UK math whiz tackles $1 million problem; refusing interviews, he claims to have solved Poincaré’s conjecture, one of the seven thorniest remaining problems in mathematics, according to a respected American mathematical foundation that has offered $1 million for the solution of any of them. An outline of his proposed solution, which is not yet accepted by the mathematical community without controversy, is posted on the web. CNET

danklife is an attractive and thoughtful weblog I just stumbled upon (“where life is a gift wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper…”).

Boy adopted by chimps

KANO, Nigeria: A disabled Nigerian boy believed to have been adopted and raised by chimpanzees for 18 months is in care in a specialist children’s home in this northern city.

Named Bello by nursing staff at the Tudun Maliki Torrey home in Kano, he was brought to them six years ago by hunters after being found with a chimpanzee family in the Falgore forest, 150km south of Kano, staff told AFP.

Believed to have been aged about two when he was taken in, Bello is probably the son of nomadic ethnic Fulani people who travel through the region, Abba Isa Muhammad, the home’s child welfare officer, said.

Mentally and physically disabled, with a misshapen forehead, sloping right shoulder and protruding chest, he was probably abandoned by his parents because of his disabilities, Isa Muhammad said.

news.com.au

Expert claims primates may have roamed with dinosaurs: “A Chicago expert claims his statistical techniques show primates evolved 20 million years earlier than thought.

If correct, it means they were roaming Earth at the same time as dinosaurs. It also means many fossil records may be useless.” Ananova

Diminutive, but perfectly formed: “Umberto Eco explains why short forms of modern communication can be simply irresistible.” An appreciation of a new book edited by Isabella Pezzini, Trailer, spot, clip, siti, banner: Le forme brevi della comunicazione audiovisiva [Trailers, Ads, Clips, Websites, Banners: The Short Forms of Audiovisual Communication]. Guardian UK

One ring to rule them all: ‘From post-“Bridget” fiction to ABC’s frightening “The Bachelor,” the wedding porn genre mates emasculated Mr. Rights with soulless, life-size Barbies.’ Salon

Egypt ready to wage war on Israel … for $US100 billion: ‘ “Let the Arab world give $100 billion from Arab funds deposited around the world. Let it say to Egypt: ‘This is a budget for confrontation. This budget is at your disposal. Undertake confrontation,’ ” (Egyptian Prime Minister Atef Ebeid ) said.’ Sydney Morning Herald

Guth’s Grand Guess: ‘In December 1979 Guth, then 32 and an obscure physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, emerged as the first scientist to offer a plausible description of the universe when it was less than one-hundredth of a second old. During an unimaginably explosive period between 10-37 second and 10-34 second after its birth, Guth said, the universe expanded at a rate that kept doubling before beginning to settle down to the more sedate expansion originally described by the Big Bang theory.

Guth’s theory of inflation—the name he coined for this superfast early-universe expansion—has since vanquished every theoretical challenge and grown stronger with each new cosmological finding, including the latest, largest one: that the universe’s expansion rate, long thought to be slowing, is actually accelerating. “There’s no competition, but that’s not for lack of trying,” says cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University. “Many people have tried to develop a model that addresses the same problems, and they have failed.” Guth’s reputation has ascended with the theory: He has gone from an underemployed postdoc to cosmology’s leading man. In April of last year, he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in physics, often a precursor to the Nobel Prize.’ Discover

Zoe

The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox)

what Google did for the web… The Google principle: It doesn’t matter

where information is because I can get to it with a keystroke.

So what is Zoe? Think about it as a sort of librarian, tirelessly,

continuously, processing, slicing, indexing, organizing, your messages.

The end result is this intertwingled web of information. Messages put in

context. Your very own knowledge base accessible at your fingertip. No

more “attending to” your messages. The messages organization is done

automatically for you so as to not have the need to “manage” your email.

Because once information is available at a keystroke, it doesn’t matter

in which folder you happened to file it two years ago. There is no

folder. The information is always there. Accessible when you need it. In

context.

Practically Speaking: Zoe is a email client. It’s also a email server. And a long term

archive. And a search engine. And an application server. All that at

once on your desktop. Or server. Or both. Or it doesn’t matter because

client and server are the same.

Science And Consciousness Review: “…is an up-to-date resource for everyone interested in scientific studies of consciousness. We will not publish primary empirical articles, but will focus on interpreting the rapidly growing scientific literature, from sources like Science, Nature, Consciousness & Cognition, and Psyche.

