Paul Krugman: “Celebrating victory well in advance seems to be the style lately. And that includes the economic front. Both the administration and many business leaders have taken a modest improvement in economic indicators as proof that the economy is poised for full recovery. They could be right — but don’t count on it.” NY Times

The Zen TV Experiment: “I want you to watch TV with acute awareness, mindfulness and precision. This experiment is about observing television scientifically, with Beginner’s Mind, rather than watching television passively with programmed mind. Ordinarily, if you are watching TV you can’t also observe and experience the experience of watching TV. When we watch TV we rarely pay attention to the details of the event. In fact, we rarely pay attention.” Adbusters

Dennis Mahoney: How to Write a Better Weblog : “After posting my own short list of things that ought to be banned from weblogs, I realized that a list of things to be encouraged would be more useful. ” A List Apart

Microsoft Admits XP Media Player Spies on Users: “Microsoft has confirmed that the Windows XP version of its Windows Media Player is programmed to track which CDs users listen to and which DVDs they watch. The company also has altered its privacy statement to admit that its player software tracks DVD content, which was not previously mentioned.

However, the company downplayed privacy concerns. For example, Microsoft disputed claims by snooping software watchdog Richard Smith that Windows Media Player 8, which comes bundled with Windows XP, cannot be turned off and poses a threat to privacy because of its tracking capabilities.

Privacy advocates said the media player’s capabilities fly in the face of Microsoft’s “trustworthy computing” initiative, a new dedication to security and privacy that the company announced last month.” NewsFactor

Privacy Watch: Rental agency hit for spying on speeders: “A Connecticut car rental company that used satellites to track customers and then charge them for speeding was ordered Wednesday to pay back the $10,000 total to the drivers it fined.

The Connecticut Consumer Protection Commission said that Acme Rent-a-Car’s practice of assessing customers $150 each time they crossed the speed limit violated the law.

The company tracked the customers’ driving habits through global positioning devices that many rental agencies use to locate their vehicles in case they are stolen or taken across state or national borders.” C/net

Professor touts plan to train agents on campus: “A former CIA director is encouraging a Kansas University professor to move forward with a plan the professor says will help prevent future terrorist attacks on the United States.

Felix Moos, a KU anthropology professor, is promoting a plan to create ROTC-like programs on university campuses to train future national security and intelligence officers.” Lawrence (KS) Journal-World

Star trek criteria: ‘Interstellar travellers should be “motivated, tolerant and nice”.’ Nature

Ripping yarn: How did From Hell play in Whitechapel, scene of the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders the film depicts? sp!ked

Post-radical depression: “We all know about ‘Chick Lit’ – the phenomenon of young female writers getting big advances for novels based on the singleton lives of themselves and their friends.

What’s next, it seems, is ‘Guilt-trip Lit’, where the menopausal mothers of the women’s fiction world turn their attention to the fucked-up lives of their grown-up children’s generation.” sp!ked

Myths of immunity: Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, the medical columnist for sp!ked, continues with important reflections on the sociocultural context of healthcare. I wrote last month about his concerns, which echo my own, about the meaning of unquestioning acceptance of the validity and extent of ‘chronic fatigue syndrome.’ Now he considers the metaphorical significance of widespread fears about side effects of MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccination.

The term ‘immune system’ is now so familiar that it has the aura of a medical or scientific concept that has been around since the seventeenth century. In fact, the term is scarcely 30 years old. It was first used, by the immunologist Niels Jerne, at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology in 1967 (2). As Anne Marie Moulin, a historian of immunology explains, the term was introduced as a pragmatic device to hold together two contending factions within the discipline

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Study Finds Utah Leads Nation in Antidepressant Use: “Some point to the pressures of Mormonism, especially for women, to explain the surprising findings.” LA Times

CD-rom of key Nato secrets feared sold: “The United States military’s European Command last night appealed for the return of a CD-rom said to be packed with a wealth of secret military information on the Balkans.

In a report to be published today, the German magazine Stern said the disk had turned up in a laptop computer auctioned on the internet.” Guardian UK

Lioness adopts another antelope: “A Kenyan lioness which perplexed wildlife experts last month by adopting a newborn antelope astonished them again on Valentine’s Day by taking on another.

Game wardens at Samburu National Park say the lioness spent yesterday lying down with the delicate oryx calf in the shade of an acacia tree, grooming it and warding off predators.” Guardian UK

If you hate to receive snail mail, you can arrange to redirect your mail deliveries to this new service which will scan them in and send them to you as email. Optionally, they’ll filter out your junkmail before sending.

