On the other hand, here’s a review of Can Love Last? by Stephen Mitchell: “A philosophically inclined psychoanalyst’s daring final work explains that the ecstasy of romantic love doesn’t fade away over time — we kill it.” Salon

Are we hardwired for God? “In all cultures we find notions of gods, spirits and ancestors as supernatural agents, who are remarkably similar to humans. Where do these ideas originate? And why do they persist so strongly in the face of science? In this exclusive essay from the London Review of Books, WG Runciman examines the argument that recent advances in evolutionary psychology hold the answer to the ‘God-question’.” LRB via Guardian UK

Thomas Murray, President of the Hastings Center: Psychology should be in dialogue with bioethics. “Too often, the interactions between social scientists and philosophers were futile and frustrating exercises in mutual unintelligibility. Philosophers were trained to map the intellectual landscape, parse whatever interesting concepts they found there, and articulate and critically evaluate ethical arguments. Philosophers were, with rare exceptions, not trained to create, interpret, or critique empirical studies. Social scientists, on the other hand, understood how to frame and answer certain kinds of empirical questions – those within the purview of their field and methodologies – but they were often mystified by the forms of reasoning and argument employed by philosophers. What does a Kantian distinction between heteronomy and autonomy have to do with whether physicians should tell patients they have cancer? (In 1979, whether to tell the truth about a grave diagnosis such as cancer was still a contentious issue within medicine.)” APS Observer

Review: Mind in Everyday Life and Cognitive Scienceby Sunny Y. Auyang: “If you want to know how the human mind works, the one thing you shouldn’t do is ask a cognitive scientist. So says science writer and Ph.D. physicist Sunny Auyang, whose latest polemic suggests that the psychologists, computer scientists, linguists, philosophers and neuroscientists whose mission is to investigate our mental functioning are less purveyors of scientific truth than nutty zealots with a pathetically overdeveloped sense of their own importance.” American Scientist

1,300 People May Sue NYC Over Handling of WTC Aftermath. ‘From rescue workers who say they have lung problems to business owners who say their shops were damaged, 1,300 people have given notice they may sue the city for a total of $7.18 billion over the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack. The claims involve injuries or damage caused not by the attack itself but by the alleged negligence of the city during the recovery and cleanup.’ Yahoo! News

Thanks to Jim Higgins for suggesting this. Weblogger William Fields is also a wonderful composer. Here’s a page of Fields’ Music at his website, with links to downloads.

As an unabashed anglophile, I’m indebted to plep for pointing to this index of British Myths & Legends.

Tuning in to multimedia reporting:

For the past year, NPR has been asking its radio reporters to lug digital cameras and video cameras an assignments as a way of enhancing its Web site. Reporters are not required to add cameras to their usual bag of sound recorders, but the station’s push for a greater Web presence has made incorporating multimedia into its reports inevitable.

“These people are certainly not professional photographers, but they capture what reporters are seeing on the ground,” said Maria Thomas, vice president of NPR Online. CNN

Dear Members of the American Conservative Union Foundation:

I am highly concerned about an escalation among people to advance their political causes through violence. What has been remote for most of my lifetime–groups with particular interests expressing their positions with car-bombs and automatic weapons–is no longer just something I see on the news. I’ve seen terrorism out my window. It is out of this concern that I appeal to you to issue a public statement denouncing the call to violence implicit in the comments of Ann Coulter at the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 2, 2002.

Ann Coulter said, “When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors.”

It promotes neither unity nor security to stand behind a statement that people who share a particular ideology within our society ought to be murdered. It does not serve national unity to assert that John Walker is a liberal when he is not. It does it serve national security to assert that liberals have any particular likelihood to evolve into traitors.

The purpose of the CPAC, to “advance important everyday issues such as taxes, crime, culture and foreign policy and to provide basic conservative viewpoints and solutions” is ill-served when the overwhelming message the CPAC brings to the greater community is a call to exterminate fellow citizens. I think that the community at large wants to know that conservatives don’t truly intend to work toward a future where opposing viewpoints are punishable by death.

I am concerned about the impact of Ann Coulter’s statement on the people of our nation, wherever they stand on the political spectrum, as they read about the recent conference in the press. As the developer of the nations premiere conservative conference, the CPAC, it is up to you to whether you want to send a message to America that a new mission of conservatism is to promote the murder of “college liberals” by letting Ms. Coulter’s statement represent the tone of the CPAC, or to send a message to America that the American Conservative Union does not advocate the physical intimidation of law-abiding citizens because of their political beliefs. As much of the public is concerned, I appeal to you to make a public statement denouncing Ms. Coulter’s inflammatory remarks.

Thank You…

Schools Translate Terror Into Curriculum Changes: ‘The Sept. 11 terror attacks and their aftermath are taking a front-and-center seat in the nation’s classrooms, sparking a surge of student interest in topics from Arabic to crisis management and prompting educators in fields as disparate as Islamic studies and microbiology to revamp their courses.’ Washington Post

Pakistan Hopes Suspect’s Family Will Lead to Pearl. “Getting closer every day.” Sounds ominously like whistling in the dark to me… NY Times

“I don’t know where he’s coming from, except he’s the director and he’s in denial. It was absurd. Nobody in the building believed it, not even the people who were cleaning up the room.” — Sen. Richard Shelby (R.-Ala.)

Wolf Blitzer: CIA Intelligence Failures? ‘When Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet appeared this week before the Senate Intelligence Committee — his only public question-and-answer session since September 11– he firmly denied that there was any U.S. intelligence failure leading up to the terrorist attacks. “Where did the secret for the planning reside?” he asked the senators. “Probably in the head of three or four people, and at the end of the day, all you can do is continue to make the effort to steal that secret and break into this leadership structure. And we have to keep working at it. There will be nothing you do that will guarantee 100 percent certainty here. It will never happen.” ‘ CNN

Safety board says pilots can cause tail fin to break off

‘Many airline pilots are unaware that their maneuvering can cause part of an airplane’s tail fin to break off, the National Transportation Safety Board announced Friday during a progress report on the crash of American Airlines Flight 587.

