“A cunning statistical study has exposed scientists as sloppy reporters. When they write up their work and cite other people’s papers, most do not bother to read the original.” Change a few words of this New Scientist piece and might we be talking about webloggers as well?
Monthly Archives: December 2002
Let’s Pull a Jeffords?
The Rittenhouse Review suggests we might focus some attention on some Republican senators who might be inclined to put distance between themselves and Lott. “In the event that Sen. Lott declines to resign or even to apologize for having heaped praise upon the 50-year-old, thoroughly discredited, and unconscionably heinous agenda of the 100-year-old, quasi-corpse known as Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), the refusal of Sens. Chafee, McCain, Snowe, and Specter to abandon the oh-so-cleverly-subtle racist enterprise that is today’s Republican Party will speak volumes, not only about American politics today, but about political power generally and the morality and character of these particular senators.” Addendum: Later that day, RR notes, Arlen Spector, who never fails to disappoint, stated, “His comment was an inadvertent slip, and his apology should end the discussion.”
Did You Bring Bottles?
Groceteria.net: “a site on the subject of supermarket history and architecture, roughly covering the period from the 1920s to the 1970s. It is not a site about current supermarket issues and locations, except in historical perspective, and it is not connected with nor owned by any supermarket chain, past or present.”
My friend Duncan used to theorize that the price of a can of tuna could be used as the basic measure of any given city’s cost of living. He was right. You can learn an awful lot about a place by visiting its supermarkets.
Supermarkets are one of the most important and overlooked elements of American life. I’m fascinated by them, and my road trips always include visits to the local chains, from Winn-Dixie in the south to Giant in Baltimore, from Cub Foods and Rainbow in Minneapolis to Kohl’s in Wisconsin. Harris Teeter, Alpha Beta, Piggly Wiggly, and the “holy trinity” of Safeway, Kroger, and A&P: I’ve done more than my share…
I’m really picky about my supermarkets. By this, I don’t mean that I shop in the newest, sleekest stores with the most fabulous produce departments. On the contrary, I’m more drawn to smaller and older stores which are perpetually in danger of being either closed or “upgraded”.
Don’t Tread on Me.
Declare Your Town a Civil Liberties Safe Zone: “Bill of Rights Defense Committees are forming in cities and towns across the country, declaring the USA Patriot Act null and void within their borders.” Utne Reader
Limits Sought on Wireless Internet Access:
“The Defense Department, arguing that an increasingly popular form of wireless Internet access could interfere with military radar, is seeking new limits on the technology, which is seen as a rare bright spot for the communications industry.” NY Times
Designing robot?
Designing a robot that can sense human emotion
Forget the robot child in the movie “AI.” Vanderbilt researchers Nilanjan Sarkar and Craig Smith have a less romantic but more practical idea in mind.
“We are not trying to give a robot emotions. We are trying to make robots that are sensitive to our emotions,” says Smith, associate professor of psychology and human development.
Their vision, which is to create a kind of robot Friday, a personal assistant who can accurately sense the moods of its human bosses and respond appropriately, is described in the article, “Online Stress Detection using Psychophysiological Signals for Implicit Human-Robot Cooperation.” The article, which appears in the Dec. issue of the journal Robotica, also reports the initial steps that they have taken to make their vision a reality. EurekAlert!
The abstract is here:
Robots are expected to be pervasive in the society in a not too distant future where they will work extensively as assistants of humans in various activities. With this in view, a novel affect-sensitive architecture for human-robot cooperation is presented in this paper where the robot is expected to recognize human psychological states. As a demonstration, an online heart rate variability analysis to infer the mental stress of a human engaged in a task is presented. This technique involves real-time heart rate monitoring, signal processing using both Fourier Transforrn and Wavelet Transform, and inferring the stress condition based on the level of activation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems using fuzzy logic. Results from human subject trials are presented to validate the presented methodology. This stress detection technique is expected to be useful in the future human-robot cooperation activities, where the robot will recognize human stress and respond appropriately.
A survey on body awareness and the self:
“You are asked to participate in a voluntary research study conducted by Daniel M.T. Fessler, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, from the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. You are a possible participant in this study if you are at least 18 years of age.
The purpose of the study is to explore the roles played by different parts of the body in people’s conceptions of themselves.
If you volunteer to participate in this study, we would ask you to complete a survey. You would be asked to indicate a) how important various parts of your body are for your identity or sense of self, and b) how much you are aware of , or sense, various parts of your body. The total length of time for completion of the survey is approximately 3 minutes.”
War and Peace is 165:
“Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don’t tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist- I really believe he is Antichrist- I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my ‘faithful slave,’ as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you- sit down and tell me all the news.”
It was in July, 1805, and the speaker was the well-known Anna Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honor and favorite of the Empress Marya Fedorovna. With these words she greeted Prince Vasili Kuragin, a man of high rank and importance, who was the first to arrive at her reception. Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la grippe; grippe being then a new word in St. Petersburg, used only by the elite.
All her invitations without exception, written in French, and delivered by a scarlet-liveried footman that morning, ran as follows:
“If you have nothing better to do, Count [or Prince], and if the prospect of spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too terrible, I shall be very charmed to see you tonight between 7 and 10- Annette Scherer.”
So starts Tolstoy’s agony and ecstasy, which is available on the web here. It debuted 165 years ago today.
RIP Zal Yanovsky:
Guitarist With Lovin’ Spoonful Dies at 57: “Zal Yanovsky, whose distinctive guitar playing and ebullient personality helped make the Lovin’ Spoonful one of the most popular rock groups of the late 1960’s, died on Friday at his home outside Kingston, Ontario. He was 57.” NY Times Only the Youngbloods could hold a candle to them for good-timey infectivity. Time to get out my Best of the Spoonful CD…
Fans of pencils pocket No. 2, opt for their No. 1
“We are talking about the legendary Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602, which went out of production in 1998. Up in Writers’ Valhalla, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and Archibald MacLeish are shedding a silent tear. Down here on Earth, Stephen Sondheim, Andre Gregory, and Roger Rosenblatt are scrounging to locate leftover 602s. The pencils once cost 50 cents; now they are selling for as much as $20 apiece on the Internet.” Boston Globe
Tech’s answer to Big Brother —
Declan McCullagh: Ways to Poindexter-proof personal information CNET
Those Tax-‘n’-Spend Republicans:
New Tax Plan May Bring Shift In Burden: “As the Bush administration draws up plans to simplify the tax system, it is also refining arguments for why it may be necessary to shift more of the tax load onto lower-income workers.” Washington Post
Present at the Creation:
A Night at the Opera: “(I)in 1933, following the disappointing release of Duck Soup… (t)he Marx Brothers were all but washed up — at least as far as their studio, Paramount Pictures, was concerned. The film, which is now considered a classic, turned off both audiences and critics, and the fallout left the team looking away from the silver screen for work.
…For Morning Edition, Jeff Lunden reports that although things may have looked dreary for the brothers’ film careers, their greatest success was just around the corner. As part of the Present at the Creation series, he looks at the origins of the Marx Brothers’ classic film, A Night at the Opera.”
