Why should it still be news that self-fulfilling prophecy plays a role in a variety of illnesses??? These are the conditions where it is most obvious and should be least controversial, on the borderland between mind and body. More daring are similar assertions about illnesses we ‘know’ are ‘real’ such as cancer and heart disease…

“Alan Richman traveled 23,750 miles and consumed more than 150,000 calories while taking the measure of 162 burgers across the country—with one goal: to find you the best damned assemblage of ground beef and buns this country serves up.” (GQ [via kottke] )

(Metroblogging San Francisco)

Arianna takes on Judy Miller, via Daily Kos: ” Those who think Judith Miller is some kind of hero, let’s not forget who we are talking about. Arianna reminds us…” This is just jaw-dropping and enraging, if true. [via acm]

Weird as he may be and anathema to most serious chess players, Bobby Fischer’s variation on chess is attracting attention in the tournament world. In the game, the ranks of pawns are lined up as always, but white player gets to arrange the other row of pieces behind the pawns in random order (except that the king must be between the two rooks and the bishops must be on opposite colors). The black pieces are set up to mirror the positions of the white. The point is to free chess from the rote play of memorized openings, since there are 960 possible starting positions for the game (thus, the game is sometimes referred to as Chess960; it is also known as Fischer Random Chess). “Competitors live and die by skill alone from the very first move.” Fischer had proposed the game in 1996 and it finally caught on in Europe in 2001. As this Wired coverage points out, it also holds strong appeal for chess programmers for the same reason; chess programs’ analysis of the openings in a conventional game relies on a digital lookup table version of an opening book. It is not clear yet if the game tips the odds toward either human or computer in a person-machine match, as compared with conventional chess. Fischer, now in jail, continues to publicize his chess variant, and announced he does not play conventional chess any more. Anatoly Karpov has just publicly challenged Fischer to a match at his own game. (A rudimentary chess player, I would do as well at Chess960 as at conventional chess, since I have memorized exactly zero standard openings…)

I have previously written about this here, but August and September are crucial months for organizing around opt-out issues:

M.G. Bloche and J.H. Marks (New Engl. J. Med. 2005 353:6): The International Committee of the Red Cross and others agencies charge that the aggressive ‘counter-resistance measures of US military interrogators at Guantanamo constitute cruel and inhuman treatment and torture. A number of studies are starting to explore the complicity of medical perssonnel with such abuses. One aspect of the violations of detainee rights has been the sharing with interrogators of the confidential data on prisoners’ health status (gathered by healthcare workers either in the course of healthcare of the prisoners or explicitly for intelligence purposes) to shape interrogation techniques. Sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, sexual provocation and humiliation, displays of contempt for Islamic symbols, beatings, and feigning (or real!) efforts to kill the detainee are among the approaches which might be chosen or shaped by health and mental health data on the particular prisoner.

Although denied by the Pentagon, evidence exists that interrogators did in fact use detainees’ health data to design their interventions. An inquiry by the inspector general of the US Navy found that access was supposedly carefully controlled at Guantanamo but interrogators sometimes had easy access to health data of their prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Bloche and Marks’ study found that the claim that medical confidentiality of Guantanamo detainees was shielded is sharply at odds with the facts. A policy statement from the military command with jurisdiction over GTMO instructed health care providers that communications from enemy detainees were not protected by medical doctor-patient privilege, and that providers had an obligation to convey any information germane to US ‘national security objectives’ obtained in the course of their work to security personnel. Behavioral science consultants had ready access to health records and also helped shape and implement interrogation techniques, in effect acting as a bridge between privileged health data and intelligence agendas. I have also heard from a different source that, to evade the stringent standards of physician-patient privilege, other non-MD health professionals with less explicit codes of ethics were used in their place or alongside the doctors ministering to these prisoners. Interrogators themselves have in fact had access to health data on their prisoners, and psychiatrists and psychologists participate in designing and implementing interrogation strategies with resistant prisoners involving extreme stress.

