Thomas Friedman finally gets it, and admits he’s been a little slow on the uptake. — New York Times op-ed

Garret Vreeland’s comments on Rumsfeld’s surprise visit to Iraq:

This Administration thinks expensive publicity stunts move public opinion. Maybe they do, sometimes. But this won’t stop the current juggernaut. Rumsfeld must be sure that the photos won’t be released, if he took this trip. More photos would just overshadow the trip by an exponential margin.

Indeed, government lawyers reportedly advised the Bu**sh** administration today that the new photos are “too disturbing” to be released to the public. Since invoking secrecy for political protectionism has already taken a hit in the Abu Ghraib scandal, it is now time to attempt to be offensively paternalistic. Will the American public be taken in by the claim that our benificent government is protecting our sensitive feelings?

Garret feels Rumsfeld should have visited some of the Abu Ghraib prisoners and apologized personally. This would make sense if he had any sincere sense of responsibility and remorse. But it would not, of course, be good politics, and that is what matters.

Boing boing pointed me to this link to an Interview with Brother Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican’s curator of meteorites, from Astrobiology Magazine. Consolmagno divides his time between the Vatican and the research observatory they founded in Arizona as a result of growing light pollution in the Roman sky. The interview occurred at a NASA astrobiology conference in California and, after the interviewer satisfies his predicatble curiosity about what an astronomical researcher might do for the Vatican, turns to speculation about the theological challenge that might be presented by the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligent life. Reading boing boing‘s blurb, I immediately thought of Mary Doria Russell’s two provocative science fiction novels, The Sparrow (1996) and Children of God (1998), about the consequences of the Jesuits’ beating the rest of the world to a first-contact expedition to a newly-discovered extraterrestrial civilization. In fact, the interviewer asks Consolmagno about The Sparrow, and it turns out he wasn’t much taken with it. Russell, by the way, is a reformed paleoanthropologist, raised as a Catholic but a convert to Judaism, according to her website.

Via boing boing, there are 49 entries in this photoshop contest illustrating irrational phobias, and some of them are ROFL-funny. — worth1000

The latest in a series of studies by English autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen shows thattestosterone levels to which fetuses are exposed in the wombs have profound effects on their social development after birth. At one year, those with higher fetal testosterone had a smaller vocabulary and made less eye contact. At age four, there continues to be a widening gap between the social skill and interest levels of those who had been exposed to high and normal testosterone levels in the womb. Baron-Cohen thinks that the inverse relationship between testosterone and social competence is counterbalanced by a benefit to pattern recognition skills. He thinks autism might be “the extreme form of the male brain.” — New Scientist