“A serious literary magazine published by a hospital? Sounds unlikely. But the Bellevue Literary Review, published by the New York University department of medicine at Bellevue Hospital, is drawing on a long literary heritage. Bellevue has nursed William Burroughs, Eugene O’Neill and many other close-to-the-edge writers and artists. Danielle Ofri, the review’s editor-in-chief and a doctor at Bellevue, believes scientists and doctors too often dismiss the power of language. Words, she tells Michael Bond, are a vital part of the healing process.” New Scientist

Hamas urges Iraq to use suicide bombers: “(Hamas leader Abdul Aziz) Rantisi’s remarks were unusual for Hamas, which has focused on fighting Israel since taking up arms in 1987 at the start of the first Palestinian uprising.” AP [via Salon]

Australian spiders to be sent into space Salon

Sex improves your sense of smell. It is known that levels of the hormone prolactin surge after orgasm, and frequent sex boosts the overall levels of this hormone. Now a study of mice shows that elevated prolactin causes the number of neurons in the brain’s olfactory bulb to proliferate, presumably heightening the sense of smell. Researchers suggest that the evolutionary significance of this finding is that increased “scents-itivity” adds to recognition of mates and offspring, cementing family bonds. Telegraph UK

In a move of unusual political courage and integrity, ‘Gov. George Ryan will commute the death sentences of all 156 inmates on Illinois’s death row, and he has sent letters to victims’ families warning them of the move, his spokesman said Saturday… Ryan halted the state’s executions nearly three years ago after courts found that 13 death row inmates had been wrongly convicted since the state resumed capital punishment in 1977 – a period during which only 12 other inmates were executed… Ryan spread the blame in his hour-long speech, calling the state’s criminal justice system “inaccurate, unjust and unable to separate the innocent from the guilty, and at times very racist.” ‘ The Nando Times If anyone can point me to any press about any behind-the-scenes political machinations involved in this decision, I would be grateful.

“Police appear to have recovered about 500 original Beatles tapes that were stolen in the 1970s, including some never-released tracks, during raids Friday on members of a piracy racket in England and the Netherlands.” AP [via Salon]

The scourge of the Greens accused of dishonesty:

The Bjorn Lomborg saga took a decidedly Orwellian turn this week. Readers will recall that Mr Lomborg, a statistician and director of Denmark’s Environmental Assessment Institute, is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, which attacks the environmental lobby for systematically exaggerated pessimism. Environmentalists have risen as one in furious condemnation of Mr Lomborg’s presumption in challenging their claims, partly no doubt because he did it so tellingly. This week, to the delight of greens everywhere, Denmark’s Committees on Scientific Dishonesty ruled on the book as follows: “Objectively speaking, the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty.”

How odd. Why, in the first place, is a panel with a name such as this investigating complaints against a book which makes no claim to be a scientific treatise? The Skeptical Environmentalist is explicitly not concerned with conducting scientific research. Rather, it measures the “litany” of environmental alarm that is constantly fed to the public against a range of largely uncontested data about the state of the planet. The litany comes off very badly from the comparison. The environmental movement was right to find the book a severe embarrassment. But since the book was not conducting scientific research, what business is it of a panel concerned with scientific dishonesty? The Economist

Group decision-making in animals: “Groups of animals often need to make communal decisions, for example about which activities to perform, when to perform them and which direction to travel in; however, little is known about how they do so. Here, we model the fitness consequences of two possible decision-making mechanisms: ‘despotism’ and ‘democracy’. We show that under most conditions, the costs to subordinate group members, and to the group as a whole, are considerably higher for despotic than for democratic decisions. Even when the despot is the most experienced group member, it only pays other members to accept its decision when group size is small and the difference in information is large. Democratic decisions are more beneficial primarily because they tend to produce less extreme decisions, rather than because each individual has an influence on the decision per se. Our model suggests that democracy should be widespread and makes quantitative, testable predictions about group decision-making in non-humans.” Nature [requires free registration]

The Neanderthal’s Necklace by Juan Luis Arsuaga. Review:

Suppose a remnant population of Neanderthals were discovered today. What would we do with them? Would we welcome them into the human family and try to set them up in suburban semis, send California Man to high school with our teenagers, or corral them in a reservation in Siberia?

The Neanderthals are an interesting test case of what it means to be human. As Juan Luis Arsuaga asks: “Apart from us, has there ever been another life form on Earth that was conscious of its own existence and of its place in the world?” The Neanderthal’s Necklace is his attempt to convince us that the Neanderthals fit the bill. And in this endeavour he is very successful. New Scientist

after finding traces in London flat

Ricin was used to assassinate the Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov in London in 1978. He was injected using the point of an umbrella and died within four days. The symptoms of ricin poisoning are similar to flu, including a high temperature and loss of appetite. Hospitals and doctors across the UK have been put on alert for signs of ricin poisoning.

The toxin must be inhaled, ingested or injected to take effect. But it is thought that it would be more difficult to mount a mass attack with ricin than with anthrax or botulinum toxin, for example. New Scientist

I love sp!ked‘s Don’t Panic column (“An antidote to panics based on dodgy statistics and dubious arguments.”). Scroll down to the second item to explore the hysteria over ricin in the UK, for example. ” ‘The primary aim of these [terrorists] is to cause fear’, said a British military expert last night. Right now, we seem to be doing a good job of that ourselves.”