The scientific study of consciousness is a rediscovered enterprise, and does not yet have the institutional underpinnings of other topics in psychology and brain science, fields like memory, perception, and attention. Yet consciousness is an unavoidable ingredient of all those fundamental topics. Today we have a fast-growing body of new evidence. Our notion is to make the new evidence easily available to interested people, no matter what their background.”

Bad brain or bad person?: “Does the existence of a criminal brain diminish the notion of personal responsibility?” The Times of London

Teen-ager who survived suicide pact with her husband is charged with a sex crime

A teen-ager who tried to kill herself as part of a suicide pact with her husband has been accused of a sex crime against a 14-year-old girl, officials said.

Jennifer Holey, 19, was charged Thursday with first-degree criminal sexual conduct for aiding her husband, Patrick Holey, in the alleged assault at the couple’s home April 1, assistant prosecutor Joyce Draganchuk said.

Apparently despondent about the investigation into the assault, the couple tried to commit suicide together April 9 by swallowing painkillers, authorities said. Patrick Holey, 19, died but his wife survived.

Patrick Holey’s mother, Kathleen Holey, faces two charges of assisted suicide for allegedly helping the couple carry out the pact.[emphasis added — FmH] SF Chronicle

Limits: Interesting argument by Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, that the Church pedophilia scandal is a challenge for the opinion industry “because they have so little to say.”

The Boston Globe and The Boston Herald have called on Bernard Cardinal Law to resign. But you can’t declare someone unfit for their post without having an opinion about the requirements of the post. And you can’t have an opinion about the requirements of the post without having an opinion about the mission of the institution as a whole. Newspapers can call on a politician to resign because they have legitimate opinions about the purpose of the government in which he or she serves. They can demand that a cardinal who shields pedophile priests go to jail because they have legitimate opinions about criminal justice. But they can’t legitimately call on a cardinal to resign because they can’t have a legitimate opinion about the purpose of the Catholic Church. You can’t weigh Law’s cover-up of pedophilia against his work serving the poor, or opposing abortion, or bestowing the sacraments, or espousing the gospel, without making a judgment about the relative value of those endeavors, and that judgment is inescapably theological. It is a judgment about the best way to incarnate the revelation of Jesus Christ–and that’s not a judgment for The Boston Globe.

Heal Me, Father: Portrait of Dr. Thomas Plante, chair of the psychology department at Santa Clara University and editor of the book Bless Me Father For I Have Sinned: Perspectives on Sexual Abuse Committed by Roman Catholic Priests, who screens potential priests and nuns for emotional problems when they’re applying to take their vows and has treated about 50 priests accused of sexual misconduct, including those charged with pedophilia or sexual abuse. He says that the proportion of pedophiles among the clergy is much lower than among the general American populace; that around 20% of sexual abuse accusations against clergy are untrue, and that he finds it relatively easy to recognize prospective candidates who will ‘sin’ in this way but has ‘no responsibility’ for what the Church does with his findings. AlterNet

Anti-Semitism Is Deepening Among Muslims: “…(A)nti-Semitic imagery is now embedded in the mainstream discourse concerning Jews in much of the Islamic world, in the popular press and in academic journals.” NY Times

Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jörg Haider, and other xenophobes:

“After Sept. 11, many observers predicted that the ugly side of the American character would soon reveal itself. Xenophobia and nativism would flourish. Ominous reports of widespread violence against Arab-Americans would surface. A few hysterical doomsayers worried that it was only a matter of time before Muslims would be placed in internment camps. Despite those fears, none of the Ugly American predictions came to pass. Instead, 9/11 cemented an altogether different phenomenon: Ugly Europeanism.

Jean-Marie Le Pen’s strong showing in the French presidential election is only the latest in a string of successes by anti-Muslim political parties across the Continent.” Slate

“This decision is an essential first step in restoring stability and sound management to this very important organisation.” — US State Department spokeswoman.

Chemical weapons body sacks head: Thanks to Colin Green for pointing me to this; put it together with my post several days ago noting that the UN high commissioner for human rights Mary Rogers is stepping down because of US pressure for a new, 21st century take on The Ugly American.

The body that polices the ban on chemical weapons has ousted its chairman, after the United States threatened to withhold funding.

