‘A Harvard Law School committee announced plans yesterday to draft a speech code that would ban harassing, offensive language from the classroom, a highly unusual step for a law school and a move that runs counter to a national trend against interfering with campus speech.

Last night, the proposed code set off such a furious debate at an extraordinary campus ”town meeting” that some committee members and the law school dean said afterward that they were deeply uneasy with the idea.’ The fractious campus, home of many fierce First Amendment champions, has been rocked by several racial incidents. The Committee on Healthy Diversity, which has been the administration’s major response to the racial tension, is the source of the proposal for a code of speech. Boston Globe

“The A.L.I.C.E Bot is a conversation emulating bot developed by Richard Wallace. The bot has won the Loebner Prize in both 2000 and 2001. You can talk to A.L.I.C.E yourself to see its chat capabilities, quite remarkable.

We thought it would be a great idea to hook up two instances of the A.L.I.C.E chat bot to each other… The results are amusing, you can see them below.

To begin with the characters of this dialog argue about who should be downloading who, and then it slowly descends into constant waffling until it finally reaches an unstoppable loop of junk messages…” nik [via blogdex] I laughed out loud reading the dialogue between the two ALICEs.

“Americans’ use of cellphones has increased so quickly that wireless networks are becoming overloaded, causing a growing number of customers to complain about calls that are inaudible or are cut off or are never connected in the first place.

And things could get worse before they get better, industry experts say, because even as cellphone companies are rolling out fancy features like digital photography and Internet-based games, they are hard-pressed to spend the money needed to improve basic service.” NY Times

I saw evidence of this firsthand this weekend, when I spent an inordinate length of time at the repair counter of my cellular provider’s local storefront while they replaced the broken antenna on my phone. They’ve gone to a new antenna design, the tech explained; this was presumably to stop them from breaking as readily. Unfortunately, it was also responsible for his 20-minute struggle to reassemble the phone after instaling the new antenna mount. That’s beside the point, though. While I was there, I listened to any number of cellular customers coming to the technical support counter complaining that their reception sounds like they’re underwater. There must be something in it for the support personnel to maintain the fiction that the network is okay, because they gamely examined every complainant’s phone, tweaking some and replacing others, and in any case reassuring everyone that everything will be fine.

Embodying peace Pt Reyes Light

Something new from the Google Lab. Enter a few items from a set of things, click on large set or small set and Google will predict other items in the set.

“A nearby black hole is hurtling like a cannonball through the disk of our galaxy. The detection of this speed demon is the best evidence yet, some astronomers say, that stellar-mass black holes — those that are several times as massive as the Earth’s Sun — are created when a dying, massive star explodes in a violent supernova. The stellar-mass black hole, called GRO J1655-40, is streaking across space at a rate of 250,000 miles per hour, which is four times faster than the average velocity of the stars in that galactic neighborhood. At that speed, the black hole may have been hurled through space by a supernova blast….

GRO J1655-40 is the second so-called ‘microquasar’ discovered in our Galaxy. Microquasars are black holes of about the same mass as a star. They behave as scaled-down versions of much more massive black holes that are at the cores of extremely active galaxies, called quasars. Astronomers have known about the existence of stellar-mass black holes since the early 1970s. Their masses can range from 3.5 to approximately 15 times the mass of our Sun.” NASA STScI

“It may not be the caffeine in coffee that raises blood pressure because drinking decaffeinated coffee has a similar effect, Swiss researchers said yesterday.

In an article in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation, the researchers said there may be another ingredient in coffee that causes blood pressure to rise. They found that coffee, caffeinated or not, raises the blood pressure of people who do not regularly drink it.” Boston Globe In habitual drinkers (of either caffeinated or decaf), the body adapts and the hypertensive effect is not sustained.

…Being Called a Difficult Poet

…Over the years he has won a fair share of praise. But he has also been criticized for being difficult…. He has also been criticized for being postmodern, a prankster, for engaging in madcap rhyming.

