The Wacky World of Japanese Ice Cream: “Having succeeded globally with cars, electronics and even fashion, it was only natural the Japanese turned their hand to trying to surpass the West with one of its favorite culinary delights – ice cream.” Mainichi Daily News [via Red Rock Eaters]

Has to be mostly for export, as Westerners who have lived there assure me ice cream is not big in Japan, possibly because of the high prevalence of lactose-intolerance among the Japanese people. Several people independently have described to me their addiction to the exquisite shaved ice concoctions the Japanese appear to prefer.

“Newly released documents show that George W. Bush’s campaign paid for operatives who staged a riot in Miami that disrupted the counting of votes in November 2000. The new information is contained in hundreds of pages of financial records that the Bush campaign grudgingly released to the Internal Revenue Service 19 months after the Florida recount battle ended.” The Consortium

“In their explorations of artificial life, … Media Lab researchers have created what they call ‘Public Anemone,’ a sea creature that responds to stimuli like touch, motion and light. Near the tentacle creature are clumps of fiber optic wires that pull in if you touch them, just like an ordinary sea anemone.

Is this good artificial intelligence or good programming? ‘Is there a difference?’ responds Scott Senften, chair of Siggraph’s Emerging Technologies Exhibition.

This year’s exhibition was a meditation on human-machine interaction, as researchers from around the world demonstrated three kinds of projects: robots, machines that enhanced one or more of the five senses, and explorations of virtual reality.” Wired

“If traditional concert performances leave you sighing for more, you can look forward to an opera where musicians squeeze squishy embroidered balls, play soundless violins and bang on glowing bugs with antennae.

These hyper-instruments were developed by Tod Machover of MIT’s Media Lab in an attempt to break free of conventional musical instrument design. Building on technologies developed for Machover’s groundbreaking Brain Opera, these music toys enable children to engage in sophisticated listening, performing and composing activities normally accessible only after years of study.” Wired

If you use Outlook for email and have installed the security patch, you’ll discover that all of a sudden you are unable to receive any executable files as email attachments. Yes, I know they can propagate malicious code, but there are still reasons you might want to receive an executable from a trusted source. I discovered this in attempting to send code from one of my email accounts to another. The security update also blocks me from receiving .url files linking to webpages. Here’s a discussion of possible remedies, which range from simply changing the extension of the attachment before sending it; compressing your attachment into a zip file; using any of several downloadable utilities to restore control over which types of files you are willing to receive; to a registry edit that disables the “level 1” security fix on a per-filetype basis. Opening Attachments Blocked by the Microsoft Outlook E-mail Security Update:

‘The Outlook E-Mail Security Update (included in Office 2000 Service Pack 2) and Outlook 2002 block access to .exe, .com and other “dangerous” files. See Attachment Security for a list of the affected file types. You cannot open these files from Outlook, nor can you use Outlook to save them to your system. If you try to forward a message containing an .exe file, Outlook does not include the attachment in the forwarded message.

So what do you do when you receive an .exe file and must find a way to open it? There are several methods, depending on your version of Outlook.’

Frequently asked questions on the Seven Deadly Sins University of Leicester History of Art Dept. [via nonharmful

]

“It doesn’t look pretty: The United States ranks last among the world’s 28 top foreign aid donor countries, and its foreign assistance levels have dropped dramatically over the past 10 years, according to a United Nations report released this week.

The United Nations Human Development Report 2002, a wide-ranging report that includes both fascinating country statistics and a questionable development ranking of 137 nations, puts the United States well below Denmark, the Netherlands, Japan and even Spain and Portugal on the list of the biggest foreign aid donor countries relative to the size of their economies.” Miami Herald [thanks to Julie Ferguson]

“Not to suspect that a dirty little word lies at the center of the controversy spawned by the most recent Bush administration document on climate change. In the June EPA policy paper “Climate Action Report 2002,” the government admitted that climate change is not only real but getting worse, that human activities are the most likely cause, and that the negative consequences are real and dangerous, a clear and present threat. This dirty little word may have been the reason conservative leaders have privately pressed to have EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman fired from her position—for producing a document that provides the most realistic, scientifically accurate picture of the problem available from current research. This dirty little word may be the main reason President Bush is eternally trying to distance himself from this itchy environmental problem, this foreign cause touted by Russians, Europeans, and Japanese. The word: liability.

In terms of scale, the climate change issue will make any sort of environmental liability lawsuit filed in national or international courts to date seem like tarts and gingerbread.” Village Voice

“Thanks to the military’s Global Positioning System, border disputes — common in the nation’s frontier days — are making a comeback. The system, launched in the 1980s, is a cluster of 24 satellites, designed for targeting weapons and tracking troops. But in recent years it has revolutionized land surveys, making it easier and cheaper for even the smallest municipalities to pinpoint their boundaries.” MSNBC

If you use Outlook for email and have installed the security patch, you’ll discover that all of a sudden you are unable to receive any executable files as email attachments. Yes, I know they can propagate malicious code, but there are still reasons you might want to receive an executable from a trusted source. I discovered this in attempting to send code from one of my email accounts to another. The security update also blocks me from receiving .url files linking to webpages. Here’s a discussion of possible remedies, which range from simply changing the extension of the attachment before sending it; compressing your attachment into a zip file; using any of several downloadable utilities to restore control over which types of files you are willing to receive; to a registry edit that disables the “level 1” security fix on a per-filetype basis. Opening Attachments Blocked by the Microsoft Outlook E-mail Security Update:

‘The Outlook E-Mail Security Update (included in Office 2000 Service Pack 2) and Outlook 2002 block access to .exe, .com and other “dangerous” files. See Attachment Security for a list of the affected file types. You cannot open these files from Outlook, nor can you use Outlook to save them to your system. If you try to forward a message containing an .exe file, Outlook does not include the attachment in the forwarded message.

So what do you do when you receive an .exe file and must find a way to open it? There are several methods, depending on your version of Outlook.’

Intriguing thought from Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing:

‘This week’s Onion is out, and I’ve created a bookmark file for Mozilla that will load every page in the new ish in its own tab. If you’ve got Moz, right-click/control-click [this link

] and select “Save Link Target As…” Save the file, then select Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks… Once the bookmarks window is open, select Tools –> Import… and choose the file. You’ll have a new bookmark, called “The Onion Aug 1 2002.” Select it and your Moz window will open up with all the pages of the new Onion in it.

