This Chicago Tribune list, to which I was pointed by Rebecca Blood, contains none of my must-read magazines, the ones to which I subscribe and resubscribe: Fortean Times, New Scientist, Folk Roots, Whole Earth, Utne Reader, The American Prospect, Adbusters, The Believer, London Review of Books…

“U.S.-based missiles to have global reach; allies to become less important as new generation of weapons enables America to strike anywhere from its own territory ” Guardian/UK

The fight to build the world’s most powerful sound system:

Troy Irving’s 18-year-old Dodge Caravan has a heck of a sound system: 72 amplifiers — you got it, 72 — and 36 big 16-volt batteries to put out the 130,000 watts of power needed to rumble his nine 15-inch subwoofers… Must be fun to ride down Main Street with the windows rolled down, right?

Not really. At a curb weight of about 10,000 pounds, the Caravan is basically undrivable. There is virtually no room for a driver, and even less for a passenger… But he can at least sit in his driveway and listen to music, yes? Actually, no. Irving’s audio system can’t play music. It’s designed to play a single frequency — 74 Hz — very loud. Irving, you see, is a dB drag racer.

dB (as in decibel) drag racing is an obscure but growing international “sport” in which competitors go head-to-head for two or three seconds at a time — hence the name drag racing — to establish whose sound system is loudest. The 2002 record, set by a German team of secretive audio engineers, was 177.6 dB.

The roar of a 747 on takeoff is usually quantified at about 140 decibels, although there’s really no way to correlate the wide-spectrum noise of jet engines in open air with a low-frequency pure tone inside a highly reflective enclosure. Because the decibel scale is logarithmic, with every 10 dB increase equivalent to a doubling of perceived sound (otherwise known as noise), dB drag racing enthusiasts create some seriously loud tones. (Another rule of thumb: All else being equal, every three dB of increased sound from a typical dB drag racing system requires a doubling of amplifier power.) CNN

President challenges Iraqis to attack your loved ones. Yahoo News! [via Looka!]

is a weblog of a sort “dedicated to documenting, reporting, and reflecting on the increasingly restrictive climate for civil liberties and human rights. Our goal is to alert and inform, provide passionate analysis and opinion, and offer concrete tools for action.”

Documentary filmmaker Connie Littlefield delves into

the little-known early history of the world’s most notorious psychedelic

concoction with a series of excellent interviews with early psychedelic

researchers. Funded by the National Film Board of Canada, this is a 57

minute documentary, completed in 2002.

Airing on the Sundance network across the Continental U.S. 7 times in July:

A $1 Bet:

“My contention is that the first (subcultural) story about warchalking above is entirely a media phenomenon — it is a beautiful idea, but it doesn’t make any sense as a directory service to find Wi-Fi. It is too easy to miss a warchalk mark, and the chalk wears away (or washes away in the rain) too quickly.

Warchalking symbols were heavily promoted in the New York Times just *48 hours* after they were first made public on the Web. There was a subsequent wave of media stories about warchalking, giving everyone ideas. Every single occurrence of chalk I’ve found can be attributed to chalkers who want to self-promote their own mark. So I believe that people *do* rarely make warchalking marks for various reasons (to be cool, to advertise for their own network) but I *don’t* believe that people use warchalking marks in a meaningful way to find Wi-Fi.

(In December) I posted a call to many colleagues around the world asking for verifiable instances of warchalking that work the way that warchalking describes itself. Reports to date: zero. If warchalking worked as a directory location service, shouldn’t I be able to find it?”

Even though I have never myself noticed a warchalking symbol anywhere around town, my guess is that this is a bad bet. Even if the initial story was apocryphal, it was seen as such a good idea by a number of people that a number of them must have begun doing it. It seems to me that in the initial flood of enthusiasm about the phenomenon, I saw photographs on the web of instances of warchalking graffitti people had encountered. I may not be understanding his point, since I’m not sure exactly what he means by “want(ing) to promote their own mark”, but it beats me how that would be distinguished from a “meaningful” way of finding a Wi-Fi node.

was a May 2003 conference sponsored by sp!ked, to the announcement of which I blinked then.

The conference grappled with the

spread of risk aversion into ever-more spheres of life.

Here are links to the proceedings and related material

from the conference that have been published to date.

• <a href=”http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006DE2F.htm
  
  “>Challenging The Precautionary Principle
  
  by Helene Guldberg:

  How has society come to be governed by the maxim ‘better safe than
  
  sorry’?

• Who Wants To Live Under A System Of Organised Paranoia?
  
  by Mick Hume:
  
  The principle of safety first has become the major barrier to social
  
  advance.

• Panic Attack
  
  by Helene Guldberg:

  spiked’s London conference debated the dangers of risk-aversion.

• Science, Risk And The Price Of Precaution
  
  by Sandy Starr:

  The scientific community imagines what society would have lost, had the
  
  ‘precautionary principle’ governed science in the past.

• Risky Living
  
  by Professor Sir Colin Berry:

  Why do we fear things that are as rare as getting struck by lightning?

• Down With The ‘Slippery Slope’ Argument
  
  by Mick Hume:

  The prevalence of this nonsense speaks volumes about society’s loss of
  
  faith in the human subject.

• Scaring Into Space
  
  by Helene Guldberg:

  A new book by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, gives humanity a 50/50
  
  chance of survival.

