the West are about to realise — is not a country. You can’t “occupy” or even “control” Afghanistan because it is neither a state nor a nation.

Nor can we dominate Afghanistan with the clichés now being honed by our journalists. We may want a “broad-based” government, but do the Afghans? We may regard cities as “strategic” — especially if reporters are about to enter them — but the Afghans have a different perspective on their land.

As for the famous loya jirga, a phrase which now slips proudly off the lips of cognoscenti, it just means “big meeting”. Even more disturbingly, it is a uniquely Pashtun phrase and thus represents the tribal rules of only 38 per cent of Afghan society.’ Independent UK

Marylaine Block: The Game of the Name:

‘One of the things that makes me despair of the Democratic party is that its leaders don’t understand why their own issues are always discussed on terms set by Republicans. They simply do not grasp the power of naming: those who name a problem define it, decide which field the game will be played on, and set the rules of play. Because Republicans have been so good at naming issues, Democrats have found themselves voting to keep the death tax, not the estate tax. Since Republicans also have an uncanny ability to get there first with a catchy name for any issue, and to get all of their members to use that name and spout the party line, they constantly force Democratic leaders to react to Republican definitions rather than to define their own issues.

Democrats haven’t grasped the fact that the name game can be played by more than one side…’ Vocabula Review

How Not To Find The Neural Correlate of Consciousness

There are two concepts of consciousness that are easy to confuse with one another, access-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. However, just as the concepts of water and H2O are different concepts of the same thing, so the two concepts of consciousness may come to the same thing in the brain. The focus of this paper is on the problems that arise when these two concepts of consciousness are conflated. I will argue that John Searle?s reasoning about the function of consciousness goes wrong because he conflates the two senses. And Francis Crick and Christof Koch fall afoul of the ambiguity in arguing that visual area V1 is not part of the neural correlate of consciousness. Crick and Koch?s work raises issues that suggest that these two concepts of consciousness may have different (though overlapping) neural correlates–despite Crick and Koch?s implicit rejection of this idea.

“People tried to donate blood, and they were turned away. Then they tried to donate supplies, but after a short while that wasn’t really needed. What they were left to do was contribute their words and their pictures.”

History Is Impatient to Embrace Sept. 11

“New York September 11 by Magnum Photographers,” an exhibition that opens on Tuesday at the New-York Historical Society, … is one of the first museum shows about the terrorist attacks that are already up or in the works. It’s also the first of at least six exhibitions on the events of Sept. 11 that the historical society plans to present in the next few years in what it calls its History Responds Project.

“We don’t want to become the World Trade Center Museum,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, director of the society. “But we do want to respond.”

They are not alone. Last month, the Museum of the City of New York and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History gathered representatives of 33 museums and other institutions for a meeting to discuss how to collect and preserve the countless artifacts and images that have documented the event. “We are all trying to grope our way through an event that is still painful,” said Robert Macdonald, director of the Museum of the City of New York.

If there is agreement about an urgent need to preserve the materials, there seems to be little about when to display them. Some people think the right time is now.

‘The Pentagon yesterday denied that it had deliberately targeted al-Jazeera, but said it could not explain why the office was hit.’ Al-Jazeera suggests US bombing of its Kabul office was deliberate:

‘(An al-Jazeera spokesperson) said he believed that al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul had been on the Pentagon’s list of targets since the beginning of the conflict but the US did not want to bomb it while the broadcaster was the only one based in Kabul.

By this week, however, the BBC had reopened its Kabul office under Taliban supervision, with the correspondents William Reeve and Rageh Omar.’ Guardian UK

Upgraded version of Alltheweb.com search engine offers near real-time searches in over 3,000 online news sources. Sure, it’s just a press release in the guise of a news story, but sounds like it may be worth a look, as searching for breaking news is not one of the Web’s strong suits:

‘Entering “Anthrax,” for example, can bring up news stories that were updated less than an hour ago from both national and local news organizations from various countries, and in a multitude of languages. The advanced search allows a user to set language preferences and also to pick what sections of the news to search.

Fast has added a new search “vertical,” allowing specific news searches. However, the most recent results from the news vertical are also displayed in a gray box on top of the general search results page.

“We want to show our customers that we can crawl fast, this is a subsecond index,” said Rob Rubin, executive vice president and general manager of Fast’s Internet division. “We are now continuously spidering and indexing over 3,000 news sources.” ‘

Here, for a start, is an Alltheweb search on “alltheweb”. I haven’t added any filtering options so it comes up with hits in many languages.

Evidence on engines puzzling in crash probe — ‘The White House and the safety board said Monday the crash appeared to be an accident, but the spread of aircraft parts – and the inability to blame the crash on an engine explosion immediately – raised some doubts about that conclusion.

”It’s a very mysterious and disturbing turn of events,” said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to maintain the investigators’ confidence.

In presenting the news to the public, the NTSB chairwoman, Marion Blakey, put on a positive face. The investigation is her first; she was sworn into office on Sept. 26.’ Boston Globe

“People tried to donate blood, and they were turned away. Then they tried to donate supplies, but after a short while that wasn’t really needed. What they were left to do was contribute their words and their pictures.”

History Is Impatient to Embrace Sept. 11

“New York September 11 by Magnum Photographers,” an exhibition that opens on Tuesday at the New-York Historical Society, … is one of the first museum shows about the terrorist attacks that are already up or in the works. It’s also the first of at least six exhibitions on the events of Sept. 11 that the historical society plans to present in the next few years in what it calls its History Responds Project.

“We don’t want to become the World Trade Center Museum,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, director of the society. “But we do want to respond.”

They are not alone. Last month, the Museum of the City of New York and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History gathered representatives of 33 museums and other institutions for a meeting to discuss how to collect and preserve the countless artifacts and images that have documented the event. “We are all trying to grope our way through an event that is still painful,” said Robert Macdonald, director of the Museum of the City of New York.

If there is agreement about an urgent need to preserve the materials, there seems to be little about when to display them. Some people think the right time is now.