Why do this? I dunno. I have an idea that there could be an RSS aggregator or similar that outputted Moz tab-bookmark files. Wouldn’t it be cool if every morning, you sat down to your browser and had a tab-file that would load up all the day’s news stories (say, every link from the previous day’s Boing Boing or Wired News or Slashdot) — click it before you take your shower, and by the time you’re done, voila, tabbed newspaper!’

What, you don’t use Mozilla?? Worth it for the nifty tabbed browsing interface alone, as well as the fact it’s not Micro$oft. And BloggerPro supports it well…

Bush ready to declare war. Considerable evidence of the requisite military buildup…

…including the building up of strategic oil reserves in the US to insulate the economy against an expected hike in oil prices that would follow the opening of hostilities.

Discreet inquiries have also been made about the availability of the oil tankers that would be needed to transport aviation and other fuel to the Gulf for use by US forces.

In a further indication that America is readying itself for war, large numbers of US Army military trucks have undergone rapid servicing by the Oshkosh Truck Corporation and have been seen being delivered by rail back to their bases painted in tan desert camouflage.

(British PM Tony) Blair yesterday faced new demands from all sides to publish the now notorious dossier of information on Saddam’s nuclear, biological and chemical armoury that he has been promising to unveil since spring… The long delay in publication has prompted suspicions that the dossier, which relies heavily on satellite pictures, is embarrassingly thin. Guardian UK

In bombing and invading Iraq, the US will abandon its age-old practice of no first strike. Of course, since the Bush team has kept up the unceasing, absurd rhetoric about there being a War on Terrorism® against a global threat (and of Iraqi complicity with al Qaeda, even though doubted by both the FBI and CIA in a rare showing of agreement… LA Times), they have a ready-made case that this is not a preemptive strike but rather a reactive one. And, of course, we do have a time-honored tradition of taking down regimes we find unfriendly with covert action. Doing it overtly — look at the military appropriation Bush asked for (and received almost everything he had asked for) last month — of course instead justifies a massive shot in the arm for the failing economy that is otherwise likely to be Bush’s lasting historical legacy, and a giveaway to boot to some of the Administration’s military-contractor best friends… and to the coffin-makers as well.

And the fact that no one is immune from danger of a first strike from the World’s Only Superpower® (and World’s Primary Rogue State) will probably stimulate, not discourage, the development of weapons of mass destruction with hoped-for deterrent value by all the other rogue states.

But real benefit to long-range US security doesn’t matter, as long as the image is right and the voters can finally see Bush as having some success. In the face of a double dip recession and his failure to otherwise deliver on his grandiose WoT® “vision”, and especially if he can finish Daddy’s War for him (with an administration made up largely of his Daddy’s old warhorses), it is (as the most hackneyed line in the media speculation about this war goes) not a question of if but only of when…

“What drugs have not destroyed, the war on them has”: ‘David Simon, creator of the searing new HBO series “The Wire,” on why even the best cop shows are phony and our anti-drug mania amounts to a permanent war against the underclass… HBO’s new series “The Wire” is as much a polemic against the drug war as it is an indictment against traditional cop-show conventions.’

What’s behind the basic plot of “The Wire”?

It’s very loosely based on the experiences of my co-writer, Ed Burns, who was a 20-year veteran of the police department here in Baltimore. He did a lot of these protracted investigations, often of more than a year’s time, into violent drug traffickers. It was largely based on his experiences and his frustrations in the department. And then it was also based on my experiences at my newspaper, which became a sort of hellish, futile bureaucracy. And then while we were writing the scripts, Enron was happening. And the Catholic Church. It became more of a treatise about institutions and individuals than a straight cop show.

Like “The Corner,” “The Wire” deals with the drug epidemic in Baltimore. Why do you keep coming back to this subject and this city?

I’ve lived in Baltimore coming up on 20 years. I know it. I actually went to the mayor and told him, “This is gonna be a pretty bleak show. If you’re sick of this shit, we’ll take our business elsewhere.” But to his credit, he said, Do it. Baltimore is one of the most drug-involved cities in the country. It has been for years. The police department we’re portraying is not particularly exaggerated for the late ’80s, early ’90s. It was that dysfunctional. [More] Salon

U.S. Challenged To Define Role In Afghanistan: “The lull in the hunt for al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan has Afghans and Americans alike demanding that the U.S. military make clear what it is doing here and how much longer it plans to keep doing it.” Washington Post And: Special Forces take over hunt for al-Qaeda: “US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has ordered the head of US Special Forces to take over the hunt for senior al-Qaeda leaders following frustration in the Bush administration that the war on terror has run out of steam.” Guardian UK

“Overfishing of shark prey in the Atlantic Ocean means sharks are coming closer to shore to find food and may mistake swimmers for a meal, according to new research by United States oceanographers.” CNN

‘Reach out and touch the consumer advertising’:

“Next time a good-looking young couple asks you to take their picture, beware — they might work for the maker of the camera.

Cell phone maker Sony Ericsson has hired 120 actors and actresses across the country to play tourists and ask passers-by to take their picture with the company’s new T68i cell phone and an add-on digital camera.” CNN

Krugman: “On the surface, the sharp drop in the economy’s growth is disheartening. Under the surface, it’s quite a lot worse.” NY Times op-ed

“When you gaze at a bowl of fruit, why don’t some of the bananas look red, some of the apples look purple and some of the grapes look yellow?

This question isn’t as nonsensical as it may sound. When your brain processes the information coming from your eyes, it stores the information about an object’s shape in one place and information about its color in another. So it’s something of a miracle that the shapes and colors of each fruit are combined seamlessly into distinct objects when you look at them.”

Simson Garfinkel has more to say on the Yale-Princeton database-hacking controversy than the usual chuckles, head-wags and tongue-clucks it provokes — specifically, its implications for database design. “To provide even better security, Yale and Princeton could have used what’s called a translucent database, a term coined by author and cryptographer Peter Wayner in his new book by the same title.”

I’ve been enjoying Warblogger Watch, another of those compendium weblogs, probably because the worldview of the contributors fits mine so well. Cognitively, that should be a cause for concern, which is precisely what this post from July 29 discusses. Igor Boog means to lambast the warbloggers but we ‘peacebloggers’ should be chastened as well:

Douglas Adams in one of his books describes a program that allows the user to specify a conclusion in advance, and then constructs a plausible series of logical-sounding steps out of a collection of facts, to support this conclusion. (In Adams’ book, the program is sold exclusively to the Pentagon, for obvious reasons.)