Dubious Rape Accusations?
Girls behaving badly: “The UK government and the public prosecution service are currently struggling to increase the numbers of rape convictions. But the dubious cases already reaching court should cast doubt on official aims.” — Barbara Hewson in sp!ked. This is one of those things a woman but not a man can write…

Making it up as you go along: “America is either sending a relatively small number of troops with infrared goggles to defeat Saddam at night, or it’s planning a full-on 100,000-strong invasion. Officials claim that war isn’t inevitable, while others reckon it’s already underway. And while British politicians talk up their united stance with the US, their troops on the ground fear America’s misguided missiles. What’s going on – and what’s not going on?

The confused and uncertain coverage of the Gulf reflects the confusion and uncertainty at the heart of American and British policy on Iraq. It is the incoherence of Bush and Blair’s plans for Iraq that creates the space for so much out-loud speculation about their intentions. The lack of direction among British and American officials creates a kind of canvas on to which we can all project our own interpretation of events, and our preferred course of action over Saddam.” — Brendan O’Neill in sp!ked

“Doctors nationwide are reporting a surge in silver poisoning cases. The growing popularity of bogus silver-based remedies on the Internet appears to be the culprit.” Wired

“Family conversations have deteriorated into a “daily grunt” that leaves young children unable to talk properly, according to the man in charge of maintaining educational standards in Britain.

Alan Wells blames television and long working hours and fears that thousands of families are becoming like the Royle family, the monosyllabic layabouts in the BBC sitcom, who live in the shadow of the television. ” Times of London

“A neural understanding of human nature broadens rather than constricts our sense of who we are…”, says neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux:

Recently, there has been a growing interest in a more partitioned view of the self. One partition is between the minimum and the narrative self. The former is an immediate consciousness of one’s self; the latter a coherent self-consciousness that extends into the past and future. But these conscious partitions, which themselves may be based on different mechanisms, are, as Freud noted, only the tip of the iceberg. Terms such as the primitive, core, ecological and non-conceptual self, refer to unconscious aspects of personal identity that define who we are. The study of implicit or unconscious aspects of the self are now major themes in social psychology. In contrast to the narrative and minimal self notions, which depend on language to encode our awareness of who we are in consciousness, these implicit aspects of the self are not accessible for verbal self-reflection.

Although the self has not been a major research interest for neuroscientists, some have ventured into the territory. Michael Gazzaniga and Antonio Damasio, for example, emphasise – as I do – the importance of understanding the conscious self in the context of the unconscious workings of the brain. But unlike Damasio and Gazzaniga, whose ideas are about the organisation of the mind and experience, I have been attempting to develop a theory that links the self to the detailed understanding of the cellular basis of brain function that is emerging in neuroscience. Before I can explain this, though, I need to discuss the relation of the self to consciousness in more detail.

“A federal plan to stop many unwanted telemarketing calls this year with a national “do-not-call” list may be delayed because of opposition from key lawmakers.” AP [via Salon]

“Some of the newly discovered objects are probably twice as faint as those seen on the famous Hubble Deep Field from the mid-1990s and lie a staggering 13 billion light years away. Although more analysis is needed, they are possibly some of the first galaxies, caught in the process of forming.” New Scientist

The hunting of the ‘snark’:
Warblogger Jeff Jarvis, at whose self-professed genius in developing “vlogs” (video blogs) I recently scoffed, now reminds us (although he won’t link to the post; probably a wise idea if he wants to keep self-promoting so assiduously) that I’d scoffed at him before:

“When I started this blog, the first snarky anti-me post online came from Follow Me Here. And now he’s snarking at vlogging. I must be onto something.”

The lesson for me is to remember at whom I’ve snarked (thanks Jeff, I’m flattered you apply the term to me, and that you delegate to me a role as an arbiter of fatuity) before. Now the inanity of his vlogging concept makes more sense, and I get a boost of renewed confidence in my own consistency.

But I agree with him on one thing. As I’ve written in my sidebar from the beginning (except that I credited its source and used quotation marks),

As Steve Baum says at Ethel, “If anyone’s offended by anything on this site then please do notify me immediately. I like to keep track of those times when I get something right.”

So even Jarvis’ smarmy comment is less brilliant than derivative, n’est-ce pas? If the snark’s shoe fits, wear it…

But take heart, Jeff, recall what la Rochefoucauld (1613-80) said:

“He who lives without folly isn’t so wise as he thinks.”

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the new novel by the esteemed Directory of Wonderful Things‘ Cory Doctorow, is out, in a variety of senses. Doctorow has released the entire text under a Creative Commons license for you to do as you see fit. If you like it, it would be seemly to go out and plunk down the dollars for a hard copy. I will.

Brooke, at The Bitter Shack, comments:

Ploughshares Into Swords: “…Turning the girders from the World Trade Center into raw materials for a warship — the USS New York — is obscene, and an affront to the memory of the people who died Sept. 11. Did anyone consider if the people who died there would like the scene of their murders turned into an instrument of war? How about the families? Again, a tragedy is being cynically coopted by an administration with a preexisting agenda which is handily advanced by the global spread of war around the world. They are militarizing our grief.”