“We’ve calculated that certain rudder inputs by pilots made during certain stages of a flight can cause catastrophic failure of an airline’s vertical stabilizer,” said NTSB chairwoman Marion Blakey.’ CNN

Reports of Priests’ Abuse Enrage Boston Catholics. ‘As the number of implicated clergy members soared to 80, the crisis grew so deep that nearly half the Roman Catholics polled said Cardinal Bernard Law should resign. The turmoil over what church officials knew, when they knew it and what they did or did not do to protect themselves and their parishioners has rocked a region that is more than 50% Catholic.’ LA Times Certainly, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s phrase, we seem to have reached a tipping point in public sentiment, although this emerging evidence of a longstanding Catholic Church coverup should have surprised no one…

No matter what your position on capital punishment, think for a moment about the barbarity of sending to her/his execution someone without sufficient mental capacity to grasp the fact of her/his imminent demise. Now, some glad tidings in this regard: Va. Moves To Limit Executions — ‘The Virginia Senate voted unanimously today to bar the execution of mentally retarded people convicted of capital crimes, a highly unusual step for a state legislature that since the 1970s has consistently expanded the reach of the death penalty.

By shielding a mentally retarded person, Virginia would join 18 states, including Maryland, that bar such executions.’ Washington Post

Creating a Stir Wherever She Goes

“What does `Moving Devi’ mean?” (the organizer) asked.

“The answer,” she said, “is a change in the relation of the subject who is writing from a place where Devi belongs as she slowly moves into the text of the museum. What I’m looking at here is that itinerary, not the nostalgic identatrianism of the metropolitan migrant.”

As she spoke, Ms. Spivak summoned a dazzling array of references: Marx, Hegel, Freud, Lacan, Rilke, Aristotle, and Hindu and Sufi mysticism. “The Sufi is not invaginated in the polytheistic universe,” she said, “but the supernatural is invaginated in the natural.” NY Times

Two pieces of cannabis-related news from the New York Times: Oregon Doctor Stands Out in Marijuana Prescriptions. One Portland MD has granted 50% of the authorizations under Oregon’s recently-passed medical-marijuana law. Regulators who cannot quibble with the law, the will of Oregon voters, are turning to the standards of care the doctor uses to diagnose and treat his patients. He has previously been disciplined for inappropriate prescribing of pain medications.

And: the DEA has extended its deadline for banning hemp in food, about which I wrote when the regulation was first proposed as one of those examples of narrow-minded misguided witchhunt mentality I’m so fond of railing against…

Philippine Arrest Offers Clues to Web Of Asian Terrorists. As attention in the America-Strikes-Back® Show shifts to the role of Islamic insurgencies in Southeast Asia, I wonder whether the US notion about a global conspiracy of terrorists, reflected in stories like this from the Washington Post, is largely a self-serving fantasy-land misreading of local movements. In an earlier iteration of the same pathology of American thought, it is clear in retrospect that there really was never a global conspiracy of Communism to dominate the world; rather Marxist ideology and alignment with foes of the West was a convenient and inspiring peg on which local self-determination movements hung their hat. Makes me wonder whether shaping bin Laden and al Qaeda’s image into that of global masterminds of terrorism is actually going to drive local insurgents to forge new links to their heroic figurehead, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. I haven’t seen much to indicate the contrary, that other ‘terrorist’ groups are running scared, chastened by the ferocity of US resolve.

A related point by Michael Kinsley: ‘The more things you call terrorism, the fewer you are likely to wipe out.’ Slate And The Progressive‘s editor Matthew Rothschild comments:

‘There was something almost pathetic about George W. Bush’s attempt to make his fight against terrorism akin to the fight against the Nazis.

In his State of the Union address, he evoked the comparison when he said that North Korea, Iran, Iraq, “and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil.” ‘

And, from Toronto Star

columnist Thomas Walkom [via wood s lot]:

The war against terrorism is a brilliant construct. It may not have been started by George W. Bush, but it certainly works to his advantage.

It has provided oomph to the sagging U.S. economy and a new raison d’être for the alliance of politicos, defence contractors and security specialists who make up what former U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower christened the military-industrial complex.

What makes this war so superior, in political terms, is its vagueness. Since the terrorist, by definition, can be anyone — the man in the next apartment, the person lurking on the subway platform — we can never be sure who the enemy is.

Also noticed by wood s lot, from Stephanie Salter in the SF Chronicle [via CommonDreams]:

Bush: All War All the Time —

“…(W)hen it comes to marketing a mediocre product, my hat is off to the GOP.

Nobody does it better.

In George W. Bush, Republicans have transcended the Emperor’s New Clothes Hall of Fame. And, now, thanks to the murderous, Sept. 11 deeds of a newly christened “evil axis,” Republicans hardly need to work to ensure long-lasting, widespread brand loyalty for their boy.

In fact, as Bush so enthusiastically demonstrated in his State of the Union message last week, the only thing his administration must do is keep America afraid and “at war.”

[All right, enough already, Eliot, they get the picture…]

Two pieces of interesting war news in the Washington Post

today: Taliban Foreign Minister Gives Up. “The foreign minister of the Taliban, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, surrendered to Afghan government officials yesterday and was turned over to U.S. forces, U.S. officials said last night. He is believed to be the highest-ranking member of the Taliban to have beentaken into custody.”

And “I’m not angry at the Americans. It’s not their fault, it was Mullah Mohammad Omar and his friends’ fault. They’re the ones to blame.”

While Washington debates its culpability for civilian casualties in the U.S. war on terrorism and Omar’s radical Taliban movement, ‘Kabul has proven remarkably forgiving of military attacks that have mistakenly killed innocent people. Afghan political leaders eager to cement good relations with the West for the difficult days of reconstruction ahead have brushed off the issue as largely insignificant. And even many of the ordinary Afghans who have suffered most as a result of what the Pentagon calls “collateral damage” express little bitterness toward the foreigners who visited it upon them.’ While the reporter acknowledges that the sentiment may not reflect feeling in other parts of the country, there is no broad sense of outrage in the capital. Could it be, however, that he has access largely to those who have a vested interest in US reconstruction aid? He admits that the issue of ‘collateral damage’ is discussed, with some irritation, only when brought up by journalists.

Fury at president’s ‘axis of evil’ speech: Patten lays into Bush’s America: ‘Chris Patten, the EU commissioner in charge of Europe’s international relations, has launched a scathing attack on American foreign policy – accusing the Bush administration of a dangerously “absolutist and simplistic” stance towards the rest of the world.

As EU officials warned of a rift opening up between Europe and the US wider than at any time for half a century, Mr Patten tells the Guardian it is time European governments spoke up and stopped Washington before it goes into “unilateralist overdrive”.’ Uhhh, George? Anybody home? There’s probably no more valuable, trustworthy feedback you should be listening to than the growing sense of everyone in Europe (except your obsequious toady Blair) that you haven’t a clue on how to manage a real alliance if your life depended on it…

A pox on scientific debate:

“(The BBC drama-documentary) Smallpox 2002 teaches us little but panics us a lot. When US postal officials issue anthrax warnings to Americans, saying ‘Look at your neighbour and see if he fits the profile’, while the US State Department warns everybody to be on the lookout for suspicious types, we seem to have moved from The X-Files‘ message ‘Trust no one’ to ‘Fear everybody’. The G7 conference of health ministers might be better informed if they watched reruns of the X-Files.” sp!ked

William Saletan: Adopting Premises – The sneaky debate over legalizing adoptions by gay couples.

