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.

Lynne Cheney’s Free Speech Blacklist: ‘Largely lost in the recent mountain of domestic and international news was the release of a report by a conservative academic group founded by Lynne Cheney, the vice-president’s wife. Quoting professors and university officials, the report calls them “the weak link in America’s response to the attack.” This accusation arises in part, according to the report, because some faculty “refused to make judgments. Many invoked tolerance and diversity as antidotes to evil.” TomPaine.com‘s Sharon Basco interviewed Hugh Gusterson, one of the professors quoted in the report.’ Phil Agre reports that, after the existence of Cheney’s broadside was publicized, it disappeared from the site at which it had originally been posted and then reappeared with the names of the more than a hundred ‘offending’ university faculty removed. Here’s a place where the original report has been mirrored and is available as a .pdf.

Are right-wing hate groups behind anthrax terror? “Nobody knows, because the Justice Department isn’t investigating violent militants on the right the way it’s monitoring Muslims, critics say.

.. Right-wing hate-group watchers say there’s been no dragnet pulling in the members of militant anti-abortion, white supremacist, Christian right or militia groups for questioning, let alone detention.

Abortion providers in particular have been calling on Attorney General John Ashcroft to condemn anti-abortion terrorists who have sent anthrax hoax letters to clinics – terror that began a few years ago, and returned in the wake of the deadly anthrax letters sent last month. But so far he has not.

Ashcroft’s opponents say the Justice Department’s reluctance to directly take on right wing groups confirms what they’ve been saying all along: that the conservative attorney general, a staunch abortion opponent and friend of the Christian right, is unable or unwilling to separate his personal beliefs from his responsibilities as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.” Salon Premium [subscription required]

Message ahead of its time

What would happen if a lone terrorist, driven by unexplained hatred, were to target a specific group of people using simple means available over the Internet and to attack them with the anthrax virus?

Scottish director Kenny Glenaan posed this question a year before the answer became all-too-clear across the world.

The director of “Gas Attack” – a suddenly prophetic film that competed in the international category of the Thessaloniki Film Festival after winning the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film at the Edinburgh Festival last August – said in an interview in Thessaloniki with Kathimerini’s English Edition, “I wanted to make a film about the things that concern us: racism, epidemics from genetically modified foods like foot-and-mouth, extremism and the inability of the authorities to deal with these crises.” eKathimerini

Harold Hongju Koh (professor of international law at Yale and former assistant

secretary of state for human rights in the Clinton administration): We Have the Right Courts for Bin Laden — ‘I hope never to see Osama bin Laden alive in the dock. As Mohammed

Atef’s recent death shows, international law entitles us to redress the killing

of thousands by direct armed attack upon Osama bin Laden and other Al

Qaeda perpetrators responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11. But if they

surrender, we should not lynch them, but rather try them, to promote

values that must stand higher than vengeance: to hold them accountable

for their crimes against humanity, to tell the world the true facts of those

crimes and to demonstrate that civilized societies can provide justice for

even the most heinous outlaws. Israel tried Adolf Eichmann. We can try

Osama bin Laden, and without revealing secret information, making him a

martyr or violating our own principles. President Bush’s order for secret

military trials undermines these values.’ NY Times

A World Not Neatly Divided — ‘To talk about “the Islamic world” or “the

Western world” is already to adopt an impoverished vision of humanity

as unalterably divided. In fact, civilizations are hard to partition in this

way, given the diversities within each society as well as the linkages

among different countries and cultures.’ NY Times

In praise of bad habits — Dr Peter Marsh:

In the Western world we live in an age that is, by all objective criteria, the safest that our species has ever experienced in its evolution and its history. We are healthier than any of our predecessors have been. We live on average considerably longer than even our immediate progenitors. Today, the infant death rate is less than 6 per 1000 live births. Just 100 years ago the figure was 150. Even in the late 1950s four times as many children died in their first year of life than they do today.

Our diet, contrary to all the ‘anti-junk food propaganda’, is not only the most nutritious but also the most free from potentially dangerous contaminants and bacteria that we have ever consumed. Despite the class divisions which remain within our society, and which reflect themselves in the health gap between the rich and the poor, we have, as Harold Macmillan once famously said, ‘never had it so good’ when it comes to a lack of objective risks to our lives and to our wellbeing.

At the same time we have, ironically, come to fear the world around us as never before. In the absence of real risks, we invent new and often quite fanciful ones. The better off in our society, who have the least to really worry about, are most prone to this novel neurosis of our age – fearing instant death from the contents of their dinner plates, unless chosen with obsessive care, and ‘unacceptable’ physical decline from failure to follow every faddist trend recommended by their personal fitness trainers. We fear that our children are constantly in danger from strangers – despite the fact that the vast majority of child abuse occurs within the family – and feel compelled to ensure their safe arrival at school by transporting them in people carriers – while at the same time decrying the depletion of fossil fuels and ‘unacceptable’ levels of environmental pollution – and we wonder why our children are getting fat.

In this constant state of irrational fretfulness we start to lose our faith in anything that looks like science – preferring to put our faith in the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’ of homeopathic and other forms of complementary medicine, while withdrawing children from rational and safe vaccination programmes aimed at preventing an epidemic of measles following irresponsible scare-mongering in our newspapers. spiked

In the house of anthrax: The Economist is worried that the US will too readily dismiss the idea that al Qaeda was behind the anthrax scare. A Pakistani NGO in Kabul with links to the Taliban is run by one of Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientists and, evidence sugggests, has been working to develop an anthrax bomb.

John Dean:
The Problems With Bush’s Executive Order Burying Presidential Records: ‘More troubling than the Order’s throwing a monkey wrench into the process of releasing Presidential papers, however, is the President’s penchant for secrecy. Secrecy provokes the question of what is being hidden and why.

If President Bush continues with his Nixon-style secrecy, I suspect voters will give him a Nixon-style vote of no confidence come 2004. While secrecy is necessary to fight a war, it is not necessary to run the country. I can assure you from firsthand experience that a President acting secretly usually does not have the best interest of Americans in mind. It is his own personal interest that is on his mind instead.’ FindLaw

Star Trek Tech Is Not So Bold: 23rd century technology according to Star Trek doesn’t hold a candle to some of the things being dreamed up in today’s labs. Wired

Soo\ciety of snitches? WSJ [viaMSNBC]
Also see: Confidentialty: Breaking Law or Principles to Give Information to U.S. NY Times

Independent Media Center: “An occasional poster to this web-site was questioned about his political affiliations by intelligence officers upon entering the United States. Materials he had posted on Indymedia were mentioned.” Indeed, he had posted pseudonymously.