It is a perennial complaint about FmH that it loads very slowly. It has been suggested that I put fewer days’ worth of items on my front page. What do you think? Please take a short readers’ poll. I’d like to see all potential responses by Sunday, July 27, and thank you in advance for your input. You can view the results to date here.

“He’s known as the anti-war candidate whose appeal is to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and some Republicans say if Howard Dean gets the nomination, President Bush will be a sure bet to win a second term.

Not so fast, say some moderate congressional Democrats who would be affected if Dean is at the top of the ticket. He also supports gun rights, the death penalty and a balanced budget.

Republicans and even some moderate Democrats have portrayed Dean as the next George McGovern, who won the 1972 Democratic nomination by appealing to anti-war liberals only to get trounced by a sitting Republican president, Richard Nixon. But behind Dean’s liberal image is his record as Vermont governor of reforming welfare, slashing state spending and cutting taxes for businesses.” Salon

to log onto nearest computer: “Computer scientists at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, wanted to make it easier for staff to log onto networked computers. So they came up with SoundHunters, a program that recognises someone’s voice or laughter and works out which computer is nearest to them. It could then be used to automatically log them on to the computer.” New Scientist

“Human brains are wired to underestimate the amount of force exerted on other people, a study of ‘tit-for-tat’ experiments has revealed.

As well as qualifying the teary ‘she hit me harder’ playground argument and explaining why we can’t tickle ourselves, the discovery may provide insight into some self-delusional symptoms of schizophrenia.” New Scientist

“Criminal charges were dropped against a man whose defense lawyer claimed that drinking jasmine tea made him temporarily insane before he smashed his way into a neighbor’s house and chased the woman with a dagger.” Salon

“Germaine Greer deliberately provokes controversy with the cheapest trick. If there’s a taboo left, she’ll break it, and since one of the few remaining taboos in Western liberal democracies is pedophilia, that’s the arena she’s most recently entered.

Her upcoming glossy book, The Boy, full of pictures of ‘ravishing’ pre-adult boys with hairless chests, wide-apart legs and slim waists, is an ‘art book’, Greer, 64, told this newspaper last week.” Sydney Morning Herald

“In recent weeks, the search for Hussein and dozens of his senior associates and mid-level loyalists has intensified here in his home province of Salahuddin, northwest of Baghdad. Spurred by reports from local informants and intercepted telephone conversations, some U.S. officials say they now believe that the fugitive former president and his closest henchmen may be filtering back here for the protection afforded by a vast network of tribal and family connections.

Almost every raid, officers say, turns up new scraps of evidence — photos, documents with satellite telephone numbers, fake identity cards. Informants — ranging from powerful sheiks to poor farmers — whisper tips, often risking lives and livelihoods. U.S. intelligence units glean tidbits from telephone intercepts, aerial surveillance and gumshoe detective work.” Washington Post

Santa Rosa teacher gave assignment: “A political science instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College is being investigated by the Secret Service for telling his students to compose an e- mail to an elected official that included the words ‘kill the president, kill the president,’ a school administrator said Wednesday.” San Francisco Chronicle The teacher could not be reached for comment, but an administrator at the school explained it had been intended as an “experiential exercise that would instill a sense of fear so they would have a better sense of why more people don’t participate in the political process,” an explanation that does not make much sense to me.

I wonder, if widely blinked to in weblogs, if this item might swamp the Carnivore system (if that’s the one that’s watching all our internet traffic for naughty buzzwords).

Related:

“White House officials discovered a stowaway on a chartered plane for reporters covering President Bush’s Africa trip, and the man was detained by Ugandan authorities.

The Secret Service was notified by a White House aide that the man, who was not identified, had joined the reporters on Friday and flew with them to a compound in Entebbe where the president had several events, said deputy Secret Service director Mark Sullivan.

The United Airlines Boeing 747 carried reporters, photographers, camera crews, White House staff and Secret Service agents. The man, who carried no weapons and had no passport or other identification, boarded in Pretoria, South Africa, and flew to Bush’s next stop, in Entebbe, where he was detained.