Probably most people’s brains work like this fictional program, more or less. People have a certain worldview (in the broadest sense of the word), and information that supports or seems to support their particular view is “processed” easier and faster. Information that doesn’t “fit” and should make people scrutinize or even reconsider their worldview and conclusions is often repressed, the people who present this information are often attacked, vilified. [thanks, Adam!]

BTW, perhaps the most thoughtful warblogger-watch contributor of late, along with Boog, is Grady Oliver, in a refreshing change from his contributions to Like Father, Like Sun, a little too densely laden with one-issue contempt for the New York Sun as it appears to be.

In another of FmH’s famous loose associations, the cognitive issue issue Boog discusses above is really similar to the ‘epistemology of epidemiology’ [grin] problem discussed in this piece from the British Medical Journal:

Author conclusions in clinical trials funded by for profit organisations are more likely to favour experimental intervention than trials funded by not for profit organisations reveals a study in this week’s BMJ.

As the BMJ is one of a few journals which requires authors to declare funding and competing interests, the researchers used 159 trials published in the journal between 1997 and 2001 as the basis for their study. Each study was examined for a link between any competing interests and the author’s conclusions.

For the purpose of the trial the author’s conclusion was defined as ‘the interpretation of extent to which overall results favoured experimental intervention’. [via EurekAlert]

Keep in mind that “clinical trials funded by for profit organisations” is a euphemism for “…funded by drug companies” and that “favour(ing) experimental interventions” means that the study found favorable results from using that drug company’s product.

In my psychiatric work, I find one of the most urgent, painful and underemphasized issues is the stigmatization my patients and their families face and the impact that has on their quality of life and stability. This paper from BioMedNet [requires free registration] is a nice discussion of the issues and the impact of new genetic paradigms in understanding mental illness. Genetic bases of mental illness – a cure for stigma?

An increased emphasis on biological causes of mental illness has been viewed as having the potential to significantly reduce stigma. From this perspective, the current genetics revolution can be seen as a source of hope. However, some have argued that biological attributions could increase stigma, for example by making the ill person seem ‘defective’ or ‘physically distinct’ – ‘almost a different species’. In this paper, I use a multicomponent conceptualization of stigma as a guide in forming hypotheses about the likely impact of genetic attributions on the stigma of mental illness.

As recently emphasized by the US Surgeon General, people with mental illnesses suffer not only from their disorders, but also from the stigma and discrimination that accompany them. Mental illness is associated in the public mind with an astoundingly broad range of negative attributes – for example, being dangerous, dirty, cold, worthless, bad, weak and ignorant. The consequences of these stereotypes range from direct and obvious ones, such as discrimination in employment and housing, to informal social ostracization and more subtle expressions, such as television programs that portray people with mental illness as being inadequate, unlikable and dangerous. Family members also suffer from stigma, through blame for causing the illness, having their own mental health status questioned, rejection by friends and other relatives, and so on.

Here’s a gallery of amateur photographers’ lovely aurora photographs from around North America, as far south as Des Moines, Iowa, last week. “On August 1st, the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) near Earth suddenly turned south–a condition that renders Earth’s magnetosphere vulnerable to solar wind gusts. A G2-class geomagnetic storm began soon after. Sky watchers in Canada and parts of the United States saw colorful auroras.”

My son has just undergone that crucial rite of passage in an English-speaking childhood — becoming aware of “antidisestablishmentarianism”. The word, that is, not the movement. As a topic, it is very difficult to use in conversation, and my experience of bemused frustration at Noah’s asking me what the word means in the real world suddenly explains the pained looks I recall on my father’s and mother’s faces at analogous moments in my own childhood. Here, Dan Hartung actually manages to find a way to reference antidisestablishmentarianism in a meaningful (?) way in a weblog. Anyone know of any earlier reasonable weblog examples? The word does have a weighty web presence, as this Google search shows. Some of the usages are even in earnest…

The front page of the Boston Globe is dismal today:

• With heart attack victim aboard, T train stops twice: “A man suffering a heart attack yesterday morning was kept aboard an MBTA commuter train that made two scheduled stops before reaching waiting paramedics at Back Bay Station in Boston as horrified passengers implored the crew to bypass the stations.” [Addendum: this link does not seem to be available anymore at the Boston Globe website.]
• The beached whales return to shore; many die despite rescuers’ futile efforts, to the horror of throngs of vacationing onlookers. [And to think I was jubilant yesterday…]
• Massachusetts is cutting reimbursement rates for “MassHealth” (Medicaid) prescriptions, prompting the three pharmacy chains that together account for the bulk of Massachusetts prescription fulfillment to threaten to stop filling MassHealth patients’ prescriptions. The Speaker of the House sneers that the “taxpayers” have had enough of subsidizing the poor in this way. Admittedly, MassHealth expenditures are growing at around 10% a year and are already the single largest expenditure line in the state budget, but if Medicaid recipients can’t fill their prescriptions in their neighborhoods, thousands will go without medications, literally consigning some to death.

  Instead of squeezing Medicaid recipients between the rock and hard place of the “taxpayers” and the profit margin of the retail pharmacy chains, Massachusetts (which was one of the states that was most adamant about going after Big Tobacco when Scott Harshbarger was attorney general), ought to go to the source — this is largely a problem of the rapacity of the pharmaceutical manufacturers. Putting pharmacies out of business, gouging ‘bottomless’ entitlement programs, and using poor medication-dependent patients as life-and-death pawns are just business as usual, until pricing policy for Medicaid patients’ drugs is made an issue just as the pricing of AIDS drugs for Africa has been.

By Attacking Bush, Kerry Sets Himself Apart: “For many Democrats, the war on terrorism has made that kind of frontal assault on Bush foreign policy seem risky, if not politically suicidal. But not for Mr. Kerry. A decorated Vietnam veteran and potential presidential candidate, he has lustily attacked the administration on policies like trans-Atlantic relations, Pentagon spending, Middle East negotiations and even Mr. Bush’s greatest triumph, Afghanistan.” NY Times

PhotoshopContest.com: “Here you can take a pre-chosen image, alter it how ever you like and post it for others to view, vote, comment and submit their own versions. The images that we select for editing can come from anywhere, such as news, sports, a random keyword search, anything!”