Nigerian Net Scam, Version 3.0:
“In the latest iteration of the Nigerian e-mail swindle, scammers pose as buyers interested in big-ticket items for sale on the Net. Thanks to a little-known U.S. banking loophole, they’re bilking Americans out of thousands.” Wired News
May 1968 Graffiti:
translations from the Paris barricades. Bureau of Public Secrets
Kenneth Patchen:
So it is the duty of the artist to discourage all traces of shame To extend all boundaries To fog them in right over the plate To kill only what is ridiculous To establish problem To ignore solutions To listen to no one To omit nothing To contradict everything To generate the free brain To bear no cross To take part in no crucifixion To tinkle a warning when mankind strays To explode upon all parties To wound deeper than the soldier To heal this poor obstinate monkey once and for all To verify the irrational To exaggerate all things To inhibit everyone To lubricate each proportion To experience only experience To set a flame in the high air To exclaim at the commonplace alone To cause the unseen eyes to open To admire only the abrsurd To be concerned with every profession save his own To raise a fortuitous stink on the boulevards of truth and beauty To desire an electrifiable intercourse with a female alligator To lift the flesh above the suffering To forgive the beautiful its disconsolate deceit To flash his vengeful badge at every abyss To HAPPEN It is the artist
Are Ravers Mad?
A new German psychiatric study reported on Yahoo! News says Mental Illness Often Predates Ecstasy Use. However, although there are other reasons to question the often-reported association between Ecstasy use and neuronal damage, I don’t think this study is one. The methodology involved interviewing subjects twice at a 3.5-year interval. Quite simply, the finding that most had had psychiatric disturbance before ecstasy use would be expected, given that ecstasy use increased during the interval of the study and that psychiatric illness is more prevalent than ecstasy use. Given these two facts, most of those with psychiatric illness who reported that they had used ecstasy by the end of the study would have reported that they had not during their initial interview. The fact that the prevalence of ‘mental illness’ was higher in ecstasy users than in nonusers is misleading, and probably attributable to the fact that they apparently sought any DSM-IV (the official ‘bible’ of all psychiatric diagnoses, from the American Psychiatric Association) diagnoses. Some diagnosable conditions should not properly be called mental illnesses, and furthermore other substance use disorders, which are DSM-IV diagnoses, should probably have been excluded, as these will surely have a nonrandom association with reported ecstasy use.
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Remixed Propaganda:
Micah Wright’s powerful posters are on sale. Good Christmas gifts for your culture-jamming friends (or a warblogger whose nose you want to tweak)?
dervala.net:
I don’t know how I missed her; adding it now to my blogroll.
Confessions of a Mild-Mannered Enemy of the State:
Bureau of Public Secrets:
“Making petrified conditions dance by singing them their own tune . . . . . Don’t call us, do it yourself !”
Happy belated birthday, Kenneth Patchen:
On (December 13) in 1911 Kenneth Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio. Patchen’s varied work and talents — as poet, novelist, painter, graphic designer — are most often labeled “early beat,” in spite of an outlook that bristled at labels and the “penny-a-line vulgarity” of beat writing. Some prize Patchen’s love poetry highest, poems written to his wife, Miriam, who nursed Patchen through a decades-long spinal injury — one that kept him more or less constantly in pain and in bed for his last 12 years, and for which a surgery fund was set up by T.S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, e.e. cummings, and others. Others prize his experiments in picture-poetry or in poetry-jazz, or the boat-rocking edge he brought to his protest poems, as here in “The Hangman’s Great Hands,” from 1937:
“And all that is this day …
The boy with cap slung over what had been a face …
Somehow the cop will sleep tonight, will make love to his wife …
Anger won’t help. I was born angry. Angry that my
father was being burnt alive in the mills; Angry that
none of us knew anything but filth, and poverty. Angry
because I was that very one somebody was supposed
To be fighting for
Turn him over; take a good look at his face …
Somebody is going to see that face for a long time.
I wash his hands that in the brightness they will shine.
We have a parent called the earth.
To be these buds and trees; this tameless bird Within
the ground; this season’s act upon the fields of Man.
To be equal to the littlest thing alive,
While all the swarming stars move silent through The
merest flower
… but the fog of guns.
The face with all the draining future left blank …
Those smug saints, whether of church or Stalin, Can
get off the back of my people, and stay off. Somebody
is supposed to be fighting for somebody … And Lenin
is terribly silent, terribly silent and dead.“
There are several recordings available of Patchen reading to jazz; though none exist of this session remembered by Charlie Mingus in his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog:
We improvised behind him while he read his poems, which I read ahead of time.
It’s dark out, Jack — this was one of his poems.
“It’s dark out, Jack, the stations out there don’t identify themselves, we’re in it raw-blind like burned rats, it’s running out all around us, the footprints of the beast, one nobody has any notion of. The white and vacant eyes of something above there, something that doesn’t know we exist. I smell heartbreak up there, Jack, a heartbreak at the center of things, and in which we don’t figure at all.” Salon Literary Daybook
Here’s a wonderful page of painted and silkscreened poems by Patchen, including:
I got me the blue dawg blues.
If the devil don’t wag this world,
How come all you lousy cats
Lickin’ away at his shoes!
Here’s Kenneth Rexroth’s 1957 essay Kenneth Patchen, Naturalist of the Public Nightmare, in which he describes why he is not taking the advice of the poetry establishment of the day to steer clear of Patchen.
Today is also the eightieth anniversary of the publication of Eliot’s The Wasteland, which continues to demand our close reading.
Kenneth Patchen:
So it is the duty of the artist to discourage all traces of shame To extend all boundaries To fog them in right over the plate To kill only what is ridiculous To establish problem To ignore solutions To listen to no one To omit nothing To contradict everything To generate the free brain To bear no cross To take part in no crucifixion To tinkle a warning when mankind strays To explode upon all parties To wound deeper than the soldier To heal this poor obstinate monkey once and for all To verify the irrational To exaggerate all things To inhibit everyone To lubricate each proportion To experience only experience To set a flame in the high air To exclaim at the commonplace alone To cause the unseen eyes to open To admire only the abrsurd To be concerned with every profession save his own To raise a fortuitous stink on the boulevards of truth and beauty To desire an electrifiable intercourse with a female alligator To lift the flesh above the suffering To forgive the beautiful its disconsolate deceit To flash his vengeful badge at every abyss To HAPPEN It is the artist
George Gilder loses…
…at The Confidence Game, sharing with us a dimwitted thesis as to “why I trust the most disgraced chief executive more than I do the most reputable public servant.