This would be a righteous move. Go, Chuck. Newsday.com

Bar Raids Irritate Owners, Drinkers:
While I think driving under the influence is an irresponsible scourge for which we as a society should have zero tolerance, police incursions into bars for sobriety testing are a very ominous phenomenon. Washington Post

“Ink-jet printing technology that prints fully assembled electric and electronic gadgets in one go could signal the end of assembly lines.” New Scientist

When self-image takes a blow, many turn to television as a distraction

‘Whether you fancy yourself a jet-setting sophisticate or a down-to-earth outdoorsy type, a fast-track corporate star or an all-around nice guy, new research indicates that you probably tune out information that challenges your self-image by tuning in to television…

“We each have ways in which we like to perceive ourselves,” said Moskalenko, a doctoral student in psychology at Penn. “In many cases self-image is carefully constructed and zealously guarded, and it’s difficult to experience a conflict between who we are and who we would like to be. Television appears to be an effective means of reducing awareness of how we are falling short of our own standards.” In a study of undergraduates’ viewing habits after receiving either positive or negative results on an intelligence test, subjects who received poor scores watched television longer and waited longer before averting their eyes from the screen.’ EurekAlert

Me? I turn to FmH at those times… [grin].

Christopher Hitchens: Prevention and Pre-Emption – When is starting a war not aggression?: “In the present case of Iraq, a pre-emptive war is justified by its advocates on the grounds of past Iraqi aggressions and the logical presumption of future ones—which would make it partly retaliatory and partly preventive. This is fraught with the danger of casuistry since if no sinister weaponry is found before the war begins, then the war is re-justified on the grounds that it prevented such weapons from being developed. (And if the weapons are found, as one suspects they will be, after the intervention has taken place, then they could be retrospectively justified as needful for defense against an attack that was obviously coming.)” Slate

Thomas Friedman: “Here’s a prediction: In the end, 9/11 will have a much bigger impact on the Arab and Muslim worlds than it does on America… For Arabs and Muslims, the shock has been that this act was perpetrated by 19 of their sons in the name of their faith. As a result their religious texts, political systems, schoolbooks, chronic unemployment, media and even their right to visit America have all been spotlighted and questioned – sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly.” NY Times op-ed

“Three men, three different instruments, music of poetic beauty — and lives often overshadowed by tragedy.

Recent months have brought forth three very different biographies. They document with varying degrees of success the lives of trumpeter Chet Baker and tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, both of whom have left this world, and singer Jimmy Scott, who enjoys a splendid career revival after decades of humiliation, misunderstanding — and obscurity.” UPI Arts & Entertainment

Study: Speed of Gravity, Light Match
“Einstein was right. The speed of gravity matches the speed of light, according to astronomers who took advantage of a rare planetary alignment to measure one of the fundamental forces of nature.” Yahoo! News

“He’s got a big problem. Her name is Linda“, says Timothy Noah. Slate.

What Bush dares not say about North Korea. Fred Kaplan: “…(T)here are reasons for favoring military confrontation with Iraq but not with North Korea—some of them are even good reasons—but most of them can’t easily be discussed in public, not by officials anyway, without setting off further contradictions and alarm bells.” Kaplan’s argument is essentially that “we’re going to war against Iraq because we can; we’re not going to war against North Korea because we can’t.” To acknowledge that is to acknowledge that Kim Jong Il has effectively deterred us (which once having been said would encourage other nations to develop nuclear weapons as quickly as possible) and also that Saddam Hussein does not have enough WMD to do much damage, giving the lie to Bush’s assertions that we are seeking to topple Saddam because he has already developed WMD. This illogic is, in fact, broadly noted in media discussions of the issue. Kaplan, however, makes another interesting point.

His thought is that we don’t mention the 800-lb. gorilla who is in the room om the Middle East but is not in play in the Korean peninsula — oil — but not for the reasons we usually hear in what Kaplan dismisses this as the “crudely Marxist” argument. . These usually amount to little more than “Of course it’s the oil, stupid.” Of course, Kaplan says, the US does not want to appear “overly pecuniary.” But a more important reason is that it would be unsafe for the entire region while Saddam Hussein is still in power for the US to pull out of Saudi Arabia, although increasingly apparent that it is strategically advantageous to do so, both because “*(o)ur military presence provides a handy target for terrorists (rhetorically, if not physically) and aligns us too tightly with a corrupt kingdom from which we might wisely begin to seek distance.” Slate

Kaplan thus neatly tries to explain why the obvious sham of couching the necessity for war with Iraq in moral terms is maintained in the face of charges of the incoherency, inconsistency and hypocrisy of US policy. Interesting — if North Korean analysts are as sophisticated as Kaplan in realizing why the US might not be able to explicitly explain why it inttends to handle open defiance so differently in the two regions, it is plausible that their timing in precipitating this crisis just now may have something to do with capitalizing on the resultant moral humiliation the US suffers.

Related: “The Bush administration said yesterday that it would agree to direct talks with North Korea on how the isolated state could meet its nuclear obligations, a subtle shift in position designed to give both sides a face-saving way to resolve the standoff over North Korea’s weapons programs.” Washington Post

Large Racial Disparity Found By Study of Md. Death Penalty
“Maryland prosecutors are far more likely to seek the death penalty for black suspects charged with killing white victims, a racial disparity that mirrors national trends and raises questions about whether capital punishment is being administered fairly, University of Maryland researchers said yesterday.” Washington Post: Front Page

Dead Man’s Switch, inspired by the locomotive hardware of the same name, is a piece of hardware which, if you ever fail to do the periodic reset it demands of you, will embark on a series of tasks you have decided upon in the event of your demise, such as sending out emails or posting to internet newsgroups the news of your passing, and password-encrypting sensitive files on your computer (to which you’ve presumably left the password with those you intend to see those files). The New York Times wrote about it in May, 2002, and Wired in June:

” The man in charge of archiving and maintaining electronic copies of Norway’s most important historical documents is dead and so is access to those archives.