After Treatment for Mental Illness, Fight for Insurance Often Follows:

“The social stigma surrounding mental illness may have eased, but many insurers are still reluctant to issue individual policies to people with a psychiatric history — be it depression, anxiety or more serious conditions like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

A record of treatment for any of those conditions can make a person ineligible for long-term disability insurance and complicate efforts to obtain health insurance. Though life insurers rarely decline people with psychiatric problems, they may refuse to offer the low-cost “preferred” rates intended for healthy nonsmokers.” NY Times

A Protected Space, Where Art Comes Calling:

If Dr. Janos Marton ran the world, there would be protected spaces everywhere for people with mental illness to create paintings and sculptures, drawings and lithographs, installations, murals and collages, poetry and novels, songs and symphonies.

The abandoned buildings on the grounds of old state hospitals would be turned into sheltered workshops.

Warehouses in urban centers, where the mentally ill pace the streets and scrounge meals from garbage cans, would become safe harbors, working studios filled with color and form.

Delusion and hallucination, pain and sorrow, fear and manic exuberance would find their outlet in something quite simple, the creation of works of art.

Dr. Marton’s vision is hardly an idle one. At the Living Museum, housed in Building 75 of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, the state hospital’s former main kitchen and dining areas, he is the director of just such an “art asylum,” a refuge where in the 19 years since the museum opened more than 800 men and women have shed their identities as psychiatric patients and bloomed instead as artists…

In a recent interview, Dr. Marton discussed the museum’s goals and the relationship between art and mental illness… NY Times

Detailed Images of Nerves, Other Soft Tissues: “A new technology that allows physicians and researchers to make detailed, three-dimensional maps of nerve pathways in the brain, heart muscle fibers, and other soft tissues has been licensed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The new imaging technology, called Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DT-MRI) was invented by researchers now at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). DT-MRI may allow physicians and researchers to better understand and diagnose a wide range of medical conditions such as stroke, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), multiple sclerosis (MS), autism, attention deficit disorder (ADD), and schizophrenia.” National Institutes of Health press release

NPR’s The Connection considers Andropause: “If you’re over forty and a man, it could be coming to your body soon. Andropause, or male menopause. Symptoms include fatigue, moodiness, and decreased sex-drive.

But wait, from the industry that can lift you up, calm you down, re-grow your hair, even give Bob Dole back his sex life, comes the latest effort to medicalize the living.

Death and taxes may be certain, but not middle age, if you believe the hype from the makers of testosterone replacement therapies. Take “T” and regain the form and function of a twenty year-old.” A discussion between Dr. Jerome Groopman of Harvard Medical School, who authored a New Yorker article, “Hormones for Men”, which is apparently no longer online; and geriatric endocrinologist Dr. John Morley of St. Louis University. [Listen].

An American Terrorist: “He’s an assassin who fled the country. Could he help Washington now?” The New Yorker

Look at that Asteroid: “Relax, there’s no danger of a collision, but it will be close enough to see through binoculars: a big space rock, not far from Earth.” NASA

… of Being Colin Powell: “Colin Powell has lost virtually every major policy battle to the

most reckless, single-minded members of the administration. So

why does he stay? ” AlterNet

Several Stranded Whales Die at Cape Cod Beach: “More than 50 pilot whales beached themselves on a stretch of Cape Cod sand Monday and nine of them died before vacationers and other volunteers could push the animals back out to deeper water in a feverish rescue effort.” NY Times The headline should have emphasized that the vacationers and volunteers had saved 41 of the 50.

8 Years After Invasion, Haiti Squalor Worsens: “A decision by the U.S. and European countries to block some $500 million in Haitian aid in order to encourage greater democracy has deepened Haiti’s poverty, critics say.” NY Times

“Military officials confirm that two F-16 jets from Andrews Air Force Base were scrambled early yesterday after radar detected an unknown aircraft in area airspace. But they scoff at the idea that the jets were chasing a strange and speedy, blue unidentified flying object.

…At the same time, military officials say they do not know just what the jets were chasing, because whatever it was disappeared. “There are any number of scenarios, but we don’t know what it was,” said Maj. Barry Venable, another spokesman for NORAD.

… Radar detected a low, slow-flying aircraft about 1 a.m. yesterday, according to a military official. Controllers were unable to establish radio communication with the unidentified aircraft, and NORAD was notified. When the F-16s carrying air-to-air missiles were launched from Andrews, the unidentified aircraft’s track faded from the radar, the military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

… (One observer) remains convinced that what he saw was not routine. “It looked like a shooting star with no trailing mist,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”Washington Post

Let’s see, it appeared on radar, so it wasn’t an optical illusion. The civilian’s observation that it looked like a ‘shooting star with no trailing mist’ suggests it may indeed have been a meteor, which disappeared when it vaporized. At least it’s probably not Al Qaeda [although of course if you’re not with us you’re against us].

“Saudi Arabia is

teetering on the brink of collapse, fuelling Foreign Office fears of an extremist takeover of one of the West’s key allies in the war on terror.

Anti-government demonstrations have swept the desert kingdom in the past months in protest at the pro-American stance of the de facto ruler, Prince Abdullah.

At the same time, Whitehall officials are concerned that Abdullah could face a palace coup from elements within the royal family sympathetic to al-Qaeda.

Saudi sources said the Pentagon had recently sponsored a secret conference to look at options if the royal family fell.” Guardian UK

Daniel Kurtzman, San Francisco writer and former Washington political correspondent: Bush channels George Orwell: “Here’s a question for constitutional scholars: Can a sitting president be charged with plagiarism?

As President Bush wages his war against terrorism and moves to create a huge homeland security apparatus, he appears to be borrowing heavily, if not ripping off ideas outright, from George Orwell. The work in question is “1984, ” the prophetic novel about a government that controls the masses by spreading propaganda, cracking down on subversive thought and altering history to suit its needs. It was intended to be read as a warning about the evils of totalitarianism — not a how-to manual.” SF Chronicle

William Safire’s take on “Blog” in his On Language column in the Sunday New York Times. Nothing special here, except that it took him so long to notice.

I was disappointed that he hasn’t caught wind of my use of blink, originally suggested to me by my friend Abby shortly after I started FmH. It is probably time for my annual reexplanation for FmH readers who may puzzle over this idiosyncratic usage of mine — which as far as I can tell has only caught on with one other weblogger. Blink: Just as a blog is a weblog, a blink is a web link. Continuing the wordplay, just as “we_blog” (instead of logging), “we_blink” (instead of simply linking).

Does your weblog own you?

A ‘bloody stupid idea’?:

“Among the the cream of Britain’s bloggers is one who will not be taking part.