Thunderwords of Finnegans Wake:

Related:

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon – O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

— T.S. Eliot,
from “V. What the Thunder Said,”
The Waste Land

Addendum: The Nielsen-Haydens are offering teeshirts, mouse pads etc. with the ten thunder words emblazoned upon them here. (Scroll down to the bottom past the rest of their swag.) Sport your credo and support a worthy website.

You can download a PDF of the information to print out as a flyer.

“When we buy into geriatric rock, prime talents pay the price” (Boston Globe)

Also:

New blows in the battle against spam

Konfabulator strikes it rich; Yahoo! acquires the desktop widget application and starts offering it for free. I have been playing with Konfabulator widgets (under WinXP) for a few months. They are well-done but consume alot of resources.

My state’s smarmy governor is playing presidential-aspiration politics at the expense of rape victims (New York Times ) It has puzzled me to no end why in one of the most liberal states in the nation the Democrats have not been able to prevent a succession of Republican gubernatorial administrations. Can anyone help me with this?

The brand name may have changed but the merchandise is still shoddy, exorbitant and irrelevant. Do you think “struggle against violent extremism” was chosen with a view towards its slick, marketable acronym?

The ICE Plan, started by a British ambulance corps, has been given new impetus by the London bombings. This sort of bulk email message is broadly circulating:

Unfortunately, hoax warnings — that having an ICE entry in your phone book could trigger premium charges by virtue of malicious text messages or viruses sent out randomly to search for such entries in receiving phones — have followed. As indicated by the Snopes page to which the above link points, such fears are groundless. I think the ICE idea is a good one, the only drawback being that in a casualty situation you may not have your phone with you or it might be damaged so that information on it is not readily retrievable. So I have a wallet card with my emergency contact information as well…

“Is a sleeper hit on the way for insomnia treatments? “ (Forbes) Takeda Pharmaceuticals just announced FDA approval for the US marketing of Rozerem, the brand name for remelteon, a sleep agent that works by a completely novel mechanism, unlike all of the agents in use these days, which are variations on the GABA theme. Rozerem is also going to be the first sleeping pill which is not a scheduled (controlled) drug, indicating the FDA’s assessment that it has no abuse or addictive potential. I will reserve judgment until I read some of the scientific papers and until I have seen it in action…

My answer, off the top of my head? No.

My answer, off the top of my head? No.

Blinks to this item often describe it as pictures of the “new U.S. silver dollar,” but the impression I take from the article is that this is a commemorative coin and not meant for general circulation.

Does anyone ever see any Susan B. Anthony or Sacajawea dollar coins anymore? There is a change-making machine where I work that dispenses dollar coins in change for large-denomination bills. Several times a week, I go there and get as many as I can bear carrying around in my pockets and use them for general transactions. They are often not recognized for what they are, and cashiers think I have given them quarters instead of dollars, as they are not too much bigger. Others are surprised and delighted to get the coins. Rarely, a shopkeeper is annoyed.

By the way, I have heard that the Joe Rosenthal photograph was staged after the fact.

I am somewhat synesthetic, so for me of course every day of the week has always had a color (as do the letters of the alphabet, the digits, the months of the year etc…). However, my colors are nothing like the consensus ones!

Recriminations fly back and forth between a game manufacturer which left ‘vestigial’ code for a raunchy scene in shipping verions of its game, supposedly inaccessible to consumers, and the modder who developed a downloadable hack to unlock the scene. Calls for a government investigation ensue!

Ann Coulter, Ann Coulter, says Bush’s nomination of Roberts concerns her.

Federal appeals court judge with, per Bush, “superb credentials and the highest integrity” was a Justice Dept. official in former Republican administrations. This is a slap in the face to women, given the serious lobbying for Bush to replace O’Connor with another woman and the number of credible female candidates whose names have been mentioned. Roberts is also anti-choice, and I have already received an appeal from NARAL, kicking off a campaign to oppose his nomination.

