“How many microbiologists does it take to change a light bulb?

Whatever you think the answer may be, change that light bulb soon. Microbiologists are dropping like flies. A career in microbiology can be harmful to your health — especially since 9-11.” [via Abuddhas Memes]

The Chocolate Messiah is coming, spreading his message about the best way to attain world peace.

The privatization of our culture: “The discoveries, eureka-moments, fables, characters, songs and jokes that form the only common ground we share as citizens — the set of ideas collectively known as “The West” — are now the property of a few multinational corporations. Our entire culture has fallen into private hands, taking with it our right to tell our stories, our right to keep our personal lives personal, even our right to heal our sick….

It need not be the end, however. Not if we as citizens, as Westerners, as participants in our own culture, can find the will and the resolve to reclaim what is ours.” Shift

Far Right Watch: Authorities Probe Assassination Plot: ‘A Montana militia organization was planning to assassinate as many judges, prosecutors and police officers as possible, amassing a weapons cache that included 30,000 rounds of ammunition, a targeted sheriff said.’ Washington Post Let’s not lull ourselves into a false sense of security reflecting on how halfbaked this plot sounds…

Prolific Sperm Donor’s Bad Gene: “A Dutch sperm donor who fathered 18 children is suffering from a rare hereditary degenerative brain disorder, a hospital said on Wednesday.

The man, whose sperm was used between 1989 and 1995, was not definitively diagnosed with cerebellar ataxia — which causes gradual shriveling of the cerebellum — until late 1998.The children conceived from his sperm, now aged between seven and 13, have a 50 percent chance of inheriting the disease, according to the hospital, which agonized for three years before deciding to tell the parents involved.” Wired [via Spike]

Stolen Restaurant Napkins Are Just a Start

As chefs have achieved celebrity status, dining out has become a theatrical event, with the setting and the props as thrilled over as the tuna tartare. Restaurants have become temples of design, filled with beautiful objects. And diners are helping themselves to more than just the bread. A lot more.

From $3 water glasses to $1,200 silver ice buckets, from vintage photographs hanging on the walls to scented candles burning in the bathrooms — if it isn’t nailed down, diners have walked off with it. Over the course of a year, restaurants around the country lose as much as 3 percent of their earnings to theft by customers who seem to be getting more brazen by the minute. Demitasse spoons, Peugeot pepper mills, imported wineglasses, Frette linens, framed artwork, serving platters, Champagne buckets. The list of stolen goods boggles the imagination. And the ways restaurateurs are coping with the phenomenon is changing the dining experience for everyone. NY Times

Koppel Is the Odd Man Out as ABC Woos Letterman, NightLine just isn’t relevant anymore; older, more literate, more informed viewers aren’t enough of a cash cow. If Letterman doesn’t emigrate, ABC might still move its latenight programming in the braindead direction of the other networks. A subsequent article makes it clear that ABC’s news division, blindsided by the plan, is quite fretful. NY Times Wake up and smell the coffee! Infotainment long ago supplanted sophisticated news coverage in the major media…

James Ridgeway: More on the claims by Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ working group on biological weapons, that the <a

href=”http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0209/ridgeway.php”>FBI has a prime suspect in the anthrax cases, has already interviewed him, etc. The FBI continues to stonewall on the claims, probably both because the case that follows would reveal the failure of security measures at US biological weapons facilities where the culprit worked, and because there might have to be discussion of secret bioweapons projects of whose existence the government would prefer the public not be aware. says Ridgeway in his Village Voice column. Is this plausible, however? Ashcroft is such a Machiavellian information gatekeeper, with such a disregard for the niceties of a free society or open inquiry, that I find it hard to believe the Justice Dept’s Good Fight against Terrorism would be stopped by free speech concerns.

Cassandra Wilson and Dee Dee Bridgewater Enter the Pantheon: “Can it be that little more than a decade ago, jazz singing was widely written off as a dead art? No one had come along to take the stages abandoned by Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Carmen McRae, though Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln had survived the wilderness years to reassert their own claims as supreme individualists in an uncrowded field.” Village Voice

A Boy Genius? Mother Admits Faking Tests, raising questions not only about the boy’s mother (he has been hospitalized with psychiatric problems and placed out of her care) but about the credulity of the psychological experts who pronounced him so gifted. NY Times

The F Scale: “an instrument that (yields) an estimate of fascist receptivity at the personality level.” Relieved to find my score wasn’t “…within normal limits; an appropriate score for an American.” Via Leslie Turek, with whose weblog I’ve become acquainted via my referrer log. She is a fellow Bostonian and appears to have been a campus contemporary of mine as an undergraduate. Leslie also points to this New York Times reminiscence on the 40th anniversary of Spacewar’s advent at MIT. Turek seems to have been there (“When I was a member of the MIT Science Fiction Society in the 60’s, I knew a bunch of people who used to hang out in the M.I.T. computer lab playing Spacewar, and a number of the names in the article are familiar to me. Many of them felt at the time that games were the true calling of computers”); I enjoyed it vicariously from afar, a decade later, via Stewart Brand’s “Fanatic Life & Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.”