Tom Coates, the current holder of the European Blogger of the Year award for plasticbag.org, has announced on his site that the competition is a “bloody stupid idea”, and that he will be boycotting it.” Guardian UK

Containment seen less risky than attack: “Despite President Bush’s repeated bellicose statements about Iraq, many senior U.S. military officers contend that President Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat and that the United States should continue its policy of containment rather than invade Iraq to force a change of leadership in Baghdad.” Washington Post

Pesticide-free, non-genetically modified food is a big, global business now. But, ironically, small farmers are getting the shaft. Salon

What does Mozart mean now? Guardian UK

Scott Anderson: “Bush’s bioethics czar Leon Kass wants to criminalize lifesaving medical research as violating the natural order of things. Would he have opposed wiping out smallpox?” Salon

Martin Amis on the relevance of fiction after 9-11:

‘After September 11, then, writers faced quantitative change, but not qualitative change. In the following days and weeks, the voices coming from their rooms were very quiet; still, they were individual voices, and playfully rational, all espousing the ideology of no ideology. They stood in eternal opposition to the voice of the lonely crowd, which, with its yearning for both power and effacement, is the most desolate sound you will ever hear. “Desolate”: “giving an impression of bleak and dismal emptiness… from L. desolat-, desolare ‘abandon’, from de- ‘thoroughly’ solus ‘alone’.” ‘ Guardian UK

Elephant feet made for talking?: ‘Elephants may be listening to and communicating with each other through their feet.

Recent research by US scientists supports previous claims that elephants can interpret slight vibrations they pick up in the ground.

Speaking to BBC World Service, Stanford University biologist Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, said: “For people who have spent time studying elephants, this is a relief.

“They finally understand some strange things that were happening with elephants and they really are excited about it.’ BBC [via RobotWisdom]

Via loose association, a piece about someone who doesn’t have his ear to the ground:

The Rogue Elephant: Bush Jr.’s Nuclear Sabre-Rattling — Francis Boyle on his contempt for international law. Counterpunch [also via RobotWisdom]

Jorn Barger repost to alt.fan.unabomber of a new tactical article by Ted Kaczynski, with ambivalently supportive response from Green Anarchy Collective which originally published it.

There are five books that we can recommend

to our readers that will help get them started on the

process of deconstructing their faith in and

allegiance to technology. They are:

– The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul

(out-of-print, but readilly available in any good

used bookstore)

– Technics and Human Development: The Myth Of The

Machine Volume 1 by Lewis Mumford

– Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford

– My Name Is Chellis & I’m In Recovery From

Civilization by Chellis Glendinng

and

– Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television by

Jerry Mander, which focuses on the destructive

impact of a very specific technology but which also

offers an incredibly strong critique of

technological mediation which has a much wider

applicability.

“Get ready for another big stink:

A new, huge “corpse flower” is expected to bloom this week at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Last year’s bloom of a Titan arum drew tens of thousands of visitors to the UW Botany Department greenhouse to see the exotic plant whose rare, purplish flower can grow as big as 4 feet wide – and many times that size in its native habitat, the Indonesian rain forests.

Fewer than 15 blooms had been recorded in the United States before last year’s flower at UW, which tied the record at 101 inches tall.

The new corpse flower is from a plant that came from the same seed source as the other one and has been at UW for about seven years. It grew 14 inches in a week and is now 59 inches tall and growing.

It grows from a tuber that can weigh up to 170 pounds, and it gets its name for the stench it puts out to attract carrion beetles, dung beetles and sweat bees to pollinate it.” Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel [via higgy]

I posted a blink to the story, and a live webcam, the last time one bloomed last year. The flower will reportedly again get a web presence, sans smell, this time around.

California Medical Board Suspends Internet Doc’s License: “Jon Opsahl, M.D. will appear before a California administrative law judge July 25 in a hearing about alleged violations of a state law that requires physicians to perform a “good faith” examination before prescribing certain medications for patients, reports The Sacramento Bee. Opsahl allegedly wrote more than 8,000 prescriptions for antidepressants and painkillers over the course of a year for patients that he had spoken with on the phone rather than seen in person. The Bee reports that the complaint against Opsahl charges he received $60 for each of the phone consultations, which were referred to him by a now-closed Texas-based Web site.” Today in E-Health Business

“One of the most traumatic experiences a family can suffer — the death of a child — is often worsened by ineffective health care that fails to address the physical, emotional or spiritual needs of the patient and family members, a report released today found.” NY Times

NIH Funds Botanical Center in Iowa to Study Health Effects of Echinacea and St. John’s Wort National Institutes of Health

Vijendra K. Singh, Sheren X. Lin, Elizabeth Newell, Courtney Nelson: Abnormal Measles-Mumps-Rubella Antibodies and CNS Autoimmunity in Children with Autism : “Stemming from this evidence, we suggest that an inappropriate antibody response to MMR, specifically the measles component thereof, might be related to pathogenesis of autism… ” Journal of Biomedical Science This has been a persistent speculation; findings have been contradictory. Obviously, important public policy decisions about childhood immunization depend on getting a better bead on this issue.

And How Fast, Really, Is the Snakehead? More on the lastest Chinese menace. The New Yorker Talk of the Town

Corporate Corruption Has its Advantages, says P.J. O’Rourke. “(It) endangers everything in which we have, over the past many years, invested our time, effort, and money–particularly Republican control of the House of Representatives. And our 401(k) plans aren’t doing so well either. In this period of gloom–with liberals seeking to make hay from capitalist foibles and our own capitalist foibles reduced in value to bales of ditto–it behooves us to look for a moment at the bright side of corporate corruption.” The Weekly Standard

A speech (scroll down about half a page) Bruce Sterling gave at a design conference in Brussels last week, to which I was pointed by Joe Katzman’s piece on his Winds of Change. Sterling describes “a rather extensively worked-out vision in worldbuilding from the point of view of ubiquitous computation in the 21st century”, and a notion he calls 911.net. None of this really appears well-worked-out to me, which he actually acknowledges apologetically several times in the speech, because he’s just a science-fiction writer, folks:

“The actual September 11 event, 9/11, was a rare and remarkable thing. And, with fewer than 3,000 people dead, it’s just not that big a deal as genuine catastrophes go. Politically, theologically and militarily it was huge, but a workaday 911.net wouldn’t fret much about terrorism. Instead, it would have to deal mostly with floods, fires, climate change, earthquakes, volcanoes and (let’s hope never) asteroids and weapons of mass destruction.