And now, with his ninth collection, Moy Sand and Gravel, published in October, it is happening again. Peter Davison, reviewing it in The New York Times Book Review, had high praise: the book “shimmers with play, the play of mind, the play of recondite information,” he wrote. But he complained that some of it was so difficult that one needed a dictionary, or perhaps an entire university library, to decipher it. “Postmodernism contents itself with allusion rather than conclusion,” Mr. Davison wrote. Some poems, he said, seem like “artificially enriched, overinformed doggerel.”

Here’s one interesting twist for the career of a ‘difficult’ poet to take — writing rock lyrics:

Mr. Muldoon has cast a wide net with his career. He has written lyrics with the rock musician Warren Zevon, including the title song of Mr. Zevon’s album “My Ride’s Here.” The lyrics have Mr. Muldoon’s distinctive postmodern lilt: “I was staying at the Marriott/with Jesus and John Wayne./I was waiting for a chariot./They were waiting for a train./The sky was full of carrion./`I’ll take the mazuma,’ said Jesus to Marion./`That’s the 3:10 to Yuma, my ride’s here.’ “

He and Mr. Zevon had also been working on a musical, “The Honey War,” about a dispute over gaming rights to an American Indian casino. Mr. Zevon recently announced that he has terminal cancer, and the project is on hold.

But that’s not the half of it:

Meanwhile Mr. Muldoon has written three operas, with music by Daron Hagen. Vera of Las Vegas is about two I.R.A. volunteers on the lam, a rogue immigration agent and a transvestite lap dancer. The opera has a mélange of styles: U2 vintage rock, jazz, and traditional Irish music. It will have two performances at Symphony Space in New York in June. Shining Brow, about Frank Lloyd Wright, will have a concert performance by the Buffalo Philharmonic next fall. A third opera is Bandanna, a re-retelling of Othello.

Mr. Muldoon is about to begin work on his next lecture, part of a series at Oxford, to be given in January. It is called “The End of the Poem.”

“It’s about how poems are ended,” he said. “It’s about the purpose of poetry in the world.”

And just what is that, Mr. Muldoon was asked? He had a ready answer. “The purpose of poetry,” he said, “is to help us to make sense of who we are.” NY Times

You’ll find some links to poems of Muldoon here. Try this:

Aisling (1983)

I was making my way home late one night

this summer, when I staggered

into a snow drift.



Her eyes spoke of a sloe-year,

her mouth a year of haws.



Was she Aurora, or the goddess Flora,

Artemidora, or Venus bright,

or Anorexia, who left

a lemon stain on my flannel sheet?



It's all much of a muchness.



In Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital

a kidney machine

supports the latest hunger-striker

to have called off his fast, a saline

drip into his bag of brine.



A lick and a promise. Cuckoo spittle.

I hand my sample to Doctor Maw.

She gives me back a confident All Clear.

“What to do when your young cast hits puberty, one of your older stars dies, your original director drops out and the next promised book is going on a year overdue? …(Author JK) Rowling is still working on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which is said to be longer than Goblet of Fire by a chapter and isn’t due to hit book stores until next year. Considering that, when Order of the Phoenix finally is published, it will be three years between books with two more still to come, by the time the seventh book is ready to be movie-fied, (actor Daniel) Radcliffe could be playing Dumbledore.” Yahoo! News

Apart from the problems of the actors’ aging, part of the charm of the series’ original conception, I thought, was the idea that, with a book a year each chronicling a year at Hogwarts, the characters and

the readers would both grow in realtime. That’s unfortunately shot to hell now, with two successive three-year intervals between the second and third and the third and fourth books. Not only will the readers grown up with Harry Potter, but it is beginning to look as if early readers like my son, with whom I’ve read each book aloud as it is released, will be too old to be interested in the conclusion of the series, if Rowling ever gets there.

In more children’s literature news, “Imagine a library where books are sorted by color, or shape, or by how they make someone feel. This week, such a library is being made available for free to anyone with an Internet connection. The library, a joint project of the University of Maryland and the Internet Archive, is billed as the world’s largest digital library for children.

Every page of Alice in Wonderland and 200 other books have been scanned into the International Children’s Digital Library’s collection… Eventually, 10,000 texts from 100 cultures are planned. But for the project to be a success, kids will have to enjoy reading from computer screens.” NPR