So the director of the Norwegian cultural center is pleading for hackers to help him crack the center’s password-protected database. “

Anyone know if the Norwegians ever got their database decrypted? [Of course, the Dead Man’s Switch developer wouldn’t publicize it if it had…] Update: Yes

. [thanks Walker]

Related? Those Norwegians are just showing themselves to be world-class-threat hackers, aren’t they? Yahoo! News

Few Takers for CD Settlement Cash: “Who’d refuse free money? Lots of compact disc buyers, apparently, who are staying away in droves rather than receive up to $20 in compensation as part of a price-fixing settlement between 41 states and a handful of record companies.” Wired

“The exhibition ‘Illegal Art’ (and its accompanying CD and Web site) asserts that American copyright laws are overly restrictive and outdated…

It sounds like a plan for drawing hordes of screaming lawyers to your door: create compilation CD’s with sampled music from the likes of the Beatles, James Brown and Johnny Cash, not to mention the voice of Dan Rather; include as many songs as possible that have already sparked legal battles; do it all without getting permission from the copyright owners; and distribute the CD’s at a nationally touring art exhibition.

Oh yeah, and give the music away online for the millions of people around the globe who can’t make it to the show.” NY Times

“Hot on the scent of a suspected terrorist? Darpa— the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — hopes to give literal meaning to the phrase. It wants someone to develop a sniffing machine that can detect individuals by their body odor.” NY Times

“The doctor who says she has produced two cloned babies in the past weeks has told the BBC three more cloned children will be born by February.

Dr Brigitte Boisselier, who is chief executive of the US-based Clonaid organisation, told the Breakfast with Frost programme that she had implanted five cloned embryos, two of which she says have already been born.” BBC

This week markes the fiftieth anniversary of the stage debut of Beckett’s watershed play, reviled at its first appearance. The New York Times tells the tale. The text of the play is online [act 1] [act 2].

VLADIMIR:

    Well? Shall we go? 

ESTRAGON:

    Yes, let's go. 

    They do not move.

Mafia is a parlour game that seems to be taking New York, at least certain literati circles, by storm, to judge by this New York Observer article, which finds it a reflection of the zeitgeist. Sounds like fun. Here are the rules in more detail. [via David Brake

]

Leuschke calls it quits, at least for now. I’ll miss ‘im… 

William Gibson now has a weblog. [via kottke]

Already-at-War Dept: US operatives are said to be active in Iraq.

About 100 US Special Forces members and more than 50 Central Intelligence Agency officers have been operating in small groups inside Iraq for at least four months, searching for Scud missile launchers, monitoring oil fields, marking minefield sites, and using lasers to help US pilots bomb Iraqi air-defense systems, according to intelligence officials and military analysts who have talked with people on the teams.

The operations, which also have included small numbers of Jordanian, British, and Australian commandos, are considered by many analysts to be part of the opening phase of a war against Iraq, even though the Bush administration has agreed to a schedule of UN weapons inspections. Boston Globe

Clifford Pickover’s ESP Experiment. This has been around the web for a long while but has begun to attract attention. See how long it takes you to figure out how it is done.

365 days:

For the entire year of 2003 (January 1st to December 31st) this page will feature one mp3 file (every day) to download. The content will be focused on musical pieces, but will also include spoken word. Listeners of the incredibly strange and outsider realm take note, for this is the majority of material that will be made available. Obscure and out-of-print recordings will be the primary focus, although once in a while there may be a change.

Alan Alda (“I’m not a scientist but I do play one on TV”) takes on President Bush on the issue of his national science advisor.

Above, all, Mr. President, I think your science advisor needs to help you help our country learn to be comfortable with uncertainty, and—as hard as this might be to believe—to put reason ahead of belief.

• College Dumps Body Parts with Construction Waste
  
• Man Who Nearly Lost Hand Vanishes
  
• Artist Defends Baby-Eating
  
• Human Foot Found in Laundry
  

— and scary

Nick Imearato, a research fellow at the Hoover Institute, said he expects the federal government to require cameras be placed every 400 feet or so in airports to monitor all aspects of airport security, from cargo areas to boarding areas. Over time, as the technology gets cheaper, he said, “This will migrate to millions of businesses and even homes.”

Such constant surveillance, even in the name of homeland security, scares civil libertarians, who feel it amounts to an illegal search of everyone who passes within view of a camera. San Jose Mercury News

Penn Jillette has an encounter with airline security that is a neat complement to, although has a very different outcome than, last week’s story by an LA writer about the treatment he and his pregnant wife received. Doesn’t hurt to be a celebrity, although Jillette’s head seems in the right place about it.

I kept saying, “Please get the police,” and they kept saying, “You’re free to go, we don’t need the police.” I insisted and they got a higher up, female, supervisor. I was polite, cold, and a little funny. “Anyone is welcome to grab my crotch, I don’t require dinner and a movie, just ask me. Is that asking too much? You wanna grab my crotch, please ask. Does that seem like a crazy person to you?” I had about 4 of them standing around. Finally Metro PD shows up. It’s really interesting. First of all, the cop is a BIG P&T fan and that ain’t hurting. Second, I get the vibe that he is WAY sick of these federal leather-sniffers. He has that vibe that real cops have toward renta-cops. This is working WAY to my advantage, so I play it.

The supervisor says to the cop, ‘He’s free to go. We have no problem, you don’t have to be here.” Which shows me that the Feds are afraid of local. This is really cool. She says, “We have no trouble and he doesn’t want to miss his flight.”

I say, “I can take an early morning flight or a private jet. ” The cop says, “If I have a citizen who is saying he was assaulted, you can’t just send me away.”