Boarding Games: “…I decided to spend an entire day at the airport — or as long as I could bear — ambling from gate to gate and recording exactly how many people were searched, how the ethnic composition of the searchees compared to that of the flight overall. The good folks at Los Angeles International Airport have apparently observed a dangerous pro-terrorism bias in the press, for they will not let even credentialed journalists past the security checkpoints. Unless, of course, they have tickets. So I was forced to buy the cheapest one I could find and go undercover as a ticketed passenger, a guise that I figured I’d have little trouble pulling off. Who notices a white man with a laptop in an airport?” LA Weekly [via Spike Report]

Wendy Kaminer: On the Contrary… “As the Bush administration is learning… attempts by presidents to keep public information private are likely to attract press attention and lawsuits. Lesser officials keep secrets with less public scrutiny.” The American Prospect

Michael Kinsley: The absurd controversy over mammograms Slate

A reader pointed me to Snopes’ coverage of the Dr Pepper controversy about which I wrote yesterday. [thanks, Kareem] Snopes points out that the words “under God” were not part of the Pledge of Allegiance as originally written, but added by an act of Congress in 1954. I seem to recall earlier controversies about the phrase, perhaps from militant atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair? I stopped reciting the Pledge of Allegiance decades ago — not, as you might imagine, because of finishing school but in response to my opposition to the Vietnam War. [Up on stage as the valedictorian at my high school graduation ceremony, I shocked the 1200 graduating seniors’ families (and my own family…) by conspicuously remaining seated as the Pledge was recited. Part of my fifteen minutes of fame, I suppose. I also spurned Gen. William Westmoreland’s offered handshake on nationwide TV…] But if the Pledge were a part of community life these days, it’d be important to antagonize the God-fearing fundamentalist Shrub-types by conspicuously omitting the phrase. Why not write a letter to Dr Pepper telling them you know it was disingenuous of them to say they left out the offending phrase out of space considerations, when clearly they were trying to be ecumenical and avoid controversy, but that you applaud their action and that, even if the boycott doesn’t amount to anything, you’re going to drink more of their product to show your support? [Only half-serious, of course, but only half-joking… -FmH]

What can animals teach us about staying healthy? “A great deal, argues Cindy Engel. Animals, she says, are constantly self-medicating, eating anything from charcoal to leaves to ward off illness and to treat sickness. An animal behaviourist at the Open University, Engel came upon the new science of animal health while searching for a cure for her own illness. Now she has brought together all the knowledge of the field in a book. She tells Maggie McDonald a few secrets from the animal world–such as what leads sheep in the Shetlands to bite the heads off live Arctic tern chicks.” New Scientist

Bill Gates Could Save Buenos Aires: “The hoodlums running Argentina have devalued the peso and, in the bargain, seized dollars on deposit in that country. …(T)he authorities have discredited not only money but banking. In a wink they have bombed their economy back to the Stone Age. How can an economy work without a medium of exchange? For a money supply Argentineans might as well use large round boulders of the sort formerly in circulation on the island of Yap.

Nothing that government can say or do about money will have any credibility, so salvation must come from outside. It could come in the form of software. I envision Microsoft as savior of the dispossessed in Latin America.” Forbes [requires free registration or use login:fmhreader, password: fmhreader]

“A biological weapons control expert yesterday refused to back down from her claim that the FBI has a prime suspect in last autumn’s deadly anthrax letters episode, despite strenuous denials by the bureau. She speculated that FBI agents might still be building their case against the suspect and possible accomplices.” New Jersey Online

Two PAC missiles fail to hit target in US land-based missile defense test

Enlisting Ice as an Ally of Skiers and Aircraft

Victor F. Petrenko, a professor at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College, proposes using the electrical principle that makes ice so difficult to remove from sidewalks to create electronic brakes to slow skiers or snowboarders automatically before they get into trouble. The technology can also be used to improve the grip of snow tires or, when applied in reverse, cause ice to burst off windshields, road surfaces or airplane wings at the push of a button.

… “Ice is very much misunderstood,” he said. “We don’t know much about its properties.”

Ice is one of the unusual semiconductors in which electrical charges are conducted by moving protons instead of electrons. It was that property of ice that particularly intrigued Dr. Petrenko.

“I thought that if you exchange very light particles such as electrons with protons, it must have some significant consequences,” he said. “It seemed that if we could somehow change the electrical properties of ice, we should be able to change its mechanical properties — and vice versa.” NY Times

Is US creating another ObL?: ‘With the cementing of a new US-Uzbek alliance as part of the “war against terror”, America is bolstering one of the former Soviet Union’s least-known, but most repressive, dictatorships.’ Red Pepper

Patents Prove Cell-Phone Dangers? The Baltimore attorney best-known for a high-profile suit against the cellphone industry claiming phone use was the cause of her client’s brain tumor says that the industry supports her claim by having filed for “dozens” of patents to create radiation-shielding technology. “Those patents aren’t snake oil. They’re from the defendants’ mouths themselves.”

Botswana leaves Bushmen in desert without water: “…The government cut off water supplies to the remaining Bushmen communities in its latest attempt to force them off their ancestral lands. Many of the 700 Bushmen still living in the reserve at the start of this month have now been forced to leave.

The Gana* and Gwi* have lived on their lands, which include the area covered by the reserve, for 20,000 years. Under international law, they own the land. But for 16 years the Botswana government have waged a campaign of harassment to force them off their lands and into ‘resettlement camps’ where they cannot continue their way of life, and where they are dependent on government handouts. Boredom, alcoholism and despair are rife in the camps, described by one Bushman as ‘a place of death.’ ” Survival International
(*The names Gana and Gwi contain sounds not conveyed by this spelling, and can be written as G//ana and G/wi. Survival omits the symbols ‘//’ and ‘/’ as they are not understood by most people internationally.)