So, basically, with 911.net, we are describing a social re-definition of computer geeks as firemen. Native twenty-first century computer geeks as muscular, with-it, first-responder types. I think this would be pretty good for the computer industry. We all need to take the dysfunctional physical world far more seriously. This week, Italy’s flooding, Texas is flooding, Colorado’s on fire. This morning, the brand-new wilderness forests around the site of the former Chernobyl are on fire, spewing radioactive ash hither and yon. Chunks of Antarctica the size of Rhode Island have fallen into the sea. I could go on.

“…This is the sort of activity that humanity is required to deal with

in this new century. If we build a successful method with which to do

this, those useful tactics will spread across the fabric of our

civilization. I believe they are already spreading. An innovation like

911.net will likely serve as a camel’s nose in the tent for a whole

series of ubicomp [ubiquitous computing] applications across society…”

Fundamentally unsound:”Left Behind, the bestselling series of paranoid, pro-Israel end-time thrillers, may sound kooky, but America’s right-wing leaders really believe this stuff…There is probably very little overlap between Salon‘s readership and the audience for apocalyptic Christian fiction, but these books and their massive success deserve attention if only for what they tell us about the core beliefs of a great many people in this country, people whose views shape the way America behaves in the world. ” Salon [via Walker]

A portrait of Barbara Ehrenreich’s unlikely bestseller Nickel and Dimed, an ‘undercover’ view of the working poor:

“Her experiences, however, have had a lasting effect on her own conscience. ‘I used to have a boyfriend who thought we should have a cleaner. I couldn’t explain why I was opposed to the idea – it just seemed emotional on my part. Then I did the job and I knew why I felt so uncomfortable with it. Do I still eat out? Yes, but remember: even in an expensive restaurant, where the waiters do well in tips, there are still the dishwashers and the other people in the background.

‘My perception really has changed. Now, when I see a woman behind the counter in a convenience store, I have so many questions. How long has she been on her feet? What does she get paid? Who does she go home to?’ ” Guardian UK Books [via Walker]

‘NewsFutures is a game. Similar to fantasy stock market games, this one lets players trade on news events. You predict the outcome of various real-world news events we supply. So the more you know, the more likely you are to predict correctly and win. And it’s not just how much you know. You can benefit from the bad predictions of others.

Win what? NewsFutures won’t make you rich, but it will give you the ability to bid for a variety of prizes using the “eXchange dollars” (X$) you earn from playing.’ “Seriously addictive!” — Bruce Sterling

Special Nerves Register the Emotional Context of a Pleasurable Touch:

“Scientists announced a study today that shows humans have a special set of nerves for feeling pleasure at a mother’s caress or a lover’s embrace.

These nerves are sensitive to the soft touch of fingers gliding over a forearm or a parent’s soothing hand, but not to rough touches, jabs or pinches. Scientists speculate that the nerves might be designed to guide humans toward tenderness and nurturing — a theory bolstered by the fact that the nerves are wired to the same brain areas activated by romantic love and sexual arousal. Although these special nerves, which have thin fibers and send relatively slow signals to the brain, had been identified in animals and humans, their role had been unclear…” Washington Post [thanks, Norton!]

“A dead crow discovered on the White House grounds was infected with West Nile virus, health officials said after the bird was tested.

The crow is one of two found near a fountain on the South Lawn this week. The first was discovered late Sunday by Secret Service officers, who then found the second early Monday….An additional 45 dead birds in the city have tested positive for West Nile so far this year, according to the city’s Health Department.” Boston Globe

“A directory of resources for research in contemporary art…” by Cheryl Shurtleff of Boise State University. “Sites have been selected according to their relevance to the study of national or international contemporary art and artists…”

Mario Vargas Llosa:

“Cries of Western cultural hegemony are as common as they are misguided. In reality, globalization does not suffocate local cultures but rather liberates them from the ideological conformity of nationalism.” Foreign Policy

OTOH (from June, 2000): Assault of the Earth:

‘Sitting in the Phoenix offices one recent afternoon, the essayist Pico Iyer smiles and admits that his new book — The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home — might be a bit “discombobulating.”

No kidding. The literary equivalent of a red-eye flight, the book flits between Los Angeles and Atlanta, Hong Kong and Toronto, England and Japan in an attempt to fathom the human cost of globalism.

As Iyer sees it, our shrinking planet — with its drop-of-a-hat intercontinental travel — has led to a new breed: the Global Soul, a “full-time citizen of nowhere” who dashes around the planet in a sort of cultural limbo. “His memories might be set in airports that looked more and more like transnational cities,” Iyer writes, “in cities that looked more and more like transnational airports. Lacking a binding sense of `we,’ he might nonetheless remain fiercely loyal to a single airline.” ‘ Boston Phoenix

Ant-bite case yields $5.35M award: “A 79-year-old woman who was found swarmed by fire ants at the nursing home where she lived was awarded $5.35 million by an Alabama jury.

Linda Law, an employee of Greystone Retirement Community in Huntsville, Ala., made the shocking discovery when she entered Lucille Devers’ darkened room to deliver clean laundry. Ants covered Devers’ body, her bed and the walls of her room. Devers, who was sitting, stood up and Law saw ants flowing from her mouth, nose, ears and hair.” National Law Journal [via Romenesko’s Obscure Store]

How Much Is Too Much? “Perhaps it means something that in San Francisco, there are now more Starbucks outlets than publicly traded Internet companies. Everybody knows that one day the franchise’s caffeinated growth rate will have to slow, but the numbers argue that it might not be soon.” One Morgan Stanley analyst indicates the saturation point beyond which further growth would hurt the company might not come until there are 3 stores for every 100,000 in the North American population. And then there’s the rest of the world… Business 2.0

…could transform space travel: “An elaborate matrix of paths scattered throughout the entire solar system can dramatically cut the amount of power needed for spacecraft to explore our celestial neighborhood, NASA announced this week…

Past space wanderers have already tested the space road, including asteroids and comets. Comet Shoemaker-Levy, for example, collided with Jupiter “when it took an off-ramp toward the giant gas planet,” NASA said.

Some scientists theorize that a killer asteroid traveled along the highway when it smacked into Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. ” CNN

Bob Dylan’s road back to Newport: “Bob Dylan returns to the Newport Folk Festival 37 years after his earth-shaking 1965 concert, the first time he performed live with an electric band.” NY Times

Jeb Bush’s daughter fails drug program:

“Gov. Jeb Bush’s 24-year-old daughter Noelle has failed to meet the conditions of a drug treatment plan ordered by a court, the governor said Wednesday.