Declan McCullagh on what surveillance technology will be like in a decade: “…(T)he biggest problem with the criticism of the Total Information Awareness system is that it’s too shortsighted. It’s focused on what the Poindexters of the world can do with current database and information-mining technology. That includes weaving together strands of data from various sources–such as travel, credit card, bank, electronic toll and driver’s license databases–with the stated purpose of identifying terrorists before they strike.

But what could Poindexter and the Bush administration devise in five or 10 years, if they had the money, the power and the will?” CNET

Search for Bigfoot Outlives the Man Who Created Him

“This wasn’t a well-planned plot or anything,” said Michael Wallace, one of Ray’s sons. “It’s weird because it was just a joke, and then it took on such a life of its own that even now, we can’t stop it.”

Bigfoot defenders, including at least two scientists and a clinical psychologist who says he ran into the Big Guy two years ago in southern Oregon, are undeterred.

They give Mr. Wallace credit for the hoax, which led to news stories around the world and began thousands of campfire debates. But, they say, other evidence is too strong to let a prank kill something that has become ingrained in the culture. NY Times

“The primary goal is not so much to obtain treatment for people who might still be sick more than a year after the attack, health officials say, but rather to interview people to get a broader picture of who was affected and to look for patterns in illness and recovery that individual physicians and clinics might have missed. The power, registry planners say, will be in the numbers.” NY Times

The evidence is massive,” said Gavin Menzies of his new theory. ”I’ve got it coming out of my eyes!” His voice was filled with excitement, just as you’d expect from someone propounding one of the most revolutionary ideas in the history of history. A retired navy man with white hair, Menzies still has a hint of red in the eyebrows that frame his ocean-blue eyes. Dressed in a handsome sports jacket and tie, he cheerfully invited me into his stately Georgian house in the Canonbury section of London. What he had to say, his publicists had warned me in breathless e-mail messages, would make ”every history book in print obsolete.” NY Times

Hunting skills may not after all have triggered the tremendous burst of human evolution at the beginning of the ice ages nearly two million years ago. Instead of man the hunter, the driving force behind this evolutionary surge may have been woman the gatherer, with both mother and grandmother playing a vital role. New Scientist

If one man sits at the nuclear fulcrum of the three countries President Bush calls the “axis of evil,” it may well be Abdul Qadeer Khan.

The 66-year-old metallurgist is considered the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb. He is a national hero at home, where hospitals bear his name and children sing his praises. U.S. and other Western officials do not. They say Khan is the only scientist known to be linked to the alleged efforts of North Korea, Iraq and Iran to develop nuclear weapons. LA Times

‘Allies, not Lickspittles’

History suggests caution. Not only is the majority razor-thin, but senators are a fiercely independent lot, often reluctant to do their president’s bidding. Bill Clinton, for instance, had a rocky ride with a Democrat-controlled Congress between 1992 and 1994, famously failing to persuade lawmakers to pass his ambitious healthcare plan. Nonetheless, Mr Bush has several big advantages. First, many Republican lawmakers are all too aware that they owe their jobs to the president’s popularity and his prodigious campaigning before November’s election. Equally important, Bill Frist, the Senate’s new majority leader (and hence top agenda-setter), is a certified Friend of George. The Economist

Well, only the Statue of Liberty so far, but they have ambitious plans. CNN

Several months ago I blinked to a piece about efforts to reconstruct the Buddhas of Bamiyan from digital data.

50 art events not to miss in 2003. [Although the verbiage has shades of “must-see tee-vee”, a phrase I disliked even before it made this year’s list of banned clichés, the list is worth your attention. — FmH] Guardian UK

In the most recent issue of the Proceedings of the Archivist of the United States, a crack team of historians lead by Harvard Professor Emeritus Ruth Ascidy announced the conclusion of a sixteen year study of the 43rd U.S. President during which the team determined “to a degree approaching absolute historical certainty” that “the 43rd President of the United States was not, as supposed by some popular conspiracy theories, George W. Bush.”

The study, commissioned jointly by the Office of the Archivist and the Smithsonian Institute’s Committee on Special Inquiries, aims to put to rest decades of speculation about the actual identity of the 43rd President. “Gore’s presidency has been a hotly disputed issue in the popular media,” explains Professor Ascidy. “And, though theories claiming a Bush presidency have not been taken seriously among academic historians, the Committee felt that the ‘Bush question’ should be put to rest once and for all.” futurefeedforward

In the most recent issue of the Proceedings of the Archivist of the United States, a crack team of historians lead by Harvard Professor Emeritus Ruth Ascidy announced the conclusion of a sixteen year study of the 43rd U.S. President during which the team determined “to a degree approaching absolute historical certainty” that “the 43rd President of the United States was not, as supposed by some popular conspiracy theories, George W. Bush.”

The study, commissioned jointly by the Office of the Archivist and the Smithsonian Institute’s Committee on Special Inquiries, aims to put to rest decades of speculation about the actual identity of the 43rd President. “Gore’s presidency has been a hotly disputed issue in the popular media,” explains Professor Ascidy. “And, though theories claiming a Bush presidency have not been taken seriously among academic historians, the Committee felt that the ‘Bush question’ should be put to rest once and for all.” futurefeedforward

“is to be released next February, on what would have been his 60th birthday.

The collection of Harrison and Beatles covers is being recorded under the title ‘Songs From The Material World’ and is due for release on February 25.

Dave Davies from The Kinks and Roger McGuinn of The Byrds will feature on the record alongside the likes of Julian Lennon and Fleetwood Mac legend Peter Green.