The US objected to Jose Bustani’s plans to encourage Iraq to join the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

Mr Bustani believed it would be a means to carry out new arms inspections in Iraq.

But the US said the inspections envisaged by the Brazilian director-general would be too lenient. BBC

The Anti-American: Ian Buruma reviews a new collection of political essays edited by the mercurial Arundhati Roy and suggests that her “preposterousness” may undermine the causes she adopts, quoting a critic who says she ought to stick to novels. But Buruma reserves his sharpest teeth for novelist John Berger, who writes the introduction to the essay collection. The New Republic

‘Exact uncertainty’ brought to quantum world: “Exact uncertainty sounds like a contradiction in terms, but that is what governs the quantum world, according to a theoretical physicist who has created an improved version of the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle.” New Scientist

Innateness and the Structure of the Mind: “This interdisciplinary conference will investigate the nature of the innate capacities, processes, representations, biases, and connections in the human mind. What elements of the mind are plausibly innate? How do these innate elements feed into a story about the development of our mature cognitive capacities? Which of these elements are shared with other members of the animal kingdom? What is the structure of the innate mind?” Part of a three year interdisciplinary project sponsored by the Arts & Humanities Research Board of the UK.

Following many years of neglect, nativist theorizing is now thriving. This resurgence owes much to the pioneering arguments of Noam Chomsky, which have stimulated a great deal of productive work in linguistics and cognitive psychology. But nativist theorizing has also received a powerful impetus from work in genetics and evolutionary biology, as biological thinking has begun to permeate psychology and philosophy of mind. As a result of these influences, there has been a huge amount of work in the cognitive sciences inspired by nativist theorizing in the past 15 or 20 years.

The roster of participants is a roll-call of luminaries in cognitive science, evolutionary psychology and philosophy of mind. University of Sheffield (UK) Dept. of Philosophy

We’re Younger Than We Look: “Put away the wrinkle cream: The universe is only 13 billion years old,

scientists now believe. That’s a little younger than previous estimates.” Wired

‘Magic’ Mushrooms to Be Outlawed: ‘Japan’s Health Ministry said on Friday it would outlaw hallucinogenic “magic” mushrooms from June, plugging a legal loophole that has allowed the mind-altering fungi to be openly sold without penalty.’ Reuters

Is Taking a Psychedelic an Act of Sedition?

“The very idea of going off on a psychedelic “head trip” in this hour of national crisis might be seen as self-indulgent folly, or worse, an act of cerebral sedition. Yet a cold and sober look through the smoldering smoke of Ground Zero leads me to believe that, depending on individual circumstances, of course, there are now even more compelling reasons to sanction the practice of judicious psychedelic use.

If combat readiness is an issue, if your function is to evacuate a building in a hurry, screen airline passengers, detect the presence of microscopic pathogens, analyze forensic evidence that could lead to the apprehension of culpable or would-be terrorists, or execute a commando raid on an Afghan mountain, this is probably not the season for psychedelics. But if you’re not sure who the real enemy is, if you’re inclined to ask more questions about the nature of the reality that’s just swung out into a broad new arc, or if you’re seeking solace and healing from trauma or debilitating stress, it could well be the time to venture out into new psychical frontiers by means of certain time-tested plants and chemicals. In fact, for some especially scarred, it might even be foolish not to, given that there might not be as much time to lose as we thought we had.” — Charles Hayes, Tikkun

Who is Charles Hayes?

From Poet Anne Waldman:

My first experience of lysergic acid, in the summer of 1965, conjured an archetypal vision that illuminated both my past history and my future development.

I was twenty, a student at Bennington College in Vermont, and had decided to travel out West to the now-celebrated Berkeley Poetry Conference. A great number of poets I refer to as “the outrider tradition” ‑- major visionaries and mavericks, including Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Allen Ginsberg ‑- were gathering to hold panels, present their work in public readings, and interact with students and passionate readers of poetry. The atmosphere surrounding the event was highly charged and magical. The Conference was a major congregation for disparate avant garde literary artists – including the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School, and Black Mountain – to come together and feed off of each other’s energy. The aggregate voltage of their nexus sent shock waves through the literary establishment.

