“The great digital music giveaway is about to begin. In the new year, some of the world’s biggest brands will promote their products and services by doling out millions of free downloads through alliances with digital music services.” —CNN

The results confirm an intuitive bond people feel with their shady outlines. “Our brains instinctively view our shadows as an extension of our bodies, a new research has shown.

Subjects in the study reacted to stimuli near the shadow of one hand as if the stimuli were affecting the hand itself, found Francesco Pavani, at Royal Holloway University of London, UK, and Umberto Castiello, at the Università degli Studi di Trento, Italy.” —New Scientist

“A trial starting on Wednesday will allow thousands of Japanese mobile phone owners to use their phones as a swipe card to pay for purchases, as travel passes, and as concert and movie tickets.” —New Scientist

“The first images from NASA’s new infrared space telescope reveal the drama and beauty of the infrared Universe.” —New Scientist

“The man leading the US hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq is to resign, according to reports. The loss of David Kay is being interpreted by many analysts as signalling the end of the major effort to discover any hidden weapons.

A number of observers now believe it is unlikely that any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) existed. However, officials from the US administration maintain that if Kay does leave, it would have no impact on the ongoing work of the Iraq Study Group he heads.

According to The Washington Post, Kay has told administration officials that he plans to leave before the completion of the ISG’s final report, expected in autumn 2004. He may even leave before the next interim report in February.

Kay has cited personal reasons for resigning, the paper says. But in recent weeks he has softened his line on the probability of finding banned WMD. He is said to be frustrated that some of the ISG’s 1400 staff were reallocated to counter-insurgency duties in Iraq in October.” —New Scientist

“Why are humans nearly hairless? And why do some wish to become more so?” —The Economist

“Today, physicists suppose that a particle can travel many different paths simultaneously, or travel backwards in time, or randomly pop into and out of existence from nothingness. They enjoy treating the entire universe as a ‘fluctuation of the vacuum,’ or as an insignificant member of an infinite ensemble of universes, or even as a hologram. The fabric of this strange universe is a non-entity called ‘spacetime,’ which expands, curves, attends yoga classes, and may have twenty-six dimensions.

In short, the recent literature on physics makes one nostalgic for anything as reasonable as a witch trial.

For the past decade many physicists have been wandering the streets with signs that read: ‘The End of Physics Is Near.’ They claim to be developing a final ‘theory of everything,’ which will leave future physicists with nothing to do but play computer games. We can dismiss their megalomania, yet still be tempted to agree with their message. The end that seems near, however, is not a climactic rise to omniscience but an embarrassing descent into pseudo-science.”

Although I don’t understand all that much of modern physics, I suspect that the author, David Harriman, despite his M.S. in Physics, is out of his depth in branding it pseudoscience. If his yearning for the naive simplicity of Newtonian science is not enough evidence, there is the fact that he is the editor of Journals of Ayn Rand and a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif.

The dire consequences of species loss and the Bush dysadministration’s culpability in its acceleration. —Mother Jones

“Silver cars are much less likely to be involved in a serious crash than cars of other colours, suggests a new study of over 1000 cars.

People driving in silver cars were 50 per cent less likely to suffer serious injury in a crash compared with drivers of white cars, the research in New Zealand found.

White, yellow, grey, red and blue cars carried about the same risk of injury. But those taking to the roads in black, brown or green cars were twice as likely to suffer a crash with serious injury.” —New Scientist

Book Review: “Attention, parents: Now that you’ve seen your kids’ first report cards of the year, it’s time for a little homework of your own. No doubt you’re doing the best you can to ensure your little ones’ eventual membership in Mensa — promoting stimulating dinner conversation, reading a chapter together each night, maybe even playing Mozart during bath time. But wait — there’s more. You’ll find your next assignment in the pages of Colleen Moore’s Silent Scourge: Children, Pollution, and Why Scientists Disagree.

You probably already know that lead is not an appropriate component of any cerebral calisthenics program. But nor is it the only pollutant that can stunt intellectual development. In Silent Scourge, Moore, a developmental psychologist, reviews the case against lead and five additional types of pollutants — mercury, PCBs, pesticides, noise, and radioactive and chemical wastes.” —Grist As a psychiatrist, I have always paid attention to the subtle cerebral insults that create less-than-obvious impairments in intellectual and emotional functioning and behavior. I keep an environmental toxicology textbook on my desk at the hospital and like to think I see alot of influences on my patients to which psychiatrists without such an orientation might be less sensitive. I have often wondered why it is not plausible to think that the overall environmental assault our unaccustomed organisms suffer is not taking its toll, and especially on the critical stages of CNS development in childhood. This book is definitely on my reading list, as a parent as well as a mental health proessional.

“Once a curmudgeonly champion of ‘usable’ design, cognitive scientist Donald A. Norman argues that future machines will need emotions to be truly dependable” —Scientific American

“The coffee-houses that sprang up across Europe, starting around 1650, functioned as information exchanges for writers, politicians, businessmen and scientists. Like today’s websites, weblogs and discussion boards, coffee-houses were lively and often unreliable sources of information that typically specialised in a particular topic or political viewpoint.” —The Economist. Has anyone else noticed an explosion of attention to late-17th and early-18th century European intellectual life recently? I have, but I am not sure whether it is just because I have been engrossed in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver in recent weeks, in which, for example, Leibniz and Newton play major roles and the rise of the coffee house phenomenon receives more than passing attention.

A compilation of links to the-year-in-arts reviews —Arts Journal

All the progressive punditry in one simple compilation: “Every pundit, blogger, correspondent, presidential candidate, reporter, scam artist, and all of their mothers, have something to say about Saddam. Here’s our roundup of what they’re spouting: from capture to trial to conspiracy theories, it’s all here (well, a lot of it anyway).” —Utne Reader

“The sooner the United States starts behaving like one country among many, rather than a global bully, the better the prospects for peace on earth become. The irony is that the post-9/11 bellicosity of the Bush Administration has been so extreme that in the long run it may lead more directly to a world with a common aversion to wars and empires.

If we’re willing, much of the rest of the world is ready. It’s in our hands.” —Geov Parrish, AlterNet

“Jailed former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and another accused war criminal could become members of Serbia’s parliament after their extreme nationalist allies swept weekend elections, according to results released Monday.” —SF Chronicle

“2003 gave us a lot to gripe about — overblown action pictures, witless sequels, pointless remakes, misbegotten literary adaptations, mopey little art films shot in headache-inducing digital video — but these failures reveal less about the state of cinema than about the fate of most creative endeavors, which is to land in the fat, mediocre middle of the artistic bell curve.

To look at the three top 10 film lists displayed in this section — and at the dozens more that sprout from nearly every printed publication and Web site in the land — is to be struck by the sheer variety and vitality of the movies, which, according to some historians, marked their centenary as a narrative art form this year. The number of good motion pictures released this year is less impressive — and harder to agree on — than their diversity.” —New York Times

…in Battle Over Next DVD Format —New York Times