Noelle Bush was arrested in January at a pharmacy drive-through window for allegedly trying to buy the anti-anxiety drug Xanax with a fraudulent prescription. She was admitted to a drug treatment center in February, with the possibility the charges would be dropped if she completed the program.

It was not immediately clear how she violated the conditions of the program and what the consequences would be.” CNN

Giant squid washes up on beach: “Scientists in Australia are investigating what may be a new species of giant squid, after one of the deep sea creatures washed up on a Tasmanian beach over the weekend.

The squid weighs up to 250 kilograms and, including tentacles, measured almost 18 meters (60 feet), the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported on Monday.” CNN Still nowhere near It Came From Beneath the Sea sizes, for those who remember the ’50’s monster picture, but getting big enough to account for the legendary battles with whales which sometimes wash up onshore dead with large sucker scars.

Net Users Try to Elude the Google Grasp NY Times

Yale Tells FBI of Rival’s Breach of Web Site:

“Yale University complained to the FBI today that admissions officers from Ivy League rival Princeton University broke into Yale’s online admissions notification system and snooped on student files.

Princeton issued an immediate apology and suspended its associate dean of admission.

Yale accused Princeton of viewing confidential decisions regarding 11 candidates who had applied to both schools — in some cases, doing so before the students had learned whether they were accepted.” Washington Post

Warren Buffett: “For their shareholders’ interest, and for the country’s, C.E.O.’s should tell their accounting departments today to quit recording illusory pension-fund income and start recording all compensation costs. They don’t need studies or new rules to do that. They just need to act.” NY Times op-ed

“Listen up, fellows: Rich, bored teenage girls in New York City are on the prowl for twentysomething (and in some cases, thirtysomething) men. And this time, they’re not just arming themselves with fake ID’s. Young women barely past puberty—and before, ahem, the age of consent—are sashaying onto the Internet, researching adult life, and constructing elaborate alter egos designed to dupe men all too willing to believe their lies.” The New York Observer

‘U.S. Taliban’ Inspires Controversial Ballad: “A new country-rock song that compares American Taliban John Walker Lindh to Jesus Christ is drawing both raves and howls of indignation just days after the 21-year-old pleaded guilty to aiding the former Afghan regime.” Reuters

“The Sun newspaper broke the news on 8 July 2002 that a white couple (Mr and Mrs A) had black twins, following fertility treatment… The stage is being set for a legal moot, over ownership of body fluids.” sp!ked

Where the Upper Crust Crumbled Politely: “The formerly luxurious state-run asylum has fallen on hard times, the standard stay of patients in the era of managed care a mere five days — just long enough to be diagnosed, and stabilized on drugs.” NY Times

“Recession, terrorist threat, clogged arteries, a hole in the ozone the size of France? Fuhgeddaboutit! While lots of conscientious Americans are frantically juggling their finances and questioning their doctors, many are responding by simply not responding.” NY Times

“In the seemingly staid world of physics, time travel is all the rage. Some of the giants of physics like Kip S. Thorne of the California Institute of Technology, John A. Wheeler of Princeton University (who coined the term black hole) and the world’s best-known physicist, Stephen W. Hawking of the University of Cambridge, have written books in the last few years with speculations about time travel.” NY Times

I.R.S. Loophole Allows Wealthy to Avoid Taxes NY Times

They’re free and relatively unscathed.

Bob Dylan’s road back to Newport: “Bob Dylan returns to the Newport Folk Festival 37 years after his earth-shaking 1965 concert, the first time he performed live with an electric band.” NY Times

… this cryptic reference to FmH on a weblog called frytopia:

“Just started looking in–got it off Blogger. So far it’s fascinating and informative. Part of me hopes I’ll find that one thing that will make me less of a shithead.”

I’d love to help, but I don’t have a clue how…

Hollywood hacking bill hits House:

“Copyright owners would be able to legally hack into peer-to-peer networks, according to a bill introduced in the House of Representatives on Thursday.

…(T)he measure would dramatically rewrite federal law to permit nearly unchecked electronic disruptions if a copyright holder has a “reasonable basis” to believe that piracy is occurring.

The bill, sponsored by Reps. Howard Berman, D-Calif., and Howard Coble, R-N.C., would immunize groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) from all state and federal laws if they disable, block or otherwise impair a “publicly accessible peer-to-peer file-trading network.” CNET

DiY cloning is with us at last, and you can buy it on the web. Well, sort of. If you look here, you will find that for the bargain price of $9,199 ex shipping you can buy an RMX2010 Clonaid direct fusion, umm, thingummy.

It is, apparently, a device used for embryonic cell fusion, and we get the impression that it is more efficient than the chamber method, which we confess we hadn’t heard of either. But if you have a ready supply of ovums and cellular scrapings from the individual of your choice, we deduce that this is all you need to produce your very own duplicate person. Well, apart from a womb, that is. We reckon you probably need one of those too.

Clonaid, you may be aware, is an interesting operation. It was founded by one Raël, also founder of the Raëlian Movement, and although the man himself no longer runs Clonaid he still figures prominently on the front page of the site. This tells us that “life on Earth was created scientifically through DNA and genetic engineering by a human extraterrestrial race whose name, Elohim, is found in the Hebrew Bible and was mistranslated by the word ‘God’. The Raelian Movement also claims that Jesus was resurrected through an advanced cloning technique performed by the Elohim.” The Register

Ron Borges writes for NBC Sports and covers boxing and the NFL for the Boston Globe.The Spike Report pointed me to this piece — Great feat, but not a great athlete — about Lance Armstrong’s Tour de France victory. The reader poll on the page disagrees with him 96% to 4%, and I agree with Spike that this has got to be a deliberate provocation. Even taking into account the fact that he might actually have to like boxing to cover it for a major media outlet, could he possibly really be so dense as to believe that cycling is just “pumping your legs up and down while your feet are strapped to bicycle pedals”, variations on which theme he repeats over and over like a mantra in this piece? And, if “for my money, being the greatest athlete in the world involves strength, speed, agility, hand-eye coordination, mental toughness and the ability to make your body do things that defy description”, which of those are not true of a world-class cyclist? Maybe Borges’ wife was unfaithful to a real man like him with some sissy cyclist or something…

New Rules on Accountants, but Also Questions: “The legislative agreement approved today by a vote of 423 to 3 in the House of Representatives and 99 to 0 in the Senate sets up a new and potentially far-reaching regulatory apparatus for the accounting profession. But it leaves crucial details to the discretion of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is about to undergo a potentially stormy transition.”NY Times

Why is Philip Morris supporting FDA regulation of cigarettes? “Philip Morris’ quest for governmental approval is not masochistic: There are solid business reasons for it…” Slate

Is this the definitive sign of the death of blogging?