Those who convened at Berkeley were poets and writers in the prophetic tradition, many of whom were experimenting with psychedelics. There was a legend about the night when Charles Olson, who’d been head of the Black Mountain College, gave a very shamanic poetry reading during which he literally came apart on stage. The story was that he’d taken some psychedelic the week before and it had had this effect on him. His wife had just died. On acid, as I would soon learn myself, things come apart and then reforge. Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures ed. by Charles Hayes

[This read dramatically with slow crescendo, building as it moves.]


You loathsome miserable draconian TV patriarchs,

obsolete Senators,

questionable House of Reps,

lie-of-the-land Admirals,

perjuring Lieutenant Colonels,

dishrag attorney generals,

namby-pamby political pentecostals,

macho drug smugglers,

killer arms dealers,

consultant traffickers in blood money,

multimillion dollar-fraud Pentagon schemers,

techno-military-industrial-complex corrupt Wedtech lowlifes,

Silverado mainliners,

slimy presidential wannabes

SHUT OFF



Not a woman amongst ya!



Ye lily-livered walloping big wheels



Judges of my world?



I'll make your semen dry up



YOUR GENITALIA WILL WITHER IN THE WIND

— Anne Waldman, Kill or Cure

Crimes of Big Tobacco: “Big Tobacco’s multibillion-dollar profits rest on a global

underground network of smugglers and money launderers. A

six-month investigation follows the paper trail of this illegal trade.” The Nation [via AlterNet]

Hunger affects school, psychosocial develoment: ‘Hunger and poverty in the United States are severe enough to significantly impair the academic and psychosocial development of school-age children and adolescents, according to two studies at Cornell University.

“The level of food deprivation in this wealthy nation puts millions of children at risk for multiple developmental problems,” says Katherine Alaimo…’

Call for re-think on eugenics:

The condemnation of eugenics went too far and it needs reassessment, a leading

scientist is arguing.

Eugenics is the science of using genetics ostensibly to “improve” mankind.

The idea that this was a good thing had wide currency throughout the early part

of the 20th century.

However, the concept got a bad name in the 1930s when the Nazis determined that

they would use it to create a “master race”.

Now Richard Lynn, Emeritus professor of Psychology at the University of Ulster,

has written a book in which he says it is time for a re-think.

He told the BBC that advances in medical technology, such as the pre-natal

diagnosis of pregnant women for genetically disordered foetuses, meant that in

a sense eugenics was already being practised.

“The general principle of eugenics, that we could improve the genetic quality

of the population need taking seriously.

“The new medical technology of eugenics is going to take off, because it

satisfies the needs of individuals, both for themselves and as parents. BBC

Activists demand lawyers for chimps: “The Chimpanzee Collaboratory says that chimpanzees are so close to humans – sharing 98.7% of our genetic make-up – that they deserve to get the same kind of legal representation as children. Campaigners say this would let activists act as legal guardians for the chimps, potentially lodging law suits against researchers and animal entertainers. ‘A minimum level of autonomy is sufficient to justify the basic legal right to bodily integrity.’ — Lawyer Steven Wise.” BBC

N.C. linguists trying to quantify ebonics: “Rural African-Americans increasingly speak the urban-sounding dialect called ebonics, even when their grandparents sound like their white neighbors.

That helps explain how the distinctive tongue is spreading nationwide, two N.C. State University linguists say.” The Nando Times

Hackers turn tables on file-swapping firms:

For the past several weeks, the pseudonymous programmer, who says he’s a male college student and declines to give his real name, has been releasing versions of popular file-swapping programs online with the advertising and user-tracking features stripped out.

He’s done Grokster and iMesh. And he’s not alone. His work, now available through the Grokster and iMesh networks themselves, joins that of other programmers who have previously “cleaned” programs such as Kazaa and Audiogalaxy in a campaign against “adware” and “spyware.”

“I’ve never been a big fan of large companies spying on their users,” Dr. Damn wrote in an instant messenger interview. “Especially me.”

The college student and his “Clean Clients” site form just one part of a growing backlash against the software now routinely bundled with free file trading programs. These piggyback software packages, which include Gator, Cydoor, and others, often track computer users’ activity online to show them targeted advertisements. In Altnet’s case, the add-on promises to turn users’ computers into links in a new for-profit peer-to-peer network.

What we didn’t learn from Enron: “Enron hasn’t changed a thing in Washington: Bush is taking the side of business again, supporting companies’ right not to deduct stock options on their financial statements, while deducting them on their tax returns. But even more depressing is that key Democrats are taking big business’ side, too.” The New Republic