… I trust chief executives because they deal in projects that can go bankrupt. They cannot repeatedly or consistently lie about their companies because the truth will out in a relatively short time. Even at Enron, Lay and Skilling could deceive themselves and the public only for a matter of months.” He seems to think the difference between corporate executives and politicians is akin to that between physicists and sociologists, and then confuses metaphor and reality. George, the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. Forbes [thanks, Richard]
The World According to Google:
Blogdex says this paean by Steven Levy to the ‘online Oracle of Delphi’ is one of the most-blinked pieces in the weblog sphere, but IMHO it probably has nothing new to say to any of my readers. MSNBC
And here’s what the world is using the Oracle to look for — movies, pop stars, tv shows, gaming, and ikea — that about covers the top twenty queries. I had never heard of the subjects of a number of them and, even after checking out several of them, I still don’t know what they refer to. For example, here is Google’s translation of a page about something called Loft Story:
Veiled the martyrdom is finished, you finally will be able to look at again Correspondent Special Thursday evening. Thomas loupé the walk of prides LGBT but leaves victorious season 2 of the loft, accompanied on the road by universal glory by the Karine floorcloth , outside it rains of the shit.
Without surprised the survey of this site gave the 2 names of gaining, thus confirming that you were right and that you are a beautiful band of assholes.
This site is declared died by smothering scathodic officially, the burial having already taken place during the 12 previous weeks it will not have there additional ceremony. And so that you are not too much to trust to have been faithful to this allegedly different site, we will conclude on a deserved photographic epitaph. Toxic & zord.
What in the world?? But, then, the words of an oracle derive some of their power from their obscurity, don’t they?
National Review’s Editors on Trent Lott on National Review Online —
‘Lott Should Go’: ‘We have long considered Lott a clumsy and ineffective Republican leader, and his controversial Strom Thurmond birthday remarks are a spectacular confirmation of that judgment. Is Lott a racist? We don’t think so. Are many of the attacks on him dishonest and opportunistic? Yes. But he has been a poor leader of Senate Republicans, and the latest gaffe will only further erode his standing and his ability to lead.’
Sean Penn Arrives in Baghdad:
‘ “I would hope that all Americans will embrace information available to them outside conventional channels. As a father, an actor, a filmmaker, and a patriot, my visit to Iraq is for me a natural extension of my obligation (at least attempt) to find my own voice on matters of conscience.”
Penn’s visit to Iraq has been organized by the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national U.S. organization of policy analysts with offices in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.’
Train yourself to be ready if your pet disappears:
The Boston Globe comes up with a helpful, comprehensive action plan.
Was attack on Moby driven by intolerance?
“The motive for the attack remains a mystery. Moby had just finished performing a two-hour-plus set that began with songs from his albums Play and 18, plus older, more dance-oriented material. It was a triumphant clubland homecoming that climaxed with a charming set of cover songs from artists as diverse as Lynyrd Skynyrd and Radiohead. Moby was attacked when signing autographs after the show.” This happens in the context of the legendary intolerance of Boston; the simmering feud between Moby and Eminem; and perhaps, by extension, between the dance and hip hop worlds in general. Was it veiled, or not-so-veiled, homophobia? ‘brawn against brains’?
”Perceived weakness in America prompts a strong reaction,” said Boston University social history professor Joseph Boskin. ”If someone is perceived as effeminate, it prompts an even stronger reaction. What goes over big in popular culture is a sense of authority, a sense of masculinity.”
And even Moby has confessed that his music is not particularly masculine.
”A lot of these kids, white and black, want music that reaffirms their masculinity,” he told Spin magazine. ”I’m straight, but I love going to house-music clubs and flirting with women and gay men. This is a leap most of America seems unprepared to make.”
At the Paradise show, Moby endured heckling from at least two men. One, clearly under the influence and perhaps mistaking the diminutive performer for Axl Rose, yelled ”I want to hear some rock ‘n’ roll!”
Referring to the World Wrestling Federation, Moby shot back, ”There’s something about the whole guttural voice thing that’s so WWF.” Boston Globe
City Ablaze: Edinburgh fire ‘could last for days’ BBC. Edinburgh is one of my favorite places in the world. Its Old Town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with many buildings dating back to medieval times. I’ve spent endless pleasurable moments wandering its streets through the years. Ruling out loss of life, the centers of many American cities could burn down with little of merit lost, but this is mournful.
R.I.P. Mary Hansen
Ten Reasons Why Mary Hansen Was Cool: “It is with great sadness that we report the death of Stereolab’s Mary Hansen. Ms. Hansen, who joined the band as a singer in its early years and, along with Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier, became a core member, was in a cycling accident on Monday, December 10.” chartattack
Treesit Blog:
“By Remedy, an activist who has been sitting 150 feet up an ancient Redwood in Freshwater, California. She has been in her tree Jerry for over 8 months as part of a community’s protest to save their forests and watershed. She uses Debian GNU/Linux on her laptop and a 5 mile 802.11b wireless link to get online.”
Crimes of War Project:
“The Crimes of War Project is a collaboration of journalists, lawyers and scholars dedicated to raising public awareness of the laws of war and their application to situations of conflict. Our goal is to promote understanding of international humanitarian law among journalists, policymakers, and the general public, in the belief that a wider knowledge of the legal framework governing armed conflict will lead to greater pressure to prevent breaches of the law, and to punish those who commit them.”
Recommended Reading:
If you input the URL of a webpage of yours, this utility by Mark Pilgrim will analyze your links and recommend “some interesting sites you might not be reading.” You can refine its thinking by reacting to its suggestions.
Froogle:
“a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google’s search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase.”
Black People Love Us!
Welcome to Our Website: “We are well-liked by Black people so we’re psyched (since lots of Black people don’t like lots of White people)!! We thought it’d be cool to honor our exceptional status with a ROCKIN’ domain name and a killer website!!”
Whoops! Johnny’s totally stumped!
Resigned to the State of Affairs?
Henry Kissinger resigns from Sept. 11 panel and Embattled Bishop Law Resigns but Lott Won’t Step Down, Spokesman Says Nando Times [req. free registration]
A ‘Sorry’ Spectacle
In general, politicians apologize because they get caught. They don’t come forward, unprompted, with sudden pangs of conscience. They don’t go before the cameras, bleary-eyed and haunted, to acknowledge sleepless nights and uneasy dreams for some past wrong. They may have a Hamlet complex (indecisiveness) or a Lear complex (insecurity) but they almost never have a Macbeth complex (guilt).
This is, in part, what makes the public political apology, such as incoming Senate majority leader Trent Lott has been issuing like scrip for the past few days, such compelling spectacle. Because everyone knows that apologies are almost always wrung out reluctantly — or qualified with excuses or patently insincere — the public, for a brief moment, has the upper hand. The public makes the man dance, not for his soul but his future. Washington Post op-ed
President Decries Lott’s Comments:
Speaking to a largely black audience here at an event meant to highlight Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda, Bush surprised listeners with the rare condemnation of a congressional leader from his own party. The remarks, part of a call for racial fairness, drew loud applause. Washington Post
Howard Kurtz: Not a Whole Lotta Love:
George Bush had the chance to throw Trent Lott a lifeline. Instead, with a strong condemnation of Lott’s “offensive” remarks, Bush squirted grease under the senator’s shaky footing.
