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