He has less than two years’ experience on the federal bench, thus not much to judge him by. In his 2003 confirmation hearing, he avowed that his personal views on the matter would not prevent his respecting Roe v. Wade as the “settled law of the land”… as long as it is. A polarizing candidate who will inspire a confirmation battle just at this point, of course, will divert all eyes from the Valerie Plame scandal, as Bush surely fervently desires. He is considered a legal heavyweight but not a “movement conservative”. Toady Joe Lieberman (D.-Conn.) had previously identified him as a choice who would not trigger a filibuster, but other Democrats, while acknowledging his suitable credentials, are reserving judgment until his confirmation hearings. What is more significant, however, is that the rabid right is by and large gleeful, by my early reading. Only 50 years old, Roberts will of course probably be on the Court for a long long while. At least this isn’t Alberto Gonzales…

Of course, all that is is a signal that they have found a way to construe Rove as not having violated any law.

Some of these are already on my summer list (since finishing Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, almost 3000 pages in what seemed like one sitting lasting many many months, I am hungry for any number of normal-sized books!) Like kottke, from whom this link came, I would have preferred recommendations by Edge personages rather than recommendations of their books, but I will settle. (It might be interesting to ask Edgers to critique one another’s books…) Add a comment below mentioning some of what is on your summer reading list if you like.

Lucky movie buffs, the page has recently been updated. The page title is still “20 Things…” These are almost all true and almost all funny, when you think about it. [thanks to kottke]

What Lance Armstrong’s “domestiques” do. (Slate)

“404 front pages from 45 countries presented alphabetically.” You can also list by region or change to a map view. (You should allow this page to do popups if you have them blocked in Firefox by default.) [via acm]

the dictionary for words that wouldn’t make it into dictionaries: “hello, and welcome to pseudodictionary, the place where words you’ve made up can become part of an actual online dictionary! slang, webspeak, colloquialisms…you name it, if you know a word that should be in the dictionary but isn’t, submit it and we’ll post it on this site (with credit given to you of course).

you can submit as many words you like, just keep in mind that only words which don’t break any of the guidelines will be added to the site. ” [via acm] There are currently >20,000 words posted.

In essence, the writer claims that Dutch society is a unique combination of the permissive and the Calvinist, and that liberal/radical encouragement of the welfare state gave redundant North African ‘guest workers’ and their families a free pass, with the resultant growth of a simmering disenfranchised ghetto underclass with radicalized children whose intolerance and resentment ruined Dutch tolerance.

The writer attempts to ‘normalize’ Pim Fortuyn, powerful spokesperson for the anti-immigrant mindset, as a “classic tolerant Dutchman” (in, among other ways, exploiting the fact that he was gay) and concludes that, “Perhaps what this country needs most of all is another unconventional, outspoken gay politician” and that “we must somehow stimulate young Muslims to identify with the Calvinist values of the majority.” I don’t claim to be an expert in Dutch social issues, but this argument has several flaws. The case is never really made that it was traditional Dutch tolerance that is to blame for the ‘time bomb’ of radicalized Muslim youth, and it seems too easy to blame Islamic fundamentalism per se for two individuals’ extremist acts. Certainly, the absorption of culturally distinctive immigrants is a challenge for every European society, but I am not hearing de Winter make any suggestions about how the Dutch polity or society should address the problem beyond accepting the unproven premise that “Calvinist’ conservatism (really, a stalking horse for xenophobia) be the accepted norm and that foreign ‘guests’ conform to its values. It is tempting to say that European societies have a long way to go in solving their class and racial issues, but then again the United States is several centuries further along in attempting to accommodate to the presence of its imported foreign laborer population and we still haven’t done a much better job of it… and that has little or nothing to do with Muslim fundamentalism.

Next front in the ‘information-wants-to-be-free’ war? It is easy to recall that, when I first got a broadband connection several years ago, my provider was committed to trying to prevent sharing that connection among the computers in my house too. They soon gave up on that one…

“The list contains 50 U.S. followed by 50 U.K. psychedelic releases, arranged in chronological order. “