(…) What Bush did, in publicly rapping Lott’s knuckles, was morally sound and politically smart, both for himself and his party. He could have just had Ari keep on making bland statements. But in the chemical chain reaction in which Washington’s wise men divined just a day or two ago that Lott’s job wasn’t in serious jeopardy, a few electrons shifted, and the new equation was that his fate might be spinning out of control. Washington Post
Hunting Where the Ducks Are:
The Ways Republicans Talk About Race: ‘The scandal surrounding Trent Lott is not about a poor choice of words at a birthday party for Strom Thurmond. It’s about the political choices Republicans made in the 1960’s to “go hunting where the ducks are”— code language for winning over white segregationists who abandoned the Democratic Party in the South. It’s about continuing to benefit from racial prejudice through subtle and not-so-subtle sound bites that play to the Republican Party’s far-right base. It’s about the choice today to deny that the party is as much the party of Thurmond as it is the party of Lincoln.’ NY Times op-ed
High-tech ways to yield your money faster:
“MasterCard is testing a new credit-card system designed to speed the payment process at check-out counters and replace cash transactions at places such as movie theaters and fast food restaurants.
The system, called MasterCard PayPass, allows consumers with specially equipped credit cards to simply tap or wave their cards against a reader to make a payment, rather than having to swipe the card. If the value of the purchase is under a certain amount, the cardholder needn’t sign a receipt.” CNET
Visa readies wireless smart cards: “Visa International is making a push with a new smart-card payment system that would allow hands-free transactions.
The credit card company said Thursday that it plans to set up a new system that uses smart cards fitted with radio-frequency chips (sometimes called RF identification, or RFID, tags) that will allow people to conduct a transaction, such as paying a subway fare or buying a soda, without having to fish for change or swipe a credit card.” CNET
Sun, Compaq support smart-card push: “Facing declining profits from traditional credit cards, financial institutions are once again pushing microchip-equipped credit cards. But now they have new allies: Sun Microsystems and Compaq Computer.
Financial companies have failed to popularize so-called smart cards in the United States, but the new effort is different in several ways, which could mean success this time. With the backing of American Express and Visa International in combination with three major card issuers, millions of the cards are expected to enter circulation this year.
And with each card that’s issued, Sun Microsystems makes a little bit of money as a royalty for its Java software, used to run the software on the tiny computer inside the card. ” CNET
Reading the Minds of the Dead?
Afterlife Beliefs May Have Biological Basis:
‘A new study by a University of Arkansas psychologist proposes that beliefs about the afterlife may amount to more than a cultural construct. They may in fact have a biological basis – arising from the human brain’s unique ability to comprehend the mental states of other people.
In an article published in the November issue of The Journal of Cognition and Culture, assistant professor of psychology Jesse Bering outlines a study in which he demonstrated that even individuals who claim to believe that all consciousness ceases at death were inclined to say that certain psychological states persist. He calls this contradiction the Simulation Constraint Hypothesis of Death Representation.
“It comes down to the fact that we’re unable to imagine the absence of certain psychological states,” Bering said. “People make biological inferences about death – they know that once you’re dead, you don’t need to eat anymore. They also know that once you’re dead, your brain stops working. But because they’ve never experienced a complete lack of thought, they find it difficult to make that inferential leap – that once the brain stops, thought stops too.” ‘
I think that what relates to the inability to imagine the cessation of thought and consciousness is the fear of dying oneself. It is less related to the capacity for ‘theory of mind’ or empathy than one’s own narcissism.
Annals of Depravity —
Police Scan Internet Sex Cannibal’s Home Movies: “German police are watching home videos made by a sex cannibal who apparently shared a last meal of flambeed penis with his willing victim before carving him up and freezing the man’s remaining body parts to eat later.” Yahoo! News [via Die Puny Humans, thanks to Walker]
nginco
Tell me what you make of this [via danklife]
Thoughtful Orcs:
Digital Actors in Rings Can Think: “The software that gives life to the sweeping battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy does more than paste 50,000 cookie-cutter warriors onto a digital backdrop.” Wired
R.I.P. Orlando Villas Boas
It seems like a week when the candidates for canonization in my church are leaving us. First Fr. Berrigan, and now the last of the Villas Boas brothers.
Orlando Villas Boas, a leading advocate of indigenous rights who never shied away from recounting his adventures in Brazil’s vast Amazon rain forest, died yesterday. He was 88.
The fun-loving, gregarious Mr. Villas Boas was the last surviving of four brothers who dedicated their lives to protecting Brazil’s Indian tribes. Boston Globe
Hubble Watches Galaxies Engage in Dance of Destruction
“NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is witnessing a grouping of galaxies engaging in a slow dance of destruction that will last for billions of years. The galaxies are so tightly packed together that gravitational forces are beginning to rip stars from them and distort their shapes. Those same gravitational forces eventually could bring the galaxies together to form one large galaxy. The name of this grouping, Seyfert’s Sextet, implies that six galaxies are participating in the action. But only four galaxies are on the dance card. The small face-on spiral with the prominent arms [center] of gas and stars is a background galaxy almost five times farther away than the other four. Only a chance alignment makes it appear as if it is part of the group. The sixth member of the sextet isn’t a galaxy at all but a long “tidal tail” of stars [below, right] torn from one of the galaxies.” STScI
General Sees Scant Evidence of Threat Near in U.S.
The nation’s top general for domestic security says he has seen little evidence to suggest an imminent terrorism threat inside the United States by members of Al Qaeda’s network, and warns against using “McCarthyism” in combating terror.
“I am not aware of a significant threat to this nation” from so-called sleeper cells, said the officer, Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart.
General Eberhart, who as head of the military’s newly created Northern Command oversees the Pentagon’s contribution to domestic counterterrorism efforts, expressed concern that undetected terrorist cells could be operating in the United States and plotting new attacks. NY Times
Google Goodies:
Two new toys from Google Labs: Google Viewer lets you view search results as scrolling web page images, and Google Webquotes gives you search results with quotes about them from elsewhere on the web. [via Lockergnome]
Mystery Enshrouds Writer and Internet Persona:
“Kola Boof says a fatwa was ordered up on her in London for her stand against organized religion, but particularly against Arab Muslims. Sudanese officials in London, however, said that was not true. One of those officials did denounce her in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, a leading Arab-language newspaper in the United Kingdom. A number of well-known African-American activists have taken up her causes, which include her opposition to slavery in the Sudan and her condemnation of stoning and female castration and other harsh measures taken against African women.” NY Times
Keeping Dick Cheney’s Secrets
"Low, low low"?
Linda Hall: Coolspeak:
“I find righteous denunciations of the present state of language no less dismaying than the present state of language,” Lionel Trilling once wrote. But then Trilling, I am certain, did not live to see Columbia students address their women instructors (the ones they get along with) as “Dude.” On the same campus where I am Dude, I hear a professor tell a student that she has chosen a cool topic.
…The measure of the decline in reading is to be found not in S.A.T. scores—those may be artificially high owing to coaching and cramming (cranking!)—but in our decreasing ability to speak. “A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression,” Mario Vargas Llosa observed not long ago. “We learn how to speak correctly—and deeply, rigorously, and subtly—from good literature, and only from good literature.” The Hudson Review
Facing Race, Rape…
Jim Sleeper: …and Outrage:
Since the international outcry against false charges that the black “Scottsboro Boys” had raped a white woman in the South in 1931, liberals, at least, have been reluctant to acknowledge the ugly entanglement of race and rape in our national experience.