Todd Rundgren, Donovan, the MC5’s Wayne Kramer and Midge Ure are also scheduled to record for the album, while a cover of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is expected to feature an ‘all-star’ line-up.” dotmusic

“When Susan Clancy, a psychologist at Harvard University, wanted to study people with memories of events that had never happened, she cast her net wide.

Psychonarratology : Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response: “The field of psychonarratology represents an interdisciplinary collaboration between cognitive psychology and discourse processing, and narratology and literary studies. This work provides a broad, integrative framework for pursuing research that is approachable by researchers from both disciplinary backgrounds. Marina Bortolussi and Peter Dixon survey the important problems in literary studies and demonstrate how the methodological and empirical tools of cognitive psychology are applied in this new approach.” amazon.com

“Don’t look, but today the Sun is a little bigger than usual. That’s because Earth is “at perihelion” on January 4th. What is perihelion? Our planet’s orbit is not a perfect circle, it is an ellipse. Our distance from the Sun therefore varies throughout the year; perihelion is our closest approach to the Sun.” SpaceWeather

You and i Do. Prof. Joseph Turow, form the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, wants ‘internet’ uncapitalized (and wants the internet “de-capitalized”…). “Capitalization irked him because, he said, it seemed to imply that reaching into the vast, interconnected ether was a brand-name experience… The capitalization of things seems to place an inordinate, almost private emphasis on something.” While Mr. Turow’s editor at the MIT Press agreed, the New York Times swallows hard and holds down the fort for at least a little while longer:

Allan M. Siegal, a co-author of The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage and an assistant managing editor at the newspaper, said that “there is some virtue in the theory” that Internet is becoming a generic term, “and it would not be surprising to see the lowercase usage eclipse the uppercase within a few years.”

Nominations are now being accepted for the Third Annual Weblog Awards.

“Federal and state Justice Department officials are aggressively pursuing an antitrust investigation of New Times Corp., owner of the SF Weekly and the East Bay Express, and Village Voice Media and are looking into whether the two alternative newspaper chains are cutting back on news coverage.” Essentially, the two companies may have acted in restraint of trade in a ‘horse trade’ in which each of them agreed to shut down one of its papers in a city where the other one had a competing paper. The Justice Dept. is oh-so-concerned about the cutback in “hard-hitting news coverage and analysis” that occurs when competition is killed in this fashion. It certainly does seem that the alternative weeklies are “moving farther away from their progressive, grassroots origins and acting more like the gargantuan daily newspaper conglomerates they were meant to provide an alternative to”, as this SF Bay Guardian piece opines (although, as an aside, it ought to be “conglomerates to which they were meant to provide an alternative”, not to be pedantic or anything…). However, can’t you just see Ashcroft and his minions salivating at the chance to go after the Village Voice while ignoring the far more egregious control of the information flow practiced by the media giants?

… and gets a $28 ticket. The Seattle Times

The technological predictions in The Guardian‘s Survival guide to 2003 are pretty — what else? — predictable: Bluetooth, increasing broadband penetration, WiFi, home networking, 3G mobile phones, Doom III and Xbox, blah blah blah… But there’s an interesting notion which I hadn’t considered before, of the weblog phenomenon as the new usenet.

Usenet newsgroups were rendered worse than useless by wayward discussion and wall-to-wall spam. Now, according to some web theorists, blogs are bringing back the newsgroup idea, albeit by the backdoor. The idea is that, on blogs that let readers discuss links and find out where similar ideas are being discussed elsewhere on the web, we’re seeing the rise of a kind of twenty first century Usenet – more focused, more responsive, more integrated into the rest of the online world.

There’s something enticing about the prospect, for those of us who have been online long enough to have been usenet newsgroup fanatics before the rise of other aspects of the net. But I’m not sure I see the convergence, and I’m not sure I would welcome it either. Classically, blogs continue to adhere to a one-to-many, or few-to-many, format. Although there may be reader comments and interactivity, they are not the point of most blogs (Slashdot and MeFi apart). What commands one’s loyalty for a particular weblog is its distinctive, opinionated and often idiosyncratic auteur. Arguably, a blog that became a newsgroup would in important senses no longer be a blog anymore, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein. Maybe we’ll see the rise of such a post-newsgroup phenomenon, but I hope it would not replace currently-configured weblogging. And why would the low signal-to-noise ratio in such a public discussion blogosphere not make it a ‘twenty first century Uselessnet’ with similar ‘wayward discussion and wall-to-wall spam’? Finally, could someone explain to me exactly how these beasts would be ‘more focused, more responsive, more integrated into the rest of the online world’ than the Usenet newsgroups were or are?

The other piece of welcome prophecy in The Guardian essay is that of the imminent return of William Gibson:

The most influential SF writer of the last two decades, his ideas have come to change the way we think about computers and networks. But William Gibson has always been unhappy with the future visionary tag. SF is actually about the present has been his mantra. Pattern Recognition, his new novel (his first for three years) does something he’s always threatened. It’s set in the present, not the future, in London, and follows a trend-watching heroine who’s over-sensitive to corporate logos and obsessed with tracking a “garage Kubrick” who is releasing fragments of an art film on to the net. It’s published here by Penguin in April.

Wired News put out a call to readers for the technological wonders they most looked forward to in 2002 but never saw because developers delayed release or, in some cases, abandoned them altogether. Then we tabulated nominations and selected the top 10 — or should we say bottom 10? — most-waited-for-in-vain products.

For the first time, there were quite a few winners that also made last year’s list. In the fast-moving world of technology, it’s unusual for products to be hung up long enough to qualify two years in a row, but a number of hard-working companies heroically managed it.