Addendum: Fight Back: http://www.freemaribel.org/

Antidepressants may be, partly, the victims of their own popularity. Antidepressant prescribing practices have expanded far beyond the most severely ill patients who have a biochemically determined and biochemically treatable condition, and aggregate data on their efficacy, of course, depends on the denominator as well as the numerator. There are several major, interrelated, reasons for the explosive expansion of antidepressant ‘customers’ in recent decades. First, the development of the ‘second-generation’ antidepressants (SSRIs and their successors) suggested greater tolerability and less troublesome management of the patient on an antidepressant. Second, rapacious pharmaceutical companies hit upon the strategy of marketing these medications to primary care doctors rather than psychiatrists only. A related, although probably minor, influence has been the relaxation of rules against advertising drugs directly to the lay public as well. And changes in the mental health care system have progressively edged high-priced psychiatrists out of service delivery roles in favor of less costly ancillary professionals such as social workers and other masters-level clinicians, especially in the area of talking therapy. In an effort to hold onto shrinking market share, there has been market pressure for psychiatrists to create added demand for their indispensable service niche — prescribing. They have done this by progressively enlarging the scope of conditions that are asserted to be susceptible to biological manipulation. The overall impact of these trends has been most evident in the drastic explosion of numbers of antidepressant prescriptions written over the past 10-15 years.

Moncrieff is onto something, I think, in the claim that antidepressants may not so much treat depression itself as “do other things, such as sedating or stimulating people.” In particular, these newer, SSRI and post-SSRI antidepressants may be, as I and others have often observed, more partial antidepressants than some of the older, “outmoded” agents; that may go along with their increased tolerability (since there is probably no free lunch in psychopharmacology any more than there is anywhere else). May of us feel they treat the ancillary symptoms better than the core depression. The article mentions sedation, and I would add agitation and anxiety; the antidepressants are probably better anti-anxiety medications than the anxiolytics in the Valium-like benzodiazepine family.

But I am not as troubled by this as she is. There is a misconception about what clinical depression is; this is partly bred of the unfortunate coalescence of the medical term we use to refer to a distinct clinical state and the lay use of the word. A major depression, biochemically treatable (and, in fact, it is so much the proven standard of care that a malpractice suit can be brought against a medical or nonmedical mental health practitioner who does not counsel her patient with major depression to seek an antidepressant) is not just the sadness of mood, the ‘down’ day, the ‘blahs’ or the ‘blues’, or even merely hopeless and helpless thinking, which most people mean when they say they are going through something depressing. This is often the assumption behind someone’s statement that depression is something “people need to learn to deal with themselves”. This is a misguided and destructive attitude the depressed patients I treat often receive from their uncomprehending families and friends, which compounds the difficulties they are having in their functioning and correction of which is an important contributor to their recovery. A patient with a major depression is struggling with a whole-body illness with changes in most organ systems and physiological functions including their energy metabolism, their hormonal rhythms, their basic sleep architecture, their digestive functions, immunological competence, modulation of pain, and numerous aspects of their autonomic nervous system, as well as the tissue integrity of various regions of their brains. Like a snake eating its own tail, the mental changes precipitate and worsen the bodily changes, and the somatic symptoms worsen the cognitive and emotional. The mind-body connection is, of course, a two-way street. The point is, there are indeedmany ancillary symptoms to treat in a depressive episode, and doing so has a potentially important impact on the patient’s ability to function! I have often said that medication is like a bicycle — the most efficient way to get some place, but you still have to (a) know where you want to go; and (b) do the pedaling yourself. Properly used, antidepressants are a vehicle for restitution in people otherwise too debilitated to “deal with it themselves,” precisely so they can begin to “deal with it themselves” by more effective functioning in their relationships, their activities of sustenance, their participation in their community, and their psychotherapies.

The Reuters headline said that it was an “expert” telling us that antidepressants are less effective than we had been led to believe, but I find critiques like Moncrieff’s to be vestiges of a scientifically naive and outmoded mind-body dualism. Nonetheless, the value of this study and, indeed, of the sociological critique of modern biological psychiatry as a whole, may be to raise the hue and cry about the extent to which psychiatrists have forgotten that they are not the be-all and end-all in the treatments of their patients’ depressive and other conditions, and that medication is not a cure. Antidepressants are more like the insulin diabetics take to keep their glucose metabolism regulated in the face of their disease than like an antibiotic that eradicates a patient’s pneumonia.