• Apocalypse From Now On
  
  by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick:

  SARS has become a blank screen on to which the world can project its
  
  fears.

“An itch demands a scratch, but science has barely begun to scratch the surface of why an itch itches, and how to make it stop.

The itch-scratch cycle sits right at the fascinating intersection of pleasure and pain, reflex and compulsion, but it has received relatively little scientific attention. Ten years ago, one of the small band of international itch researchers called itch ‘sadly neglected,’ an ‘orphan symptom.'” NY Times

8 Good People: “…(W)e are a group of writers chronicling our lives without work. Sometimes we’ll be whimsical, sometimes we’ll fulminate, but we’ll strive to be always interesting. Roger and Emily continue their reports on the world of the job interview, and don’t miss Rochelle’s tale of what makes her heart go pitter-patter… (E)ight unemployed former high-tech journalists have

created a Web site that plays with the idea of reality programming and tries

to make

it meaningful.

… (W)e eight – including a Pulitzer Prize

winner, the woman who was the first news editor of CNET, a former National

Geographc staffer – are using the reality programming genre to try to

get the attention of prospective employers by writing about what life has

been like without a steady paycheck. We like to think of it as reality

programming without the TV and the shlock factor….”

Pentagon system tracks every auto: “A new Pentagon system officials say will be deployed to combat zones in foreign lands has the capability to track every single car in urban areas, the Associated Press reported Tuesday, leading some to worry the technology will lead to a further erosion of privacy.

Besides tracking the vehicles, the Defense Department’s system – dubbed “Combat Zones That See” – can also analyze vehicular movement, a capability the Pentagon says will help U.S. troops fight and protect themselves overseas.

At the center of the unclassified technology is an innovative computer program that can immediately identify vehicles by size, shape, color and license plate. It also can reportedly identify drivers and passengers by face recognition, reports AP. ” WorldNetDaily

“The government and private technology experts warned Wednesday that hackers plan to attack thousands of Web sites Sunday in a loosely coordinated ‘contest’ that could disrupt Internet traffic.

Organizers established a Web site, defacers-challenge.com, listing in broken English the rules for hackers who might participate. The Web site appeared to operate out of California and cautioned to ‘deface its crime’ ” Yahoo! News

“…(F)ew probably ever envisioned The Sims as a tool for serious social and personal expression. Who would have thought, for example, that abuse victims might turn to The Sims to unburden themselves of past torments?

Yet Sims players are expressing themselves in that and many other ways via the game’s family album feature, which was originally conceived as a way for players to photograph, collect and publicly share important moments in their Sims’ lives. What no one imagined — least of all The Sims’ designers — was that thousands of players would quickly bypass the album’s intended use and instead use it to create dozens of staged snapshots, crafting what can be complex, scripted, multi-episode social commentaries, graphic novels or even movies, as it were, with the Sims starring in the lead roles.” Wired

“The Supreme Court’s decision made affirmative action resoundingly legal. Now comes the hard part — making it unnecessary. ” Boston Globe

Study links Medicaid fees, use of feeding tubes: “Thirty-four percent of US nursing home patients who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia receive their food through a stomach tube, even though the practice is of dubious medical value, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study suggests the economics of Medicaid reimbursements favor the potentially harmful practice and that large, for-profit nursing homes were more likely to use the devices. In addition, the study found that nonwhites were more likely to be given feeding tubes than whites.

Sufferers of Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases gradually lose the ability to swallow. Yet critics say feeding tubes can agitate patients and takes away much of the dignity associated with dying. The other method, feeding people by hand, often is more time-consuming and requires more staff attention. ”Staff time required for hand feeding is expensive,” according to the study. Nonetheless, Medicaid, the government-run healthcare system for the poor and disabled, tends to pay more for tube feeding than for feeding people by hand. So for-profit homes may have a concrete financial incentive to feed their patients by tube, said Joan Buchanan, a Harvard healthcare policy analyst.” Boston Globe

This is probably the tip of the iceberg of the shameful care received by nursing home patients, probably the segment of the American healthcare industry where it is most evident how pecuniary influences overpower compassionate motives. You FmH readers who think you’re young now and don’t need to attend to this issue, reconsider. The proportion of American adults caring for their aging parents or other seniors is substantial and growing, and the likelihood is significant that you or someone you know will have to consider placing your loved one in a long-term care facility.

If you find this study credible, should you refuse to consent to the placement of a feeding tube for your loved one? How much confidence would you have that anyone would take the time to monitor and encourage their nutritional intake in that case? On my hospital’s geropsychiatric unit, routine admission bloodwork reveals evidence of malnutrition in a shocking proportion of cases I see. Think twice, then twice more, before you consign a family member to a for-profit nursing home. If you have no choice, definitely visit and obtain references from families of other residents before deciding on a place. Maybe you’ll be fortunate enough to find the exception to the rule…

Sorry to sound hackneyed and clichéd but — instead of the billions we are spending to project American imperial might to distant lands, and the billions on giveaways to the rich and the corporations, how about augmenting the reimbursement rates for human services such as nursing home care so that they can hire and train adequate personnel and give them a feasible caseload? (And while we’re at it, prioritize other services for this society’s least fortunate as well, e.g. by augmenting daycare, preschool and schoolteacher salaries?)