Interesting front in the battle for hearts and minds. Sen. Frist, new majority leader and former surgeon, assisted at the scene of a rollover accident on a Florida highway where two of six passengers died. ‘The Democratic Underground’ and the warbloggers, among others, are lining up with their take on the incident. Is Frist to be demonized and ridiculed, or lauded for his involvement? Last time I was so entertained by the political haymakers was Paul Wellstone’s funereal spectacle.

“Ticket stubs are everywhere, one of the many receipts in our daily lives – but we all save some from time to time. The Ticketstub project is a place where you can upload scanned images of your saved stubs, and tell a story about that night, that concert, that movie, what happened on that date; basically, ask youself why you saved the stub as a reminder.”

Dan Hartung at lake effect describes hashing, which is new to me but, I agree with Dan, sounds like it would be wicked fun for the right people. “Hashers play a modified game of the schoolboy game Hares and Hounds, basically hide and seek in reverse. The game involves people who lay out a trail, hares, and hounds who follow the trail. Usually it’s chalk, but flour may also be used. The main modification is that hashers (optionally) drink, before, during, and often after a run, turning them into what they call “a drinking club with a running problem”. Hashers tend to call each other by rude and sometimes obscene nicknames. The Chicago club has been featured on Wild Chicago, and I’ve always been curious — it looks like a fun crowd.” As he points out, here’s a Washington Post article about the phenomenon.

Lee Felsenstein’s Jhai Computer, which the New York Times named one of the best ideas of 2002, is attracting alot of thoughtful attention from estimable webloggers like Danny O’Brien and Rafe Colburn, who takes the occasion to dismiss the uselessness of dismissive Slashdot readers’ comments. The Jhai Foundation‘s (“Reconciliation is the opposite of war”) project needs contributions, and this seems like a worthy meme to spread.

Robert Malley, Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group and special assistant to President Bill Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs from 1998 to 2001: “The responsibility today, especially for those who wish to oppose a conflict, is to think about what will happen if war is avoided.” NY Times op-ed

Paul Krugman: “What Game Does the Nation Think It’s Playing in Korea? The Bush administration’s Korea policy has systematically violated the simple principle that deterrence requires a credible commitment to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior.” NY Times op-ed

New Year’s must’ve made me and at least one of my readers nostalgic for the FmH ver. 1.0 header. Do you welcome it or is it a step backward?

Try sleeping those pounds off.‘

That advice may sound like it comes from a bad infomercial, but recent research suggests chronic sleep deprivation can affect the body’s metabolism, which, in turn, directly affects your ability to shed those extra pounds.

Sleep deprivation is becoming an American phenomenon. The National Sleep Foundation’s 2002 “Sleep in America” poll found that Americans are chronically behind in their slumber hours, with only 30 percent of adults getting eight or more hours of sleep on weeknights and only 52 percent getting their eight hours on weekends.

Many Americans may also suffer from one or more sleep disorders. The same poll found that 74 percent of respondents experienced at least one symptom of a sleep disorder a few nights per week or more. Fifty-eight percent reported experiencing at least one sign of insomnia a few nights a week.

Could this be why one source says 90 percent of Americans fail to achieve their New Year’s resolutions?

Increasingly, science is suggesting the answer is “yes.” HealthScoutNews

‘Overused cliches, wordy redundancies and hyperbolic phrases — including the Bushism “make no mistake about it” — were declared banished on Wednesday by the university overseers of an annual list of banned words.’ Reuters puts this in their ‘Oddly Enough’ category, but [wouldn’t you expect FmH to say so?] it doesn’t seem at all odd to me… Here’s the actual list.

“As Britain struggles with the issue of the euro, the Germans and Dutch want their own currencies back… Citizens of the euro zone had no vote specifically on the change, and now 57 percent of Germans and 55 percent of the Dutch are keen to see the return of the Deutsche mark and Netherlands guilder, according to a survey by European Internet company Tiscali.” CNN

Nick Hornby reviews six graphic novels for The New York Times.

Risks of neuroacoustically data-reduced music: “Unlike with compression and decompression of computer programs (e.g. ZIP), that is to say, during lossy data compression (data reduction) the original signal is not reconstructed 1:1, but to reduce the data amount, only control signals for a synthesizer programs (called CODEC) get recorded, those are optimized in a way that during rendition the CODEC can reconstruct from these an approximation of the original picture or sound signal that appears as similar as possible for the human conscious perception, but is not identical to the original signal. The danger of this exploitation of human perception flaws is that especially by lossy audio data compression sound portions get destroyed those, although the brain would not pass them to the conscious awareness, are likely necessary for the human hearing’s own perpetual calibration.” Does anyone who knows anything about this kind of stuff think this is plausible? [via the null device]

<input type=”image” src=”http://drunkmenworkhere.org/189.php?image=1&#8243; id=”risk” alt=”click for World Domination [TM]”

onclick=”setTimeout(‘document.getElementById(\’risk\’).src=\’http://drunkmenworkhere.org/188a.php?image=\’+Math.random();’,1000);return true;”>

“Every visitor who clicks on (this) image … will conquer a piece of land (2° by 2°) for (FmH).

All territory (my) site has conquered is in the same colour on the world map.

The amount of land (FmH) has conquered determines the position of (my) site in the high score list.”