‘Several million American children reportedly live in homes with at least one gay parent. In most cases, the same-sex domestic partner of that parent has no legal parental rights or responsibilities. This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared that these “co-parents” should be allowed to undertake such rights and responsibilities by adopting their partners’ children. The announcement has provoked outcries from conservatives, with each side claiming to represent science against politics. In truth, each side’s “science” is loaded with politics. Here’s how they fudge the data.’ Slate

In Shift, Bush Says Geneva Rules Fit Taliban Captives but Not Qaeda Members: ‘President Bush decided today that the Geneva Convention would be applied to the Taliban captives being held in Cuba but not to Al Qaeda detainees, a decision that will make little difference in the day-to-day treatment of either but may help protect American soldiers captured in foreign conflicts.

The Bush administration had already decided not to grant prisoner- of-war status to any of the captives, and that decision holds.’ NY Times The grandiose hubris of the Shrub’s claiming the right to decide whenever it’s useful to be above the rule of law is a large part of what fuels resentment of us both among our European ‘allies’ and throughout the developing world. And is there no contradiction between our propagandistic insistence that this is a ‘war’ against terrorism and our transparently self-serving refusal to label our captured opponents prisoners of war?

At least there’s this:

“The decision marks the second victory this week for Secretary Powell, who has at times battled some of his more hard-line cabinet colleagues over foreign policy issues. Earlier this week, he announced that the administration would meet Russia’s demand for a legally binding agreement regarding the reduction of nuclear weapons. Some White House officials had not wanted to tie Washington’s hands with a written arms control agreement.”

I still, however, haven’t decided whether I should consider it pitiful that Colin Powell is the voice of moderation and diplomacy in a sitting administration…

On a related note: Legalizing War Against Iraq — Robert Wright: “One fact you probably won’t hear President Bush mention is that Iraq is in violation of international law. After all, that would require him to utter the phrase ‘international law’. ” Slate

100 Years, 100 Stinkers: The Worst Films of the 20th Century. In all candor, I’ve seen nine on this list, of which I enjoyed, oh probably, three…

“Call me crazy, but it seems like everyone I know is manic-depressive.” Friends in High Places: This writer from the San Jose MetroActive intersperses colorful anecdotes about bipolar (manic depressive) friends and acquaintances with reportage about why the illness is becoming more visible — the lessening stigma to major mental illness, the increasingly accurate recognition and diagnosis of the disease, and the increasingly effective treatments for it that allow normalization of the life of its sufferers (which probably contributes to reason #1) — even though it is probably not becoming more prevalent.

I think that, while this may be true, it is not necessarily the case that the increasing number of people among us who are ‘out of the closet’ with their manic-depressive diagnosis really warrant that diagnosis. One of the deplorable cultural trends shaping my environment as a psychiatrist has been the way in which the increasing medicalization of distress over the time I’ve been in the field has increasingly allowed people to adopt the bipolar diagnosis to explain (to others) and explain away (to themselves) other less palatable categories of labile mood and unstable behavior, especially borderline personality disorders (which, arguably, have become more prevalent in society from decade to decade). Increasing recognition of bipolar disorder dates from around 1970, when the first medication with proven and dramatic stabilizing impact on manic depressive disorder, lithium, entered the pharmacopoeia — because, arguably, one of the important reasons for diagnosis is to recognize something that you can do something about . Other comparably or perhaps even more effective medicines for bipolar mood swings have followed in the intervening decades, making this recognition even more important, but perhaps the diagnosis more circular (how do you know if it’s truly a case of bipolar disease? if the medications that treat bipolar disease are effective against the case. What makes you think these are bipolar medications? They work on bipolars, of course!) But, in point of fact, mood stabilizing medications are non-specifically stabilizing to any cause of fluctuating or labile mood! Too much diagnosis is done by the ‘walks-like-a-duck, quacks-like-a-duck” doctrine, which for the sake of empirical utility throws out almost all subtle depth-derived insight into the human process of a psychiatrically ill patient. Approaching a personality disorder as if it were an unstable mood disorder has profound and misguided consequences unless you believe that all there is to treatment is throwing medications at someone’s life out of balance.

While I’m an adult and not a child psychiatrist, I can’t help being similarly concerned about the last decade’s ‘recognition’ of a hidden epidemic of childhood bipolar disorder (spearheaded by a group of psychiatrists, some of them friends of mine, at the Mass. General Hospital, with lots of pharmaceutical industry grant funding…). Lo and behold, the proponents of this message go through theoretical contortions — not very convincingly, IMHO — to explain that we never recognized childhood bipolar states before because, counterintuitively, they look nothing like manic depression in adults. Predictably, they resemble conduct disorders and oppositional-defiant disorder, childhood analogues and precursors of personality disorders which may not be neurobiological in nature at all. Calling these behavioral disturbances bipolar takes them out of the realm where treatment and training to enhance personal accountability and self-control are conceived as useful. This ‘recognition’ of childhood bipolar disorder is one of the reasons for the explosive growth in prescribing of psychoactive medications to children. The other source of this, of course, is the ‘recognition’ of the epidemic proportion of childhood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is now so prevalent in our school-age children that we could almost by current diagnostic practice label the modal behavior of the majority of kids in that age range with a disease! And, of course, being the good cultural materialist that I am, I can’t help pointing out the economic advantages to the two big classes of ‘winners’ that sustain this ‘medicalization of distress’. The pharmaceutical lobby, of course, wins big with the societal adoption of the meme that our emotional and behavioral distress can and should be medicated away. And members of the beleaguered psychiatric profession, struggling to hold onto market share in a managed care environment in which cheaper allied health professions increasingly displace them in conducting psychosocial interventions, do so by insisting they are the only ones who can take care of behavioral or emotional disturbances which are inherently medical or neurobiological in nature. ‘I prescribe, therefore I am’ …

Read your EULA! Some new shrink-wrap license terms seem tailor-made for UCITA. Ed Foster gripes in InfoWorld about the clauses you may be agreeing to when you open a software product’s shrink-wrap — prohibitions on your writing critical reviews or publicizing adverse benchmarking data on the product; arbitrary termination of your contract at the publisher’s whim; the manufacturer’s right to monitor your computing remotely.