America’s original racial sin was a long trail of rapes of black women by white men, especially slave masters. Many African Americans’ “white blood” and lighter skins marked these violations and other illicit intimacies, some of them gentler, perhaps, but most of them palpably coerced in the shadow of white omnipotence.
The Central Park jogger trial of 1989, in which five black and Latino teenagers were convicted of assaulting and raping a young, white investment banker, seemed to turn the tables on Scottsboro: This time, the “black” boys were indeed guilty, everyone agreed, with liberals and feminists at the head of that consensus.
Now comes Manhattan Dist. Atty. Robert Morgenthau’s recommendation that the teens’ convictions be vacated. Morgenthau had to respond after Matias Reyes, an imprisoned serial rapist who had never been charged or convicted in the jogger case, came forward this year and established that it was he who raped her that night in 1989. LA Times commentary
Celebrities ask Bush to stop war rhetoric:
‘Celebrities mobilized against a possible war in Iraq on Tuesday, gathering to publicize a letter urging President Bush to avoid military action.
More than 100 entertainers signed the missive, which says a war with Iraq will “increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks, damage the economy and undermine our moral standing in the world.” ‘ Salon
Convicted? Need a Gun?
No Problem: “Since the creation of the National Instant Criminal Background Check, or NICS, administered by the FBI to screen firearm sales, 10,000 people forbidden from owning guns have obtained them despite FBI screenings, according to the Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms.
The poor quality of criminal records maintained by states is the main reason the NICS system fails to identify individuals prohibited from acquiring guns, said Jim Kessler, policy director of the Americans for Gun Safety foundation.” Wired
Whistling While Rome Burns Dept:
Arctic Ice Melting at Record Rate: “More ice melted from the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet this year than ever before recorded, report scientists from the University of Colorado. The same team found that the extent of Arctic sea ice reached the lowest level in the satellite record in 2002, offering further evidence that climate change is already altering the Arctic.” Environmental News Service Along with the erosion of domestic civil liberties, the impending devastation of Iraq, and the gutting of the arms control infrastructure, surely one of the most execrable legacies the Bush dysadministration will leave the generation to come will be having failed to address global warming or, indeed, acknowledge that it is even a real phenomenon, while we still could.
Cockney pub landlady is toast of the art world,
Named one of the most influential figures in modern art: “Since the East End has become the fashionable district for London’s young artists, the Golden Heart pub in Spitalfields has become its hub.
For her role as a homely mother confessor to the angry generation of British conceptual artists, Sandra Esquilant has won the improbable reward of 80th place in a list of the 100 most powerful figures in contemporary art.” Telegraph UK
The Rite of the Sprinkler:
Damage reports trickle in after concert hall deluge: “…(D)uring a Philadelphia Orchestra rehearsal, a sprinkler system began discharging dirty water over musicians and incoming music director Christoph Eschenbach… A second Steinway grand piano was damaged in Tuesday morning’s deluge at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, some warping has begun to appear in the floor of Verizon Hall, and 11 orchestra musicians are reporting damaged instruments.” Philadelphia Inquirer
"I’ll do whatever it takes…"
Parents Panic In Pursuit Of Toys: “With little more than two weeks until Christmas, parents are scrambling to find the FurReal robotic cat, Bratz doll play sets and other hot toys that are already scarce on store shelves.” CBS News
Bad Sex:
Third time ‘lucky’ for bad sex winner:
Author Wendy Perriam has won one of the least coveted prizes in literature – the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
And it was third time “lucky” for the author who has the misfortune of being nominated three times in row.
Some of the biggest names in literature had been nominated for the title, including Will Self and Nicholas Coleridge. BBC
Dialect Survey
“The Dialect Survey uses a series of questions, including rhyming word pairs and vocabulary words, to explore words and sounds in the English language. There are no right or wrong answers; by answering each question with what you really say and not what you think is “right”, you can help contribute to an accurate picture of how English is used in your community.
The test is designed for speakers of North American English, but speakers of all varieties of English are welcome to take the test.”
My Bloginality is INTP
R.I.P. Philip Berrigan
“Phil Berrigan died December 6, 2002 at about 9:30 PM, at Jonah House, a community he co-founded in 1973, surrounded by family and friends. He died two months after being diagnosed with liver and kidney cancer, and one month after deciding to discontinue chemotherapy. Approximately thirty close friends and fellow peace activists gathered for the ceremony of last rites on November 30, to celebrate his life and anoint him for the next part of his journey. Berrigan’s brother and co-felon, Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan officiated.” I was saddened to learn of Berrigan’s death, having supported and followed his war resistance since the anti-Vietnam movement. It is quite timely to celebrate his life.
PHIL’S STATEMENT 12/05/02 (via Elizabeth McAlister)Philip began dictating this statement the weekend before Thanksgiving. It was all clear – he had it written in his head. Word for word I wrote…
When I Lay Dying…of cancer
Philip Berrigan
I die in a community including my family, my beloved wife Elizabeth, three great Dominican nuns – Ardeth Platte, Carol Gilbert, and Jackie Hudson (emeritus) jailed in Western Colorado – Susan Crane, friends local, national and even international. They have always been a life-line to me. I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the earth itself. We have already exploded such weapons in Japan in 1945 and the equivalent of them in Iraq in 1991, in Yugoslavia in 1999, and in Afghanistan in 2001. We left a legacy for other people of deadly radioactive isotopes – a prime counterinsurgency measure. For example, the people of Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Pakistan will be battling cancer, mostly from depleted uranium, for decades. In addition, our nuclear adventurism over 57 years has saturated the planet with nuclear garbage >from testing, from explosions in high altitudes (four of these), from 103 nuclear power plants, from nuclear weapons factories that can’t be cleaned up – and so on. Because of myopic leadership, of greed for possessions, a public chained to corporate media, there has been virtually no response to these realities…
At this point in dictation, Phil’s lungs filled; he began to cough uncontrollably; he was tired. We had to stop – with promises to finish later. But later never came – another moment in an illness that depleted Phil so rapidly it was all we could do to keep pace with it… And then he couldn’t talk at all. And then – gradually – he left us.
What did Phil intend to say? What is the message of his life? What message was he leaving us in his dying? Is it different for each of us, now that we are left to imagine how he would frame it?
During one of our prayers in Phil’s room, Brendan Walsh remembered a banner Phil had asked Willa Bickham to make years ago for St. Peter Claver. It read: “The sting of death is all around us. O Christ, where is your victory?”
The sting of death is all around us. The death Phil was asking us to attend to is not his death (though the sting of that is on us and will not be denied). The sting Phil would have us know is the sting of institutionalized death and killing. He never wearied of articulating it. He never ceased being astonished by the length and breadth and depth of it. And he never accepted it.