W. Va. Doctors Strike Over Insurance: “Surgeons at four hospitals began a strike Wednesday to protest malpractice insurance costs, and most operations in northern West Virginia were canceled or were being moved. In Pennsylvania, a similar walkout was averted.” Yahoo! News Years ago, the hospital where I did my psychiatric residency was one of only two of which we were aware where the house officers (interns and residents) had a collective bargaining unit. I could not have foreseen then that doctors everywhere would grow to feel as much powerless cogs in the medical machine as house officers did then. I recalled our ‘house officers’ association’ only recently as the evident discontent of my colleagues has grown and just recently had a conversation with a labor lawyer speculating about whether we would see efforts to unionize doctors. Lo and behold. As a purist and a moralist, however, the concept of a strike seems inimical to my idea of why people should go into medicine.

And, while we’re in the First-Do-No-Harm-Hah! Dept, “The state (of Massachusetts) will stop paying for artificial limbs, dentures, and eyeglasses for nearly half a million residents today in the most far-reaching reduction in medical care for the poor in more than a decade.” Boston Globe

Bush cites diplomatic path with Pyongyang. The striking part of the news conference is this outburst: ”You said we’re headed to war in Iraq,” Bush said. ”I don’t know why you say that. I hope we’re not headed to war in Iraq. I’m the person who gets to decide, not you.” Is this a lying fool, or what? Boston Globe The same puzzlement is on everybody’s lips in attempting to follow Bush’s logic. Iraq may have WMD and is not meeting our expectations for cooperation with the international arms inspection process. They have openly flouted international law. So we have to deploy force and threaten invasion and regime change to show ’em who’s boss. North Korea has WMD, has rejected monitoring, is announcing its intention to openly defy the US, and for Bush this clearly calls for diplomatic rather than military engagement. Oh, and if you don’t get the distinction, Iraq represents a threat to the US and the world economy

Yahoo! News whereas North Korea does not. Oh, and both are charter members of the AoI® (Axis-o’-Evil). Now I get it…

Related [thanks to Walker]: William Rivers Pitt, author of War On Iraq (with Scott Ritter) and The Greatest Sedition is Silence, available in May 2003, a high school teacher in Boston, MA., editorializes:

The Dead Remember: This country is headed to war with a nation we armed in the first place for a tidy corporate profit, despite the fact that there is no evidence that nation is a threat anymore. Beyond the tens of thousands of civilian deaths this war will bring to the people of Iraq, beyond the potential for hundreds or thousands of American casualties, beyond the vastly increased threat of stateside terrorism this will cause, yet another tidy corporate profit will be made. Simultaneously, corporations and our government collude to keep average Americans from being able to call to account those who poisoned children during 40 years of profitable manufacture of what appears to have been a neurological poison.

2001 was an abominable year, to say the least. 2002 was not much better. As we stride towards the brave new year 2003, a moment of pause should be taken. Is this the country you want? Is this the government you want? Is this the world you wish to leave for your children?

The New Year is meant for resolutions. Consider yours carefully, and keep it after you make it. truthout

U.S. Says Pakistani Guard Shot Soldier in Afghanistan

An American soldier wounded in the head during a border patrol on Sunday was shot by a Pakistan border guard, and the United States responded by calling in a coalition plane that bombed the area, the United States military said today.

The Pakistani guard was part of a unit cooperating with American forces on border control. It was not clear why he opened fire, but it appears he strayed over the border into Afghanistan.

When the American patrol ordered him to move back into Pakistan, he retreated with several others to the cover of a building and opened fire, grazing the American soldier’s head, said a statement from the press center at the United States air base at Bagram, north of Kabul.

The American patrol called in air cover after the shooting, and a coalition plane dropped a 500-pound bomb on the area, according to the statement. NY Times

Another example of striking ineptitude — on someone or other’s part — in the WoT®. Not clear from this depiction if the Pakistanis fired because they were miffed at being ordered to retreat by US forces, or mistaking the identities of the Americans as hostiles, or whether they were really ‘cooperating’ with American forces at all. Both US and Pakistani sources say no, but are the hearts of at least some of the Pakistani security forces with the Taliban? And what’s up with responding with a bombing run? At least two Pakistanis were killed, it is said…

(All Together Now: In Moderation!): “Many drugs can save your life or kill you, depending on how much of them you take. Only one comes on the rocks with a twist, in a chilled mug with a foamy head, or in a goblet with lingering overtones of raspberry and oak.

Alcohol has become the sharpest double-edged sword in medicine.

Thirty years of research has convinced many experts of the health benefits of moderate drinking for some people. A drink or two a day of wine, beer or liquor is, experts say, often the single best nonprescription way to prevent heart attacks…” NY Times

Equality, It Seems, Is Relative

In science, no truth is forever, not even perhaps Einstein’s theory of relativity, the pillar of modernity that gave us E=mc2.

As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in particular the speed of light — 186,000 miles per second — are the same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving.

Generations of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical consequences of Einstein’s deceptively simple notion, which underlies all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes using the word “relative.”

Guided by ambiguous signals from the heavens, and by the beauty of their equations, a few brave — or perhaps foolhardy — physicists now say that relativity may have limits and will someday have to be revised.

Some suggest, for example, the rate of the passage of time could depend on a clock’s orientation in space, an effect that physicists hope to test on the space station. Or the speed of a light wave could depend slightly on its color, an effect, astronomers say, that could be detected by future observations of gamma ray bursters, enormous explosions on the far side of the universe. NY Times

Temperatures Are Likely to Go From Warm to Warmer: “Climate experts say global temperatures in 2003 could match or beat the modern record set in 1998, when temperatures were raised sharply by El Niño, a periodic disturbance of Pacific Ocean currents that warms the atmosphere.” NY Times