Oral sex makes pregnancies safer and more successful – study: “New research suggests oral sex may not only help a woman conceive but may make her pregnancy safer and more successful.

The Australian study found that semen contains a growth factor which helps persuade a mother’s immune system to accept sperm.

It claims to have found evidence that regular exposure before pregnancy, especially by mouth, helps her immune system get used to her partner’s sperm.” Ananova

Babies learn in their sleep — ‘By the time babies are a year old they can recognise a lot of sounds and even simple words. Marie Cheour at the University of Turku in Finland suspected they might progress this fast because they learn language while they sleep as well as when they are awake.’ New Scientist

The Common Thread by John Sulston and Genrgina Ferry:

In 1998, an ambitious American geneticist called Craig Venter announced that his company, Celera Genomics, would get the sequence first, and make it private property. This is the story of how a coalition of scientists fought to ensure that no one could claim to own this information, from the viewpoint of a key combatant: Cambridge scientist John Sulston. The book aims to explain, blow by blow, how the forces of good narrowly won the first battle. It also purports to tell the story of one’s scientist’s life. Independent UK

P2P Faceoff — CNET’s Eliot Van Buskirk: “Six months ago, not long after Napster shuttered its service, I pitted the top eight file-sharing competitors against each other to find out which one found the largest number of MP3s. At the time, Gnotella snared the music-swapping crown. But a lot has changed since July; most of these apps have been updated, and the shifting popularity of the programs means that some of them now work better than others. That’s why I decided to run my survey again. My test methods might not be terribly scientific (after all, everyone has their favorite method of finding and downloading MP3s), but they do give a snapshot of how these various networks are performing.”

Annals of the Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Developed World Sees Rise in Youth Suicide, Murder — ‘Since the mid-1950s, an analysis of data from 26 industrialized nations reveals, the rate of death among adolescents and young adults has decreased by almost 50%. But death rates in this group from motor vehicle accidents, homicide and suicide combined have risen by 17%, according to the analysis.

And among 15- to 34-year-olds in the sampled countries, the US had the second highest rate of death from homicide, and the third highest rate of death due to motor vehicle accidents, the researchers found.’ Reuters Health via Yahoo!

Digging Deep Into Compression. Because file compressibility is intimately related to degree of repetitiousness in data (which differs from language to language and even author to author within languages) researchers have shown that measurement of compressibility with common utilities such as WinZip or StuffIt can “discern the language of mystery texts as short as 20 characters. Furthermore, using a database of 90 texts from 11 different authors, they found their method could even pick out individual authors with a success rate of 93 percent.

Search engines, they say, could use this simple technique to categorize their quarry by semantic content and more qualitative categories such as style and readership level.” Wired

Further analysis of Palm OS 5.0; only around 80% of existing applications will be compatible. The Register

Choosing the Right Enemies: Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, describes the damage to our security which will be done by Dubya’s undiscerning aggregation of “countries like Iran, Iraq and North Korea with their terrorist associates”, particularly with respect to Kim Jong Il. NY Times op-ed Bush’s speech shuts door on tenuous opening to Iran Washington Post; and a commentator finds that Bush’s omission of Syria from the list leaves a bad taste. Ha’Aretz Meanwhile, Angered by snubbing, Libya, China, Syria form Axis of Just as Evil,

Cuba, Sudan, Serbia Form Axis of Somewhat Evil; Other Nations Start Own Clubs. SatireWire

Henry Kloss, 72, Innovator in Audio and Video, Dies. Over the years, my listening pleasure has been channelled through a number of Henry Kloss’ innovations including AR-1, Advemt and KLH speakers, Model 8 and Model One table radios, and of course Dolby B. I’ll continue to think of him… NY Times

A Curator Defends His Show Exploring Nazi Imagery

More than a month before the March 17 opening of his new exhibition, “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art,” and long before anyone has even seen any of the pieces in the show, the ink is flowing: The Wall Street Journal, The Daily News, Newsweek and The New York Times have all mentioned the exhibition in conjunction with “Sensation,” the Brooklyn Museum of Art show that former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani tried to shut down in 1999.

Mr. Kleeblatt has an odd take on this. The problem, he said, is that at this point “the works are shown only in reproduction” in the catalog. And that is the worst way to see installation art and sculpture, which many of this exhibition’s works are, he noted. These pieces are big and confrontational. They are meant to engage the viewer, to raise questions. They are incomplete without the viewer in the gallery. NY Times

Bye, Bye Love: How Men, Women Dish Out Rejection — ‘It can cut like a knife, or make your brown eyes blue. It’s romantic rejection, and a new study finds big differences in how men and women give would-be partners the brush-off.

When it came to the reasons cited most often for turning someone down, “men and women were different on every one of them,” according to researcher Dr. William F. Chaplin of the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa.

He and co-researcher Susan Reneau presented their findings here Saturday at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.’ Reuters Health via Yahoo!

[Yeah, but the study was done in Alabama! – FmH]

Thinking robots go to war in fight for survival:

‘With a hiss and a clank, one of the world’s first predatory robots seized its metal prey yesterday, plunged a claw into its electronic heart and then whirred off to a computerised mate to “breed”.

“It’s pure survival of the fittest,” said Noel Sharkey, happily preparing another victim for the arena in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, where the frontiers of artificial intelligence yesterday took a dramatic leap forward.

Designed to mature robotic “thinking”, to allow machines to adapt and survive in extreme conditions without human help, the tests mimic a child’s development with eerie accuracy.

Predators and prey do battle – from next month in front of human audiences at the £42m Magna science centre – for limited supplies of electric power, storing the lessons of victory and defeat in their micro-computers.’ Guardian UK

[The Comedy Channel is probably beating down their door for a t.v. contract… -FmH]

Bush Eyeballs Heavy Tech Spending — Declan McCullagh:

President Bush is asking Congress to grant federal police hundreds of millions of dollars for surveillance, information-sharing and computer upgrades.

In his proposed 2003 budget sent to Capitol Hill on Monday, Bush proposed an unprecedented increase on spending for anti-terrorism efforts, saying that doing so “recognizes the new realities confronting our nation, and funds the war against terrorism and the defense of our homeland.”

Because the complex document is merely a proposal, Congress will spend much of this year wrangling over what form the final budget will take for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2002. Wired

Who You Calling Mediasaurus? – The New York Times dodges Michael Crichton’s death sentence. Jack Schafer:

‘ “To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years,” novelist-filmmaker Michael Crichton wrote in a widely quoted Wired magazine piece, “Mediasaurus,” which he adapted from an April 1993 speech before the National Press Club. “Vanished, without a trace.”