University of Chicago students offer definitive answer to the change-a-lightbulb question. SF Chronicle

US, Afghan and coalition forces are being beaten back, with casualties, in a battle with at least 5000 al Qaeda and Taliban forces near Gardez on Saturday. Reuters

Tugboat: thanks to Phil Agre for this delightful blink. As the saying goes, don’t try this at home. [Have patience; lots of pictures, slow-loading, and you may have to click refresh and start over several times if it chokes on you…]

Have a Heart. We’ll Send the Bill: “Last weekend American moviegoers shelled out $23.6 million to watch John Q. Archibald, played by Denzel Washington, hold an emergency room hostage because his HMO wouldn’t spend $250,000 for his dying son’s heart transplant. One wonders how many hearts could have been purchased for that $23.6 million if the supply of organs for transplant were expanded through monetary incentives.

Sound ghoulish? Bear with me. The standing American policy of the distribution of transplant organs can be summarized in one proposition: It is divine to give, but evil to sell. Altruism is chic; individuals are encouraged to give their organs at death and even during life. And they do, chiefly to close family members. But trade is verboten: It is a criminal offense to sell organs, either during life or after death, to strangers.”Wall Street Journal Not that I support this, but unfortunately the WSJ is probably perfectly in tune with the sentiment of the times — that altruism is dead and that people will only do something for a stranger from pecuniary interest.

Dear Ann Coulter…

“I must confess that my heart sank when I read your latest column, “Mineta’s Bataan death march,” in which you criticize Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta for opposing the racial profiling of Arabs in U.S. airports.

It’s not so much that I have problems with your argument (though I do personally disagree with it). What I don’t get is why you tiptoed, quite un-Coulterlike, around your most striking point: That you’d like to see Mineta dead…” –Chris Mooney The American Prospect

“It took all of seven days to shut down the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence — roughly the same amount of time that anyone actually knew it existed.

Controversy over OSI originally heated up following a New York Times story suggesting the office might spread false reports to the foreign press or run “black” propaganda campaigns. After taking a beating over this — as critics barked that the U.S. shouldn’t lie to the rest of the world — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pulled the plug. Indeed, it was all over so quickly, the debate over OSI didn’t really progress far enough for anyone to bother asking whether office would actually have been very good at duping anyone.

A look back at some of the low points of U.S. psychological warfare, however, suggests that this might have been by far the more salient criticism.” The American Prospect

The American Prospect

shares with us a frustrated 12-year veteran EPA official’s letter of resignation to Christie Todd Whitman, which provides an insider’s confirmation of what is already abundantly clear to outside observers — that delays, budget cuts and the coddling of industry by the Bush dysAdministration have hobbled US environmental protection, perhaps irrevocably.

Our Man Musharraf

Few people did not feel outrage and sadness at news of the death of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Indeed, according to Colin Powell, Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s dictator, “took it pretty hard because he was trying to do everything he could to keep [the murder] from happening.” Echoing Powell, State Department flack Richard Boucher characterized Musharraf’s efforts at finding the missing journalist as “full-edged and full-bore.”

Diplomacy certainly requires a degree of circumspection and linguistic sleight of hand. However, that the aforementioned comments appeared in a February 23 Washington Post story — under the headline “U.S. Praises Musharraf’s Battle Against Terrorism; Powell, Others Applaud Pakistani Leader’s Efforts on Behalf of Slain American Reporter” — leaves us wondering if the Post isn’t aspiring to the status of “semiofficial newspaper,” happily serving as handmaiden to U.S. government policy. Because not only is the story bereft of any sentiment remotely critical of Musharraf — whom numerous scholars, diplomats, and intelligence agents see as yet another Pakistani strongman playing both sides against the middle in the “War on Terrorism” — but it doesn’t mention Musharraf’s derogatory and deranged remarks on the Pearl case, which were quoted in the Post a few weeks earlier. The American Prospect

KaZaA to Sen. Biden: the RIAA is lying to you PoliTech

Nearest Galaxy Ripped from Another, Study Suggests

The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, our closest neighbor at just 75,000 light-years away, was only found in 1994. The density of stars in our Milky Way can obscure astronomers’ views of the satellite galaxies, making it harder to study some regions the local universe than to examine much more distant groups of stars that exist along clear lines of sight.

Since the discovery of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, researchers have noticed that some of its younger stars are strikingly similar to stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, another satellite galaxy that sits just a bit further out in space.

Now a study led by Patrick Cseresnjes of the Paris Observatory shows strong similarities in a certain class of old stars seen in both of these satellite galaxies. Cseresnjes thinks the evidence may point to a common ancestor, a larger galaxy that was ripped apart to form both the Large Magellanic Cloud and the nearer Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, or Sgr as astronomers call it. space.com via Yahoo!