O Christ, where is your victory? It was back in the mid 1960’s that Phil was asking that question of God and her Christ. He kept asking it. And, over the years, he learned
· that it is right and good to question our God, to plead for justice for all that inhabit the earth
· that it is urgent to feel this; injustice done to any is injustice done to all
· that we must never weary of exposing and resisting such injustice
· that what victories we see are smaller than the mustard seeds Jesus praised, and they need such tender nurture
· that it is vital to celebrate each victory – especially the victory of sisterhood and brotherhood embodied in loving, nonviolent community.
Over the months of Phil’s illness we have been blessed a hundred-fold by small and large victories over an anti-human, anti-life, anti-love culture, by friendships – in and out of prison – and by the love that has permeated Phil’s life. Living these years and months with Phil free us to revert to the original liturgical question: “O death, where is your sting?” <span class=”attrib”Pittsburgh IndyMedia
Out of this world
The music of the spheres turns out to be a mixture of whistles, chirrups, howls, static and something that sounds like chattering voices. Oh, and a string quartet and a choir.
The string quartet and the choir were not Don Gurnett’s idea. The mind of an astrophysicist tends to favour the hard evidence. But it was Gurnett who built the devices that captured the whistles and chirrups as Nasa’s Voyager probes hurtled past Saturn, Uranus and Neptune on their 25-year journey into deep space, and he was there to share a standing ovation when they formed part of Sun Rings, an hour-long piece written by Terry Riley for the Kronos Quartet and a 60-voice choir, given its world premiere at the University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium recently.” Guardian UK
The Prodigy with His Shirt Out
Jazz liberates an autistic 10-year-old Jerusalem Report
Why hobbits are the new heroes
“Fantasy films now exert a stranglehold on the world’s cinemas in a way no genre has ever done before… War movies are too brutal, the Wild West permanently tarnished: it’s fantasy that is now setting box offices ablaze.” Telegraph UK
‘Burning Bush’ comment draws prison term
“A man who made a remark about a “burning Bush” during the president’s March 2001 trip to Sioux Falls was sentenced Friday to 37 months in prison.
Richard Humphreys of Portland, Oregon was convicted in September of threatening to kill or harm the president and said he plans to appeal. He has said the comment was a prophecy protected under his right to free speech.
Humphreys said he got into a barroom discussion in nearby Watertown with a truck driver. A bartender who overheard the conversation realized the president was to visit Sioux Falls the next day and told police Humphreys talked about a “burning Bush” and the possibility of someone pouring a flammable liquid on Bush and lighting it.
“I said God might speak to the world through a burning Bush,” Humphreys testified during his trial. “I had said that before and I thought it was funny.” ‘ CNN
New Tools for Domestic Spying, and Qualms:
“…(F)ederal and local police agencies are looking for systematic, high-tech ways to root out terrorists before they strike. …(O)fficials are hatching elaborate plans for dumping gigabytes of delicate information into big computers, where it would be blended with public records and stirred with sophisticated software.
In recent days, federal law enforcement officials have spoken ambitiously and often about their plans to remake the F.B.I. as a domestic counterterrorism agency. But the spy story has been unfolding, quietly and sometimes haltingly, for more than a year now, since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Some people in law enforcement remain unconvinced that all these new tools are needed, and some experts are skeptical that high-tech data mining will bring much of value to light.” New York Times
The Biological Basis of the Placebo Effect — Imaging technologies bring empirical rigor to the study of a mysterious medical phenomenon. “What we’re getting,” says Harvard Medical School’s Ted Kaptchuk, “is good preliminary evidence that describes the hardwiring of the placebo effect–that is, the impact of symbolic treatment, and how it’s mediated through the neurobiology of the brain to produce physical effects in illnesses.” The Scientist
Decrying of Lott:
GOP Senate Leader Hails Colleague’s Run As Segregationist: “Senate Republican leader Trent Lott of Mississippi has provoked criticism by saying the United States would have been better off if then-segregationist candidate Strom Thurmond had won the presidency in 1948.
Speaking Thursday at a 100th birthday party and retirement celebration for Sen. Thurmond (R-S.C.) in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Lott said, “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.” Washington Post [with apologies to Pynchon…]
Please — if you’re linking to Follow Me Here, there are four or five different URLs that will get your readers here. But the best one is the “alias”, http://gelwan.com/followme.html. If it’s easy, could you take a moment and edit the link to me in your blogroll so it reads that way? Or, if you maintain your links through blogrolling.com, just click here to blogroll me.
That way, not only will the link not get broken if I migrate, but I’ll be better able to aggregate ‘reverse links’ such as these, which point to me in a variety of ways (for all of which I’m grateful, BTW!):
Please — if you’re linking to Follow Me Here, there are four or five different URLs that will get your readers here. But the best one is the “alias”, http://gelwan.com/followme.html. If it’s easy, could you take a moment and edit the link to me in your blogroll so it reads that way? Or, if you maintain your links through blogrolling.com, just click here to blogroll me.
That way, not only will the link not get broken if I migrate, but I’ll be better able to aggregate ‘reverse links’ such as these, which point to me in a variety of ways (for all of which I’m grateful, BTW!):
Please — if you’re linking to Follow Me Here, there are four or five different URLs that will get your readers here. But the best one is the “alias”, http://gelwan.com/followme.html. If it’s easy, could you take a moment and edit the link to me in your blogroll so it reads that way? Or, if you maintain your links through blogrolling.com, just click here to blogroll me.
That way, not only will the link not get broken if I migrate, but I’ll be better able to aggregate ‘reverse links’ such as these, which point to me in a variety of ways (for all of which I’m grateful, BTW!):
Please — if you’re linking to Follow Me Here, there are four or five different URLs that will get your readers here. But the best one is the “alias”, http://gelwan.com/followme.html. If it’s easy, could you take a moment and edit the link to me in your blogroll so it reads that way? Or, if you maintain your links through blogrolling.com, just click here to blogroll me.
That way, not only will the link not get broken if I migrate, but I’ll be better able to aggregate ‘reverse links’ such as these, which point to me in a variety of ways (for all of which I’m grateful, BTW!):
Bigfoot is dead. Really.
Lovable trickster created a monster with Bigfoot hoax:
‘Ray L. Wallace was Bigfoot. The reality is, Bigfoot just died,” said Michael Wallace about his father, who died of heart failure Nov. 26 in a Centralia nursing facility. He was 84.
The truth can finally be told, according to Mr. Wallace’s family members. He orchestrated the prank that created Bigfoot in 1958.