…Replacing the established media within a decade, Crichton predicted, would be an Infotopia in which “artificial intelligence agents” would roam “the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page, or a nightly news show, that addresses my interests.”

…Where did Crichton go wrong? (Where did I go wrong?) Fables of the near future have a way of never materializing, whether they be fevered dreams of nuclear energy too cheap to meter or fossil fuels too expensive to burn. To be fair, Crichton wasn’t the only one to get puking drunk on the new media moonshine. Many of us spent a lost weekend—sometimes months—in a stupor after reading early issues of Wired. But instead of blotting out conventional media, the emerging Infotopia seems only to have made the conventional media more ubiquitous.’ Slate

The Few, the Proud, the Marins – A top conservative is wrong about John Walker. Scott Shuger:

It is, to say the least, hard to believe that a young American could have ended up in the Taliban. But saying the least is not the conservative’s discourse of choice. And so it was that soon after John Walker’s dirty, bearded face was beamed worldwide, conservative commentator Shelby Steele appeared on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page with a 1,100-word unified Walker theory, which boiled down to this: The 20-year-old Walker could do what he did only because his formative years were spent in hot-tubbing, wine-loving, liberal Marin County, California. Steele explained that in Marin “there are no external yes’s and no’s, or rights and wrongs … just the fashionable relativism (Islam is as good as the family Catholicism) that makes places like Marin so cool,” and that there, “a little anti-Americanism becomes a sophistication, a mark of authenticity.”

A few days later, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, detecting a rash generalization, begged to differ. “I am willing to wager,” Cohen wrote, “that most of the kids born in 1981 (or any year, for that matter) are still in America. In fact, there may be more of them with the U.S. armed forces than with the Taliban. I am way out on a limb on that one, I know.” Slate

High-Risk Sex Among Men Linked to Childhood Abuse

Men who were sexually abused as children are more likely to engage in unsafe sexual practices as adults, putting them at higher risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, a new study has found.

“We often think of childhood sexual abuse as a problem for women and ignore or discount the impact of such abuse for men…(so) I think that the findings highlight the importance of childhood sexual abuse among men,” lead author Dr. Colleen Dilorio of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, told Reuters Health. Men who were sexually abused as children are more likely to engage in unsafe sexual practices as adults, putting them at higher risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, a new study has found.

“We often think of childhood sexual abuse as a problem for women and ignore or discount the impact of such abuse for men…(so) I think that the findings highlight the importance of childhood sexual abuse among men,” lead author Dr. Colleen Dilorio of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, told Reuters Health. Yahoo!

Faults Suggest a High Calling for Delphi Priestesses: “…evidence is growing that the priestesses, known as pythia, were ripped on hydrocarbon gases, especially ethylene, a sometime anesthetic which, taken in modest doses, can induce lively conversation of a somewhat incoherent nature.” Washington Post

Sesame Street Getting Huge Makeover: “Rest assured, Elmo is keeping his red fur. And his goldfish. The street won’t be different, but the way it’s presented to young viewers will be.” Yahoo!

“Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) studies the relationships between mental states and the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems. Among the issues it focuses upon are how mental states, in general, and belief states, in particular, affect physical health. The book examines a series of PNI topics that relate to religious faith and behavior. The contributors argue that religious involvement and belief can affect certain neuroendocrine and immune mechanisms, and that these mechanisms, in turn, positively affect a wide variety of health outcomes, such as susceptibility to cancer and recovery following surgery. This book is the first to present medical research establishing a connection between religion and health and to examine the implications for Eastern and Western religious traditions and for society and culture.” Oxford Uiversity Press

Geov Parrish: Bush’s Sickening Super Bowl Propaganda: “During America’s most jingoistic sporting event, Bush spent $3.2 million to convince us that drug use equals terrorism. It would be laughable nonsense if it wasn’t so horribly misleading.” AlterNet

Bush’s Death Squads: “It now seems likely, given the unprecedented ‘license to kill’ President Bush granted to the CIA (after 9-11), there was U.S. complicity in the murders of the following individuals. Human rights commissions and war crime tribunals in Belgium and France should take a close look at these likely criminal misadventures…” Analysis by Wayne Madsen, formerly with the NSA. Cryptome

“President Bush has been keeping a “war on terrorism scorecard” in his desk drawer and using it to cross off photographs of al-Qa’eda and Taliban leaders as they have been killed or captured.

“Early on, I said, ‘I’m a baseball fan. I want a scorecard’,” Mr Bush explained in an interview with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.’ Telegraph UK

apparently while he was in office, and perhaps planned further attempts on world leaders, United Press International has learned.

Specific references to Clinton were found among handwritten notes and sketches of U.S. Secret Service protective methods recovered from the Shomali compound near Kabul where al Qaida members received specialized training in assassination and hostage taking.” UPI

Peter Spiro, a former State Department lawyer and NSC staff member, now a professor at Hofstra Law School: Deploying A Law Enforcement Model In The Fight Against Terrorism

President Bush claimed in his State of the Union address earlier this week that “our war against terror is only beginning.” In fact, this war is over — except, perhaps, in a metaphorical sense.

Military operations are winding down in Afghanistan, and normalcy is returning on the domestic front. Leaving aside the horrific civilian casualties on September 11 itself, this conflict closely parallels our experience with such other recent deployments abroad as the Kosovo campaign. It was quick and neat, with few American casualties. The conflict demanded no direct sacrifice at home; far from the economic deprivations and military service requirements of real wars, in this one civilians were asked only to deploy their purchasing power.

Now that the engagement in Afghanistan is over, its aftermath is better addressed through a law enforcement model than under the model President Bush has suggested, of a continuing war that operates for an indefinite period of time, and is not ended even by the cessation of hostilities. The events of September 11 have demonstrated the obsolescence of old models of conflict premised on hostilities among states, from both a domestic and international perspective. Under domestic law, that means rejecting extraordinary procedures, such as the proposed military tribunals, and pursuing terrorists as we pursue criminals, within normal constitutional constraints.

FindLaw

I agree entirely; I have been a proponent of a law enforcement model for responding to 9-11 ever since and, like Spiro, I cannot refer to the “war” on terrorism without putting “war” in quotes.

Banished Words List: Lake Superior State University

Every New Year’s Day since 1976 the University has issued an annual “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use or General Uselessness” compiled from nominations sent from all over the world, covering all manner of word or phraseology which some consider to be worthy of exile.