I would welcome your comments, particularly if (a) you have personal experience with depression or antidepressants; (b) you disagree with me on this; or even if (c) you got to the end of this argument without your attention flagging.

Even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory gets its ‘family values’:

Neuron Network Goes Awry, and Brain Becomes an IPod: “Doctors are finally studying the mysterious phenomenon of musical hallucinations.” (New York Times via abby)

Kenneth Rexroth’s late ’60’s essay was written at the height of the counterculture and, looking back at its sources and development, unearths the truly radical elements that were lost with the drama, conspicuousness, superficiality and co-optation.

Related:

• “Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation” (Rexroth)
• “Beginnings of a New Revolt” (Rexroth)
• “<a href=”http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/songs.htm
  ” title=””>Subversive Aspects of Popular Songs” (Rexroth)

The simple answer is that they both are. The apparent discrepancy arises from our difficulty seeing that racial differences are points on a continuum rather than categorical distinctions. Recalling Gregory Bateson‘s famous comment about information being a difference that makes a difference, it seems clear that there may be greater drug metabolism variations within classes than between them, in fact, and I doubt Sally Satel is basing her dosing decisions for Prozac or anything else as strictly on a racial profiling basis as the example would tend to suggest.

If you should care to write to Disney World’s management and say, oh, for instance, that you will never take your family to a Disney attraction as long as the finger scanning requirement is in place, you would click here, by the way.

This is a set of 23 rules a waiter says the customers should always live by around settling up for the great meal they have just had. This waiter begins to sound a little like a dominatrix as you read, but as one commenter said if you want to eat anywhere a second time, don’t ignore the rules. As a frequent diner out and (in a past life, and only briefly) a waiter, many of these are common sense, but there are some surprises. For example,

I have often become impatient waiting for the check, feeling both cynically that the investment in rapid pleasing service ends once you’ve had your meal and somehow feeling it is impolite to show my impatience by summoning them over. If I do, I am often apologetic about being in a rush. I guess I can jettison the guilt!

It is often taught that the prevalence of this disease is constant from one region or culture to another. But this study finds that recovery from an episode of the disease is less likely in the Western world. I share the speculation of some that the difference is likely attributable to the breakdown in social connectedness in the modern world, as opposed to village and family networks in the third world.

Unsolicited bear-knocking: “A bear has become an unwanted guest in one Croatian town after learning how to knock on the door to trick people into letting it in.”

“…(O)ne of the major themes of evolutionary biology – the conflict between individual selfishness and group altruism – is paralleled by a comparable theme in literature, and that each usefully illuminates the other.” — David Barash (Human Nature)

One of the most disturbing givens in human traumatology is the transgenerational transmission of abuse, the frequent observation that children who were abused have a tendency to become abusers as parents. One (conservative) figure cited is 30%. This study shows that, in rhesus monkeys, abuse is similarly transmitted transgenerationally and that it is childrearing rather than constitutional factors that account for it. In an analogue of human adoption studies which are used to distinguish the contributions of nurture from those of inherited biology, even rhesus babies born to nonabusive mothers but reared by abusive ones had a tendency to become abusive mothers themselves, while babies born to abusive mothers but adopted by nonabusive ones never did. I am surprised that there is child abuse among nonhuman species, and even more astounded by the author’s leap to asserting that this means that rhesus child abuse is a good model for human child abuse, especially after going the distance to demonstrate that it is not the genetic constitution (yeah, yeah, we all have heard by now that we share 98% of that with our primate cousins…) but the social environment (surely far less than 98% similar, to say the least!) that shapes this phenomenon. Other primatologists suggest — quite rightly, it seems to me — that ‘monkey models at best provide “food for thought” about how human child abuse occurs.’

“…(O)ne of the major themes of evolutionary biology – the conflict between individual selfishness and group altruism – is paralleled by a comparable theme in literature, and that each usefully illuminates the other.” — David Barash (Human Nature)

Certainly, you can read to your heart’s content and far beyond about the London attacks. I feel no need to even offer you any blinks, except these BBC-solicited eyewitnesses’ photos. My thoughts are with the victims, their families and the people of London. I have just a few things to say.