Hubble’s Hands-on Overhaul: “NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is getting a midlife makeover.

Shuttle Columbia’s crew are ready to set sail on a fourth service call to the Earth circling observatory since it was placed in orbit in April 1990. It’s tool time for teams of spacewalkers trained to carry out a $172 million modernization job on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This latest renovation effort includes: Installing a more powerful picture-taking camera; outfitting the telescope with new solar arrays; plugging in a fresh power control unit; and attaching experimental cooling gear to rejuvenate HST’s infrared vision.” space.com [via Yahoo!]

Study: Most Had Radioactive Exposure: “Radioactive fallout from Cold War nuclear testing exposed virtually everyone in the United States, and contributed to about 11,000 cancer deaths, an unpublished study by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concludes.

The radioactive exposure also contributed to a minimum of 22,000 U.S. cancer cases overall, according to a progress report the CDC provided Congress last year. The report first came to light in USA Today on Thursday. Reuters Health

Mother Said to Smuggle Saw Blades to Jailed Son. Watching too many movies?

A woman was arrested in Oklahoma on Thursday for trying to smuggle hacksaw blades inside a Bible to her jailed son who was only recently recaptured after escaping from prison, authorities said.

Tawana Cherese Smith, 54, was arrested in southern Oklahoma near the town of Waurika after authorities said they found the blades in the spine of a Bible she brought to her son, Joshua Bagwell.

Smith, an attorney who has been representing her son, was also found to be carrying two assault rifles in her pickup truck, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said.

Shadow Government Activated for U.S.: ‘A “shadow government” consisting of 75 or more senior officials has been living and working secretly outside Washington since Sept. 11 in case the nation’s capital is crippled by terrorist attack. “This is serious business,” President Bush said of plans to ensure the continuity of government.’ AP As usual, profound comment from the Buffoon-Elect.

Good Doobies in the War-on-Terrorism®: Gun Owners Rally Around Man Denied A Computer By Dell Newsbytes

Meet the Marquis de Sade of the puzzle world (who “says he dreams of being a former crossword constructor, but it’s not clear what else he would do.”)

He lives and works in Brooklyn now, not far from Prospect Park, in a small wooden house so barricaded to guests that he barely lets the cable man in. “I’m the guy that inspired the phrase ‘Doesn’t play well with others,’ ” he says. On most days, he wakes up by seven, does a word search to get his eyes focussed, and then spends the day shuttling between his crossword grids, his reference books, and the television. More and more crossword constructors are relying on computer programs and data bases of common clues. Hook uses only a pencil (“A computer looks really stupid tucked behind your ear”), yet he has been known to come up with twenty-four crosswords and write more than fifteen hundred clues in three days.

[…] Crosswords aren’t so different from life, one constructor told me. You start out floundering in a void, plagued by questions. And then, little by little, you begin to find answers. You build gradually on your knowledge, or make mistakes and double back, and pretty soon you find that everything is connected to everything else. But if crosswords can be addictive—if some people love them nearly to the point of folly—it may be because real life hardly enters into them. Here every problem has a solution, and pain, disease, violence, and despair never make it to the grid. “When you solve a crossword, you don’t want death or Nazis thrown in your face,” Will Shortz says. “If there is a seventy-year-old woman who is filling out the grid and she’s got ‘__uck,’ I can’t imagine making her add an ‘F.’ ”

[I’m grateful for David’s feeding me blinks like this from The New Yorker!]

“An analysis of suspected radioactive substances seized in Afghanistan has found nothing to prove that Osama bin Laden reached his decade-long goal of acquiring nuclear materials for a bomb, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing administration officials.

The government’s analysis of suspicious canisters, computer discs and documents suggests that bin Laden and al Qaeda may have been duped by black-market weapons swindlers selling crude containers hand-painted with skulls and crossbones and perhaps dipped in medical waste, the Times reported.” Reuters We all chuckled over the report several months ago that the bomb-making plans al Qaeda had obtained turned out to be spoofs from a scientific humor magazine too. It’s appealing to think of these people as easily fooled buffoons, but they only get swindled until they wise up, and it only takes once…

U.S. Broadens Terror Fight, Readying Troops for Yemen

Yemen is just the latest partner in an increasingly broad campaign that has expanded well beyond Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf, the Philippines and potentially to Georgia and Indonesia as well.

It comes as Democrats have become increasingly restless about the military moves, complaining that the administration has demanded virtually unlimited funds without providing a clear road map of the worldwide military effort. NY Times

Radical New Views of Islam and the Origins of the Koran

The reverberations have affected non-Muslim scholars in Western countries. “Between fear and political correctness, it’s not possible to say anything other than sugary nonsense about Islam,” said one scholar at an American university who asked not to be named, referring to the threatened violence as well as the widespread reluctance on United States college campuses to criticize other cultures. NY Times