“For more than a quarter-century our list has rooted out grammatical subterfuge at the source,” says a spokesman for the word-sifters. “Doublespeak and sloppy talk continue to flourish. Now is not the time to drop our guard.”

Much Riding on Palm’s New OS. In conjunction with the OS change, Palm is going from a 33 MHz Motorolla Dragonball processor to a Texas Instruments ARM chip that will reportedly clock better than 200 MHz. “While the Palm OS 5 operating system — which analysts and applications developers expect to ship in early 2003 — is faster and can handle more robust multimedia applications than the current OS, it doesn’t take advantage of the multimedia capabilities of the Be operating system that Palm purchased last September.” Wired

Motivational Effects of Cannabinoids Are Mediated by µ-Opioid and [kappa ]-Opioid Receptors. This study by a Spanish-French research team using a ‘knockout’ mouse model (in which mice are genetically engineered to lack a class of neuroreceptors) produced the surprising finding that the modulation of reward pathways produced by THC is mediated by opiate receptors. J. Neurosci. — Abstracts: 22 (3): 1146

Philips Burning on Protection: ‘Electronics manufacturer Philips has been fanning the flames in the fight over copy-protected music CDs, threatening to undermine the record industry’s attempts to tinker with disc formats in order to thwart music pirates.

Could Philips take on the major labels and win? Yes, it could — but the company may only be hastening the death of the 20-year-old compact disc format.’ Wired

Confusing the Facts of the GAO-Cheney Dispute — ‘An analysis of the rhetoric from presidential spokesperson Ari Fleischer and Vice President Cheney reveals a disturbing pattern of dissembling that has caused much of the confusion. The two have consistently exaggerated the GAO’s request to make it appear unreasonable and to paint the administration as a victim.’ Spinsanity

Bob Herbert: Sneak Attack — “Bush administration officials presented a plan as an altruistic attempt to bring more health care benefits to low-income pregnant women. It was actually a guerrilla attack on abortion rights.” NY Times op-ed

GAO to Cheney: ‘You’re Lying”. General Accounting Office chief David Walker is refraining from filing suit yet (to force Cheney to divulge what outsiders he consulted for his energy taks force)

to give the White House time to reconsider some of its statements about the case.

So far, there’s no evidence the White House is interested in doing so. And while Walker says he wants to reach an agreement, he is also ratcheting up the rhetoric in the already-tense case. In an interview with National Review Online, Walker in essence accused Cheney of lying about the GAO’s demands. “There have been material misrepresentations of facts coming out of the White House in recent weeks,” he says. In particular, Walker points to a statement Cheney made in a television interview last Sunday. “They’ve demanded of me that I give Henry Waxman a listing of everybody I meet with,” Cheney told Fox News, “of everything that was discussed, any advice that was received, notes and minutes of those meetings.”

“That was a very critical and highly material misrepresentation,” Walker says. “If we were asking for that, I’d understand where they are coming from. But we are not.” National Review Online

Factional fighting erupts in Afghanistan, 40 killed — “The clashes are seen as a setback for the government of interim leader Hamid Karzai as he attempts to bring peace to the country following more than two decades of war.” Express India [via Red Rock Eaters]

Nomic

is a game, and it is a lot of FUN! Unlike most games, the rules of nomic are not written in stone. In fact, the object of the game is to make changes to the rules of the game. Players start off following some “initial rule-set”, which dictates how the rules can be changed. Once a rule change has been made, players then follow this new rule set. Most importantly, the rules about how rule changes are made can themselves be changed!

This is where it tends to get mystical, because as a result of these rule changes, the game you are playing will change from moment to moment. The nature of the rule changing mechanism might change from democratic to capitalist, to totalitarian, to whatever. Or the ability to change the rules might be removed entirely – perhaps the game will turn into chess, or tag, or snap. The future of the game is entirely in the hands of the players.

You can find an initial rule set here.

New Hope That Kidnapped Journalist Is Alive: “A new communiqué that offered hope that Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was apparently kidnapped 10 days ago, might still be alive was e-mailed to several Western and Pakistani news organizations today.

The message asserted that at least some previous messages claiming responsibility for Mr. Pearl’s disappearance had been sent as a prank.” NY Times

Kids, Snapping To Attention A review of “Secret Games” by Wendy Ewald, at the Corcoran in Washington:

More about life than art, this retrospective surveys the career of a pioneering documentary photographer who gave cameras to small groups of disadvantaged children in the United States and developing nations to learn what they were thinking and to encourage them to express themselves. She taught them to look at their own lives, their families, their communities, and to write about and photograph them. She also encouraged them to tap into their dreams and fantasies, and in dirt-poor places like Appalachia and Chiapas, Mexico, she struck creative gold.

Washington Post

Privacy of MP3 fans at risk

A new security hole has been discovered in one of the world’s most popular file-swapping programs which could allow anyone to gain private information about its millions of users.

Security experts have found a way to gain access to the computer hard drives of users of Morpheus, which has taken over from Napster as the leading internet song-swapping service.

It means that the personal details of up to two million people could be exposed to prying eyes. BBC

In related news, Clean Limewire — all the flavors without all the spyware, with a link to a download site. Infoshop News

The Trouble With Self-Esteem. Another of psychotherapist Lauren Slater’s provocative New York Times Magazine pieces. She argues that the central assumption that impaired self-esteem is related to social ills like crime bears reexamining. For example, the assumption that people with antisocial tendencies (“sociopaths”) have a hidden, unconscious sense of defectiveness and shame, which has been a tenet of the psychoanalytic formulation of sociopathy, has not been borne out in close research and clinical examination of antisocial individuals. Perhaps that’s the basis for the longstanding recognition that psychotherapeutic treatment of sociopaths is virtually never successful?

Slater hints at a broader theme — that impaired self-esteem may in fact be in general healthier and more ‘normal’, that inflation of self-esteem may in fact be a root of behavioral and emotional problems. Readers will recall I’ve written before on the notion that depression may be a more realistic way of seeing things, closely akin to this notion. It is not a novel idea; the inventor of modern psychology a century ago knew it too. Witness Freud’s oft-quoted pronouncement that the aim of psychoanalysis was not to turn unhappy people into happy ones, but rather to turn neurotic unhappiness into plain old ordinary unhappiness. In psychotherapeutic work, we get into trouble when we try to preserve our clients’ self-esteem as an end in itself. People are good enough without our help at defending against the painful-self-examination that is necessary for successful change, and I am fond of saying that, in therapy, one must expect to “feel worse in order to do better.”