First, the obsessional focus on whether this is “al Qaeda” or not is meaningless. Listen to the pundits coming out of the woodwork from the proliferating number of think tanks devoting themselves to terrorism and counter-terrorism pontificating on how it “certainly shows the hallmarks…” Has no one realized yet what has been apparent for a long time? In an important sense, there is no such thing as al Qaeda. It is a ‘franchise’ term to be used by any group of extremists adopting aims similar to those bin Laden and his followers held or hold. Moreover, whether the al Qaeda moniker is explicitly used or not by those taking responsibility for a given terrorist attack, the government, the pundits and the press reflexively use the term. ‘al Qaeda’ is a generic term. as much as ‘terrorist’, during the Bush War on Terror®, or as much as ‘communist’ was during the Cold War. Anyone perpetrating an “al Qaeda-like attack” is al Qaeda, and all attacks perpetrated come more and more to be characterized as “al Qaeda-like”. (Four years ago, the ‘hallmark’ of an ‘al Qaeda’ attack involved martyrdom from members of a reawakened sleeper cell striking largely for the symbolism of taking down icons of American capitalism and imperialism; now the ‘hallmark’ of an ‘al Qaeda attack’ apparently has none of those attributes…)

So perpetuating the ‘al Qaeda’ connection in these attacks becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This brings me to my second point. It is absurd to even debate whether it has been the WoT® and the invasion and occupation of Iraq that is dramatically promoting recruitment to the extremists’ cause Increasing our resolve to either fight ‘terrrrrism’ or protect against it more vigorously begets more attacks, and there is little we can do about it. Security is essentially unattainable, since prevention has to succeed 100% of the time to succeed, whereas it has to fail only once for the attackers to succeed.

As a corollary, all the handwringing about how our intelligence resources failed to have any advanced warning of the attacks is nothing but pitiful. Given that there is no centralized command structure and very little in the way of coordination needed to pull off a devastating attack on a Western city, there is not going to be any communication to intercept, no meetings to infiltrate etc.

As another corollary of the above, increasing security expenditures is little more than closing the barndoor after the animals have flown the coop. It does serve one purpose — to give a shot in the arm to a flagging economy. Did you notice the surge in stock values in the security and counter-terrorism sector of the economy in the aftermath of the attacks yesterday? Over and above how ludicrous the paint-by-numbers approach of the Homeland Security hacks is, the value of increasing the security alert status one notch to orange specifically for the mass transit system is nil. Anyone who thinks the people who pull off these attacks are so simple-minded that they or others like them will pursue a copy-cat strategy is a fool.

Neither do we, however, have to simply learn to live in a world of heightened threat we can do nothing about, as some experts suggest. What we can do is get the fools prosecuting an asinine War on Terror® out of power and begin promoting intelligent foreign policy that reverses the enmity the US (and its British toadies) currently invokes on a daily basis.

Back to covert intelligence for a moment, as a further corollary, pay no attention to all the post-9/11 debate about reforming the US intelligence establishment. Let me remind you that the failures in threat assessment were not — and continue not to be — in the spheres of data-gathering or analysis but of consumption.The Bush cabal heard what it wanted to hear and saw what it wanted to see to link Saddam to the supposed terrorist threat to the US economy and ‘way of life’ and justify the Iraqi invasion. The intelligence community is the Bush administration’s scapegoat for its own ineptitude lies.

Finally, if you listen to the unbearable, hypocritical rhetoric coming out of the mouths of Bush and Blair at the G8 summit, can you fail to notice that it is the pot calling the kettle black when they decry those who live by violence, sow terror and murder innocent civilians?

I have never been a fan of “This American Life”, finding Ira Glass smarmy and smug, if it is not redundant to find someone both. But Sarah Vowell has been the show’s redeeming value. Interesting choice as a New York TImes guest columnist while Maureen Dowd is on leave.

The “meandering search engine” finds the shortest path between two search terms. Some of the relationships are fairly mechanical, done as they are by a search engine without much discrimination, but it is the closest you can get to a machine rendering of the Kevin Bacon game.

Also:

The Illogic of Intelligent Design