Some experts suspected Mr. Wallace had planted the footprints that launched the term “Bigfoot.” But Mr. Wallace and his family had never publicly admitted the 1958 deed until now.’ Seattle Times
What the World Thinks in 2002
How Global Publics View: Their Lives, Their Countries, The World, America The Pew Research Center
An Animal’s Place: Thanks to rebecca for pointing to this. I’ve had no interest in absolutist vegetarianism for several decades, but a more mindful and ethical take on my meat-eating is appealing, even overdue:
“For my own part, I’ve discovered that if you’re willing to make the effort, it’s entirely possible to limit the meat you eat to nonindustrial animals. I’m tempted to think that we need a new dietary category, to go with the vegan and lactovegetarian and piscatorian. I don’t have a catchy name for it yet (humanocarnivore?), but this is the only sort of meat eating I feel comfortable with these days. I’ve become the sort of shopper who looks for labels indicating that his meat and eggs have been humanely grown (the American Humane Association’s new ”Free Farmed” label seems to be catching on), who visits the farms where his chicken and pork come from and who asks kinky-sounding questions about touring slaughterhouses. I’ve actually found a couple of small processing plants willing to let a customer onto the kill floor, including one, in Cannon Falls, Minn., with a glass abattoir.” New York Times Magazine
Helping chickens come home to roost for Poindexter:
Eyeballing Total Information Awareness:
<a href=”http://sfweekly.com/issues/2002-11-27/smith.html/1/index.html
“>The SF Weekly‘s column by Matt Smith in the Dec 3 issue points out that there may be some information that John M. and Linda Poindexter of 10 Barrington Fare, Rockville, MD, 20850, may be missing in their pursuit of total information awareness. He suggests that people with information to offer should phone 1 301 424 6613 to speak with that corrupt official and his wife. Neighbors Thomas E. Maxwell, 67, at 8 Barringon Fare ( 1 301 251 1326), James F. Galvin, 56, at 12 ( 1 301 424 0089), and Sherrill V. Stant (nee Knight) at 6, may also lack some information that would be valuable to them in making decisions — decisions that could affect the basic civil rights of every American. cryptome
Bush anything but moronic, according to author. When Mark Crispin Miller began the Dyslexicon, compiling Dubya’s burgeoning catalogue of verbal blunders and malapropisms, he thought he was just out for the entertainment value. But he ended up noticing something far more sinister.
“Bush is not an imbecile. He’s not a puppet. I think that Bush is a sociopathic personality. I think he’s incapable of empathy. He has an inordinate sense of his own entitlement, and he’s a very skilled manipulator. And in all the snickering about his alleged idiocy, this is what a lot of people miss.”
…Miller’s rendering of the president is bleaker than that. In studying Bush’s various adventures in oration, he started to see a pattern emerging.
“He has no trouble speaking off the cuff when he’s speaking punitively, when he’s talking about violence, when he’s talking about revenge.
“When he struts and thumps his chest, his syntax and grammar are fine,” Miller said. “It’s only when he leaps into the wild blue yonder of compassion, or idealism, or altruism, that he makes these hilarious mistakes.” The Star (Ontario)
Fuck hiphop
(yeah, that’s right, he said it): I was also sent here from the null device (I really should check in there more often!)
I know you’ve been thinking it. And if you haven’t, you probably haven’t been paying attention. The art we once called hip hop has been dead for some time now. But because its rotting carcass has been draped in platinum and propped against a Gucci print car, many of us have missed its demise.
I think the time has come to bid a farewell to the last black arts movement. It’s had a good run but it no longer serves the community that spawned it. Innovation has been replaced with mediocrity and originality replaced with recycled nostalgia for the ghost of hip hop past, leaving nothing to look forward to. Honestly when was the last time you heard something (mainstream) that made you want to run around in circles and write down every word. When was the last time you didn’t feel guilty nodding your head to a song that had a ‘hot beat’ after realizing the lyrical content made you cringe. applesauce
Baby’s Named a Bad, Bad Thing
This site about the horrible babynaming practices committed in the name of misguided ‘uniqueness’ is getting much airplay. I was pointed to it from the null device, where you’ll find speculation about a rule of inverse proportion between the uniqueness of a child’s name (or a tortured [mis-]spelling) and the intelligence of her/his parents.
Subject Matter:
Rafe Colburn at rc3 writes about the double life of the weblogger who has a non-virtual life as well as her/his online presence. While some of my boundaries are abit different — Rafe not only doesn’t mention his boss or talk about competing products, as he notes, but does not appear to mention his work at all (I’m a casual reader; I can’t swear to the fact that a scholarly study of rc3 wouldn’t provide clues as to what he does…), whereas my being a psychiatrist is one of the things for which I think some people read FmH — I agree with his conclusion that confessional weblogs are only pseudo-intimacy. I’ve never met anyone in the ‘real world’ who had previously known me only from my site, whereas Rafe seems to do so with some frequency (why?), but it would probably freak me out far less than it would were I publishing an online diary. For example, you don’t want to know (and I feel no compulsion that you should) what just happened to me at work…
Rafe also points to this definition of bikeshed discussions, which, I agree, is a very useful metaphor I will file away for appropriate future use, although I further agree that (it’s a pity) no one will know what the hell I’m talking about when I make the reference.
Legonomics:
Surprisingly compelling reasons to make Legos the U.S. national currency defective yeti
The Rightward Press: This is one of my pet peeves about the crybaby Right. Washington Post columnist EJ Dionne nails it: “The fat is in the fire on the issue of media bias, and that is a good thing. It’s time to revisit a matter on which the conventional wisdom is, roughly, 180 degrees off.
You hear the conventional wisdom all the time from shrewd conservative commentators who understand that political pressure, relentlessly applied, usually achieves its purposes. They have sold the view that the media are dominated by liberals and that the news is skewed against conservatives.
This belief fueled the construction of a large network of conservative institutions — especially on radio and cable television — that provides conservative viewpoints close to 24 hours a day. Conservatives argued that hopelessly left-wing establishment news sources needed to be balanced by brave, relentless voices from the right.
But the continuing attacks on mainstream journalists have another effect. Because the drumbeat of conservative press criticism has been so steady, the establishment press has internalized it. Editors and network executives are far more likely to hear complaints from the right than from the left.
To the extent that there has been a bias in the establishment media, it has been less a liberal tilt than a preference for the values of the educated, professional class — which, surprise, surprise, is roughly the class position of most journalists.”
Israel ‘killed unarmed civilians’: “A UN official says eight of 10 Palestinians killed during an Israeli incursion into Gaza were civilians – but the Israelis are denying it.” BBC World
And:
Falling arches: “McDonald’s is under fire all over the world — literally. With restaurant bombings and shutdowns on the rise, can the fast-food conglomerate withstand the heat of global anti-Americanism?” The icon is readily transmuted into a target of the various species of contempt for what it signifies; ubiquitous brand recognition has its costs.
“In many parts of the world if people can’t reach the embassy, there’s always a McDonald’s,” says James L. Watson, a Harvard professor of anthropology who studies McDonald’s, particularly its function as a “worldwide political target.”
Fast-food bombings began after the Cold War, when opposition political groups — whether it was Chilean splinter group FPMR/D or the Greek Fighting Guerrilla Formation — started to focus more on the sources of “cultural power,” Watson says: “to questions of cultural imperialism as opposed to rather old-fashioned forms of military imperialism.” Salon
Starbucks beware…
Related:
Got Paper?