Slater suggests that

“maybe self-control should replace self-esteem as a primary peg to reach for. I don’t mean to sound Puritanical, but there is something to be said for discipline, which comes from the word ”disciple,” which actually means to comprehend. Ultimately, self-control need not be seen as a constriction; restored to its original meaning, it might be experienced as the kind of practiced prowess an athlete or an artist demonstrates, muscles not tamed but trained, so that the leaps are powerful, the spine supple and the energy harnessed and shaped.”

I heartily agree. I have long written and taught that impulse dyscontrol and disinhibition, with both physiological (“nature”) and psychodynamic (“nurture”) aspects, are the neglected step-children in much psychopathology. Psychiatric and psychological schemas have in general failed to see them as primary problems in their own right, and failed to develop targeted treatment approaches to these problems. The DSM-4 “impulse disorder” diagnoses are largely ignored; even when patients qualify for such diagnoses, their problems with self-control are attributed to other classes of pathology (e.g. depression) instead. We fail to recognize them at our peril, because the conditions of modernity are combining to erode our capacity for self-control both biologically and psychosocially. The emphasis on enhanced self-esteem may be largely a distortion of a narcissistic society with an increasingly pathetic and alarming focus on image and superficiality.

Thomas Friedman: The End of NATO? “The United States has become so much more technologically advanced than any of its NATO allies that America increasingly doesn’t need them to fight a distant war.” And Brussels knows it. “In part this is because European defense industries are not as sophisticated as America’s today. But in part it’s because the Europeans, deep down, don’t feel threatened by America’s enemies, particularly by the ‘axis of evil’ (Iran, Iraq and North Korea) that Mr. Bush identified. Therefore, they don’t want to spend much on defense. If President Bush gets the defense budget increase he asked for in his State of the Union address, U.S. defense spending will equal the defense budgets of the next 15 highest countries — combined.” Since the Cold War, tensions with Western European allies have often revolved around their parting company with our demonization of the enemy-of-the-day (as well, perhaps, as we perfected sanitized war-fighting without endangering American ground forces, as questioning whether we would truly be willing to lose lives over a threat to Europe). Friedman’s column here revolves around his alarm that we may not have European help in fighting wars now that these differences are surfacing, unless we’re sensitive to preserving the alliances. But the real focus ought to be the twin trends of letting a bloated military-industrial complex (a term dating from Eisenhower’s era but more germane now than ever) determine foreign policy and the perennial American lack of insight into the paranoid delusional flavor of our geopolitical analysis.

NY Times op-ed

New Hope That Kidnapped Journalist Is Alive: “A new communiqué that offered hope that Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was apparently kidnapped 10 days ago, might still be alive was e-mailed to several Western and Pakistani news organizations today.

The message asserted that at least some previous messages claiming responsibility for Mr. Pearl’s disappearance had been sent as a prank.” NY Times

Bush may be world’s oldest living thing. I had a hard time with this headline when I originally scanned it, associating to the pretzel-choker-in-chief for a moment… Scaramento Bee

Self-styled vampire reveals British link:

A 23-year-old Satanist jailed yesterday in Germany for a gruesome, ritual Satanic killing, said that she became a vampire in London.

In testimony which exposes the bizarre world of Britain’s underground occult groups, Manuela Ruda said that she swapped the “mortal” world for a life of blood-drinking and devil worship after working in a club in London which she said was frequented by “vampires and human beings”. Guardian UK

Fictional theory set to bite the dust

:

Vampires are fact not fiction and they could be living in a street near you.

Jon Downs, of the Exeter Strange Phenomena Group, believes that there are vampires living across the West Country.

‘There are vampiric entities in the South West, although they’re not the sort that Buffy the Vampire Slayer would recognise,’ he said.

Forget the tall, cloaked man with the swept-back hair, Jon believes that the vampires exist in various forms, possibly as animals.

This Is The West Country

Our galaxy – from the outside: “Astronomers obtained this perspective by analysing half a billion stars measured by the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS).

It features the Milky Way’s complete disc and its newly discovered central bar of stars.

The new map will help scientists confirm the existence of hitherto only suspected features in our galaxy.” BBC

Mountain ranges suffering severe degradation: “The Alps in Europe and the Himalaya-Karakorum-Hindu Kush mountain range, which spans northern India, Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan, are among ten ranges worldwide suffering severe ecosystem degradation, according to a major new report.

Climate change, tourism, deforestation, population growth and migration are causing floods, landslides and famine for people living on their slopes, says the report, which was commissioned by the United Nations University in Japan and written by Jack Ives, of Carleton University in Canada. These disasters are set to become more frequent – and many unique animals and plants will disappear, Ives says.” New Scientist

Scientists surprised at current effects of 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill: “We did indeed find quite a lot more oil than we expected to see. Most of the subsurface oil was in the fresh oil category, and by fresh oil I mean chemically, compositionally; it hasn’t really changed very much since late in the summer of 1989.” Animal species are still being affected in Prince William Sound, suffering organ damage, declining birth rates and birth defects. Nando Times

Programme to eliminate leprosy “on target”: “The World Health Organization programme to eradicate leprosy worldwide by 2005 is on target, officials have announced. But leprosy charities say claims are highly optimistic.” New Scientist Especially if you’ve ever had any contact with people with Hanson’s Disease (a more ‘correct’ term, since ‘leper’ is so deeply stigmatizing) — I did, not in my medical training but in my travels in India, where 60% of the world’s leprosy occurs — you’ll know that the eradication of this disfiguring illness could be one of humanity’s more compassionate ministrations toward its afflicted. Who was it who said a society should be judged by how it cares for its most unfortunate? Now, how about third world HIV?

A webring of blogs “that rebel against normal topic, design or structure”:

• outré designs – psychedelic colors, odd artistic endeavours, over-colourful backgrounds, hellish table experiments, et cetera.

• outlaw mentality/topicality – themes centered around things like alternative sexual practises, unpopular politics, drugs, controversial lifestyles, you get the idea.

• unusual infrastructures – anything that causes the page to go beyond the typical “blog” style in some way, or that which subverts the “dominant blog paradigm” in some way. (For example, one blog on this ring has the dates of its entries all in hexadecimal.)

• dadaist tendencies – sheer, complete and utter nonsense babbled into blogform.

I’m not sure there’s any merit to garish color schemes or putting your dates in hexadecimal per se, but the outlaw mentality and the dada might have a certain cachet…

These are pages that Google thinks are “similar” or “related” to Follow Me Here. Some similarities to my own thinking, as you can see from the number of pages that also appear in my sidebar as daily reads (Rebecca, boing boing, BookNotes, UFO Breakfast, Synthetic Zero, etc.). Does anyone know anything about the algorithm they use to determine what’s “related” to what?