The man was shouting as he was led away. ” Salon

Iraq war may have made terror threat worse:

“One of the world’s leading terrorism experts Wednesday told the panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the U.S. invasion of Iraq may have worsened the threat of terrorism.

Prof. Rohan Gunaratna, giving evidence at a public hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also criticized the failures of intelligence and policy he said had turned Afghanistan into a ‘terrorist Disneyland,’ and allowed al-Qaida and other terror groups ‘a free reign.’

Asked by panel member Max Cleland, the war-wounded Vietnam veteran and former Democratic Georgia senator, to comment on the impact of the U.S. military campaign in Iraq, Gunaratna said that deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein — on the run with nothing to lose but with money and possible biological or chemical weapons — might be a bigger threat now than before.” UPI

or a Cultural Collage?: “The Wall Street Journal reported the probable borrowings on Tuesday as front-page news. After recent uproars over historians and journalists who used other researchers’ material without attribution, could it be that the great songwriter was now exposed as one more plagiarist?” NY Times

Well, somebody had to… NY Times Bush tries to have the best of both worlds. With a fallguy in place, he wasted no time announcing that he considered the uranium issue closed (Salon). With his bullying and stonewalling ways with the press, I’m sure any reporter who tries from here on to bring up the issue at any of the infrequent press conferences Bush deigns to give will be ignored or chastised. Yet Bush has complete confidence in Tenet and the CIA (Salon); no heads have to roll… because, in reality, Bush clearly wasn’t troubled by the deception. Yet, hopefully, the credibility gap over the uranium issue won’t stop here (NY Times editorial) and, in any case, is the tip of the iceberg about mounting disillusionment with the Bush agenda (Washington Post) and the baldfaced deception used to promulgate it.

What are noctilucent clouds? “Good question. They hover near the edge of space, glowing electric blue. Some scientists think the clouds are seeded by space dust and fed by rocket exhaust. Others suspect they’re a telltale sign of global warming. Whatever causes these mysterious clouds, they are lovely, and summer is a good time to look for them. Check our gallery of recent sightings.” NASA

These are a relatively recent phenomenon, first seen in 1885 about two years after the Krakatoa eruption, which filled the atmosphere with volcanic ash worldwide., making sunsets so spectacular that evening skywatching became a popular pastime.

“Ever wanted your own first class stamps? Well now you can with Stamp It Out!

Creating your own stamps is free and easy. All you need to do is tell us which image you would like on your stamps and we’ll create them for you.” Obviously, these are illegal if used in place of official postage. But you political subversive or artistic types might want to affix them alongside a ‘real’ stamp.

MEART – The Semi Living Artist “is a geographically detached, bio-cybernetic project exploring aspects of creativity and artistry in the age of biological technologies and the future possibilities of creating semi living entities. It investigates our abilities and intentions in dealing with the emergence of a new class of beings (whose production may lie far in the future) that may be sentient, creative and unpredictable. Meart takes the basic components of the brain (isolated neurons) attaches them to a mechanical body through the mediation of a digital processing engine to attempt and create an entity that will seemingly evolve, learn and become conditioned to express its growth experiences through ‘art activity’. The combined elements of unpredictability and ‘temperament’ with the ability to learn and adapt, creates an artistic entity that is both dependent, and independent, from its creator and its creator’s intentions.

MEART is assembled from:

‘Wetware’ – cultured neurons from embryonic rat cortex grown over the Multi Electrode Array

‘Hardware’ – the robotic (drawing) arm

‘Software’ – that interfaces between the wetware and the hardware”

Common Errors in English from a persnickety (by his own admission) professor of English (“I’m just discussing mistakes in English that happen to bother me. “):

“Here we’re concerned only with deviations from the standard use of English as judged by sophisticated users such as professional writers, editors, teachers, and literate executives and personnel officers. The aim of this site is to help you avoid low grades, lost employment opportunities, lost business, and titters of amusement at the way you write or speak.

But isn’t one person’s mistake another’s standard usage?

Often enough, but if your standard usage causes other people to consider you stupid or ignorant, you may want to consider changing it. You have the right to express yourself in any manner you please, but if you wish to communicate effectively, you should use nonstandard English only when you intend to rather than fall into it because you don’t know any better.”