Beth Israel Deaconess copes with a massive computer crash: “The crisis began on a Wednesday afternoon, Nov. 13, and lasted nearly four days. Before it was over, the hospital would revert to the paper systems that governed patient care in the 1970s, in some cases reverting to forms printed ”Beth Israel Hospital,” from before its 1996 merger. Hundreds of employees, from lab technicians to chief executive officer Paul Levy, would work overtime running a quarter-million sheets of paper from one end of the campus to the other.” Boston Globe
Top Ten:
The Defining Moments in Digital Culture: “Film and TV have had them, as have music and books. What we’re talking about are those moments that have defined and redefined a genre, whether it’s a line, character, lyric, scene, or performance. The internet, though very much in its infancy compared to other mass mediums, has still managed to have many of its own seminal moments.” Shift [via Walker]
Also: Modern Humorist’s Top Ten Funniest Moments of the Past Ten Years: ” A laughably arbitrary and idiosyncratic list by John Aboud”.
Male biological clock?
Research reveals a cellular basis : “Men, as well as women, have a reproductive clock that ticks down with age.” EurekAlert!
What’s Normal?
A Look at Asperger Syndrome: “It was an exciting moment for me — and, I imagine, for other parents of children with the baffling neurological disorder called Asperger syndrome — when The New York Times Magazine published Lawrence Osborne’s “Little Professor Syndrome” in June 2000.
The title may have been condescending, but the article itself was terrific, perhaps the best yet about Asperger’s in a mainstream publication: a 4,500-word exploration, in remarkably vivid and sympathetic language, of a world that few readers had visited.
So it was doubly exciting when Mr. Osborne, a widely published health and science journalist, expanded the article into a book, American Normal, published last month.” NY Times
Different Diet-Acne Link Proposed:
Plague of pimples blamed on bread:
Eating too much refined bread and cereal, rather than chocolate and greasy foods, may be the culprit behind the pimples that plague many a youngster.
That is the theory of a team led by Loren Cordain, an evolutionary biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Highly processed breads and cereals are easily digested. The resulting flood of sugars makes the body produce high levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1).
This in turn leads to an excess of male hormones. These encourage pores in the skin to ooze large amounts of sebum, the greasy goop that acne-promoting bacteria love. IGF-1 also encourages skin cells called keratinocytes to multiply, a hallmark of acne, the team say in a paper that will appear in the December issue of Archives of Dermatology.
An Australian team will soon test the theory by putting 60 teenage boys with acne on a low-carbohydrate diet for three months to see if it makes a difference. New Scientist
Adding Insult to Injury:
Radioactive patients set off subway alarms: “Americans undergoing radioactive medical treatments risk setting off anti-terrorism sensors in public places, and subsequent strip searches by police, warn doctors at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
A 34-year-old patient who had been treated with radioactive iodine for Graves disease, a thyroid disorder, returned to their clinic three weeks later complaining he had been strip-searched twice in Manhattan subway stations. Christopher Buettner and Martin Surks report the case in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association.” New Scientist
Slicing Spam…
…with smart email addresses: “Software that generates a unique email address for every message sent could help cut down spam, a US computer scientist believes.
This is because hidden in the address are encrypted rules determining who is permitted to reply to the address, as well as how many replies can be sent and when.” New Scientist
Interracial Intimacy: “White-black dating, marriage, and adoption are on the rise. This development, however, is being met with resistance—more vocally by blacks than by whites.” — Randall Kennedy, The Atlantic
A white writer has a different take on the development:
In a world brimming with bad news, here’s one of the happiest trends: Instead of preying on people of different races, young Americans are falling in love with them.
Whites and blacks can be found strolling together as couples even at the University of Mississippi, once the symbol of racial confrontation.
“I will say that they are always given a second glance,” acknowledges C. J. Rhodes, a black student at Ole Miss. He adds that there are still misgivings about interracial dating, particularly among black women and a formidable number of “white Southerners who view this race-mixing as abnormal, frozen by fear to see Sara Beth bring home a brotha.”
Mixed-race marriages in the U.S. now number 1.5 million and are roughly doubling each decade. About 40 percent of Asian-Americans and 6 percent of blacks have married whites in recent years. — Nicholas Kristof, NY Times
Wolf in dog’s clothing
“Man’s best friend has been around longer than anyone thought. The great Dane, pit bull and Pekinese are all descended from a few far-eastern wolves that befriended humans at least 15,000 years ago.
Even the new world canines – such as Alaskan huskies and Chesapeake Bay retrievers – have DNA sequences which make them indistinguishable from European dogs, geneticists report in Science today.” Guardian UK
The Cultural Politics of the Sociobiology Debate — Abstract:
The sociobiology debate, in the final quarter of the twentieth century, featured many of the same issues disputed in the culture war in the humanities during this same time period. This is evident from a study of the writings of Edward O. Wilson, the best known of the sociobiologists, and from an examination of both the minutes of the meetings of the Sociobiology Study Group (SSG) and the writings of Stephen Jay Gould, the SSG’s most prominent member. Many critics of sociobiology, frequently radical scientists who were attached to the lineage of the New Left, argued for the same multicultural values promoted by radical humanities professors in this period. Conversely, liberal sociobiologists defended the universalist values of the liberals in the humanities. Journal of the History of Biology
With a link to a PDF of the full article.
Why we get ill at weekends
Researchers in the Netherlands say a significant proportion of the population is suffering from so-called leisure sickness.
They have found 3% of people become ill with a variety of different complaints as soon as they stop working and try to relax.
Symptoms like fatigue, muscular pains and nausea are most common at weekends.” BBC
Seven tenths incorrect: Heterogeneity and change in the waist-to-hip ratios of Playboy centerfold models and Miss America pageant winners:
We seek to correct what appears to be an emerging “academic urban legend” (Tooby & Cosmides, 2000) regarding the stability and precision of what heterosexual males find sexually attractive. The academic urban legend in question is that there has been a remarkable consistency in the waist-to-hip ratios (WHR) of both Playboy centerfolds and winners of the Miss America pageant. Because these women are taken as representative icons of venerated beauty standards, this supposed consistency has been taken by some authors as prima facie evidence of an evolved basis for this very specific preference, although that claim would seem to be refuted by studies that have failed to find the preference in societies whose conditions resemble those of our Pleistocene ancestors far more closely than our own. There is also dispute about the validity of the arguments that have been made for why such a preference would have been adaptive in the environments of our evolutionary past. We do not pursue these points here; what we dispute are the empirical assertions that have been made about the WHR of these supposed twin pillars of American beauty: Playboy Playmates and Miss Americas. The data presented below demonstrates both that the WHR has been more variable than others have suggested and that the average WHR has in fact changed in what seems to us to be a consistent fashion over time. Journal of Sex Research
Now Here’s a Really Big Idea
“A university professor wants to create a catalog of human ideas. Not
just a few choice ideas, but all of them. He believes this ‘mental map’
will help bridge the gaps between the world’s cultures.” Wired News
Shoot Back, Record the Lens That Records You
Ronald Deibert, a University of Toronto associate professor of political science, wants people to grab their cameras and hit the shopping malls Dec. 24 and participate in World Sousveillance Day. Surveillance means “to view from above.” Sousveillance means “to view from below.”
On the day before Christmas, at noon, local time, all over the world, Deibert wants citizens to “shoot back” at surveillance cameras — not with guns, but with cameras of their own. Participants are to head out, in disguise, to their favorite malls and public spaces, and photograph all the security cameras they find. Wired News