This Product Support Services page from Microsoft is going to help you to no end. [via blogjam]

So they just reviewed FmH in The Weblog Review. Very flattering, but am I really the place to get your daily news??

Al-Qaeda in talks with Hezbollah

The al-Qaeda terrorist organisation is trying to transfer its base of operations from Afghanistan to Lebanon, according to intelligence uncovered earlier this month.

A senior operative of Osama bin Laden’s network, a Yemeni national who has the alias of Salah Hajir, is believed to have arrived in Lebanon about two weeks ago and has held meetings in Beirut with leaders of the Hezbollah terrorist group. The Times of London

Iraq, Iran and North Korea dismiss Bush accusations. The countries in question reject Dubya’s idiotic “axis of evil” innuendo.

Iran, Iraq and North Korea on Wednesday rejected an accusation by U.S. President George W. Bush that they form an “axis of evil” developing weapons of mass destruction to threaten America and the world.

Iran said Bush’s remarks smacked of a desire for hegemony, Iraq suggested they presaged a U.S. attack on Baghdad and North Korea saw them as evidence of a “policy of aggression”.

Britain said the U.S. president had made a “powerful case for the coalition’s actions against global terrorism”. France questioned the merits of labelling nations as terrorist. Reuters

The Colder War: “Last week, the US government announced that it was building the biggest-ever war machine. Military spending will rise to $379billion, of which $50billion will pay for its ‘war on terrorism’.

There will be special funding for new, refined weapons of mass slaughter and for ‘military operations’ – invasions of other countries.

Of all the extraordinary news since September 11, this is the most alarming. It is time to break our silence.

That is to say, it is time for other governments to break their silence, especially the Blair government, whose complicity in the American rampage in Afghanistan has not denied its understanding of the Bush administration’s true plans and ambitions.”

U.S. Says Innocents Died in Raid: “U.S. military officials reversed themselves and now believe innocent people were among the estimated 15 killed and 27 captured in a commando raid in Afghanistan last week.” AP

Roiling Israel: ‘More than 100 Israeli Army reservists signed a statement published today saying they would refuse to continue serving in the West Bank and Gaza Strip because Israel’s policies there involved “dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people.” ‘ NY Times

Top Ten Things You Need to Know About Enron: “What follows is an imaginary conversation, intended as a kind of primer — not only ten things you might want to know about Enron, but ten things that bear repeating about Enron. Enron’s collapse is symptomatic of a deep-seated disease. All of our retirements are at stake.” AlterNet

George W. in the Garden of Gethsemane — unrelenting, well-deserved venom. Read the entire thing; this is just a sample:

The saddest part of this whole affair was the day the scandal was revealed — and you denied that you even knew your good friend, Kenneth Lay. “Ken who?” you said. Oh, he’s just some businessman from Texas. “Heck, he backed my opponent for governor, Ann Richards!” was your way of trying to deflect the truth that was hitting you like a Mack truck. You knew that he, in fact, endorsed YOU and gave you THREE times the money Ann Richards ever saw from him.

I hardly ever talk to the guy, you said. You were like Peter outside the walls of Herod after they grabbed J.C. from the Garden of Gethsemane. Three times he denied he knew Jesus, and three times the cock crowed. But Peter, unlike you, felt shame and wept, and then ran away. [thanks, David]

The Internet Grammar of English: “an academic grammar of English designed and written exclusively for the web.”

This is purportedly the website of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the group which may be responsible for the kidnapping — and perhaps murder — of WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl.

Love Among the Races: ‘… why race continues to matter – usually to the disadvantage of blacks – despite the fact that race should no longer exist. Essentialist definitions of race have long been discredited; civil rights laws enshrine society’s commitment to equality of treatment and opportunity; the merest hint of overt racial prejudice is enough to destroy a politician’s career. But if race has had the scientific and political stuffing knocked out of it, it remains stubbornly persistent as a “social truth” that affects people’s behaviour and life chances.’ Times Literary Supplement

Altered images for brain damage patients

Imagine looking at a dog – and not recognising it as a dog. What if you looked at a sheep or a cow, and didn’t know what it was?

And what if you looked at the pictures above – and thought the “babex” and “bunnyphant” might be real?

That is the situation for some people with visual agnosia.

People with the condition can have trouble recognising animals, faces or objects.

Now a series of films entitled “Eye See” is being planned to allow everyone to see the world as visual aphasics see it. BBC

Give up Enron money, Dubya.

Many of us first heard of Enron last year when the energy company became infamous for extracting billions of dollars from California electricity consumers. For others, it was Enron’s ever-increasing stock value that drew their attention. But now that Enron has imploded in the biggest bankruptcy in U.S history, the rest of us have been given a crash course in the maneuverings of a company that cheated its investors, duped its employees and freely doled out money to politicians addicted to massive campaign contributions. A few of the politicians who received these ill-gotten gains are rushing to return them to funds for the employees. President Bush should follow suit and return every penny of the $550,000 he received from Enron. ActForChange

Stem cells from embryo created without sperm:

“US scientists have isolated stem cells from monkey embryos created using only an egg. They then coaxed these stem cells into taking on the characteristics of neurons, heart muscle and other tissue types.

The embryos were generated through a process called parthenogenesis, in which the egg is never fertilized, but instead duplicates one set of chromosomes. That duplication is lethal, because two maternal sets of chromosomes are incompatible. But the so-called “parthenote” that results still develops far enough so that the equivalent of embryonic stem cells can be harvested from it.” New Scientist

A tale of one man and his blog: The Guardian UK covers the Blogger Pro rollout, interviewing Evan Williams. The interview goes in an interesting direction here:

“What we haven’t done much of, and what I think is desperately needed in the blogging world, are more tools on the browsing side. We have a tremendous amount of content flowing through our system, all in these little chunks that are separate from their sites. It should be easy to index and aggregate and present to people in all kinds of different ways.”

The dangers of this, of course, are obvious: web-hosting companies have quickly run into trouble in the past when they’ve attempted to seize the rights to re-use their customers’ content. And Williams is quick to agree that users would not condone him publishing their work. What he is interested in is tackling the largely unconnected network of weblogs, introducing network publishing to make it easier for the reader to get to things that might be of interest.

Bears further discussion.

New Scientist ‘copylefted’ article about copyleft and the open content movement.

“Have you ever wanted to pretend that you were someone else? Well, now you can! If you want to, you can use me to send someone else an email…”

Did I watch the wrong channel? ‘The media gushed over an “eloquent” and “passionate” State of the Union address many of us didn’t see.’ Salon