From economist and science fiction aficionado Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal:

I have never been a strong believer that there is a single “I”. Those times when you get in the car to go to the grocery store, and find ten minutes later that you are pulling into your office parking lot: who–or what–has been driving the car in the meantime?

There is a story that Neils Bohr’s wife once at the start of a party sent him upstairs to change his tie; an hour later she found him, asleep, in bed; taking off the tie had triggered the going-to-bed subroutine[?] reflex[?] entity[?] and had overwhelmed the express conscious purpose. I remember author David Brin once saying that he could not switch from finger-typing to voice-writing, because the raconteur who spoke through his mouth was vastly inferior at plot, characterization, and structure to the writer who communicated through the hands.

My daimones–as Walter Jon Williams calls them–do boring things like drive to the office. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, however, has a daimon that makes good omelettes… [more]

Joshua Micah Marshall:

“The White House just should not use the terrorism card to muscle through an ideological wish-list that it lacks the courage to push on its own terms.

So why no … outrage at the Bush White House for doing (that)?

The White House is insisting on a Homeland Security bill with virtually all the civil service and collective bargaining rights of federal employees stripped out of it? The excuse of course is that the DHS is just too important to pussyfoot around with the sort of loafers who slide by under the civil service regime. But this argument — though superficially plausible — doesn’t bear much scrutiny, especially since these protections now apply to people doing just the same kinds of work throughout the federal government.” Talking Points Memo

Paul Krugman and Mickey Kaus are in the midst of a pissing contest in print…

Kaus also points to <a href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59362-2002Jul24.html

“>this recent preoccupation of Lloyd Grove in the Washington Post:

Mutually Assured Dysfunction? Only a matter of time: Two like-minded magazines, the liberal-thinking American Prospect and the peace-oriented Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, are paying lawyers to try to resolve a dispute that erupted when the Prospect used an image of the Bulletin‘s copyrighted “Doomsday Clock” on its July 1 cover without permission — and, worse, changed the time. Bulletin publisher Stephen Schwartz, who noted that the Prospect set the clock at 4 minutes to doomsday, while the correct time is 7 minutes to doomsday, told us yesterday that his magazine sent a letter of displeasure, and that he isn’t entirely satisfied with the Prospect‘s correction, which appears in the latest issue. “What were they thinking? Schwartz demanded. “Something there must have broken down.”

You can just hear Kaus’ raspy palms rubbing together in glee at this specter of a dispute among the “liberal-thinking”

and the “peace-oriented”, although he disses TAP with that ultimate insult, “obscure” (which, at least to readers of FmH, it certainly is not…). Kaus really reaches escape velocity over Grove’s final point:

We hear a settlement might involve a favorable article about the Bulletin in a future issue of the Prospect. Our call to Prospect Editor Bob Kuttner was not returned.

Mickey the Rhino chomps at the bit [sorry to mix my metaphors with Krugman’s… — FmH]:

Wouldn’t that be a violation of, you know, journalistic ethics? (Imagine if the NYT or WaPo settled a libel suit by promising to publish a favorable article about a plaintiff.) Surely TAP wouldn’t do anything like that …

Wouldn’t that depend on exactly what Grove meant by “…a settlement might involve…”? Too bad Kuttner has yet, if ever, to weigh in on this one. At one extreme, The Bulletin might have demanded a favorable article as a condition of not bringing suit. At the other, might a conciliatory TAP have cited their preexisting admiration, proffering their intention to profile The Bulletin that may have predated the dispute? Most retractions I’ve seen in the press bend over backwards to compliment the source you might otherwise have been perceived as disparaging; that’s precisely what you are trying to achieve with a retraction in the first place. And it would be reasonable to claim you want to write about The Bulletin long about now. A venerable old slumbering giant of the disarmament movement since concerns about the nuclear arms race dropped off most people’s radar screens (a complacent self-delusion I’ve noted with concern here) after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has been receiving a wave of fresh attention since the warmongering Son of a Bush has taken office, since we abrogated the ABM treaty to restart the nuclear arms race with NMD, since 9-11 and the WoT®, and since the loose cannons have been rolled into position along the Indian-Pakistani line in the sand. If you’re curious, scroll past the references to the Bulletin‘s own pages in this Google search to see some of the ‘net attention they receive these days…

And what’s up with Kaus’ continual references to the Washington Post as “WaPo“? Is it just me, or does it seem he’s enjoying evoking resonances to “wacko” just abit?

Site for a seven-week Kurosawa and Mifune Film Series at New York’s Film Forum this summer with all-new 35 mm prints, many with new translations and subtitles. Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Stray Dog, Red Beard, The Bad Sleep Well, Drunken Angel, Throne of Blood, I Live in Fear, High and Low, Hidden Fortress and of course Rashomon and Seven Samurai. Go see them all…

New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell on the retrospective:

Kurosawa used the action genre more luxuriantly than any other director because he unleashed Mifune as a force of nature — the havoc he wrought was as frightening as we could imagine because the director allowed us to understand what Mifune’s victims were up against. Despite all the derring-do of Hong Kong martial-arts films, none of their directors ever lingered on the deadly physicality of the stars. Kurosawa let Mifune’s oaken arms say as much about his ruined amoral samurai in Sanjuro (Aug. 27-29) as the actor’s murderously swift shifts of facial expression did. NY Times

Ah, to be in New York this summer with time on my hands! In the Good Old Days, Boston’s late lamented Park Square Cinema would have a samurai film festival, oh perhaps on an annual basis, but this beats all… A new print of Yojimbo (which I watch over and over again on an nth-generation copy of a VHS tape)?? [thanks, Abby]

…could cause dyslexia, new research shows. Guardian UK

Pointed to by Rebecca Blood, this entry in Jeff Gates’ Life Outtacontext responds to the recent New Scientist item about eccentricity growing with age (to which I blinked) with a list of his own eccentricities. Nice enough; he sounds like someone I’d love to meet. But scroll down to the end for a worthy discussion of his own random acts of kindness… and be inspired.

General Templer’s Capitol Idea The Mighty Organ

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Hilton L. Root: The Political Roots of Poverty:

“This essay has two purposes. The first is to lay out some empirical evidence about the relationship between economic aid and systems of governance. The second is to address the problem of how the U.S. government should deal with difficult partners. On the first task there is a wealth of data that suggests some surprising connections between the length of political tenure, the nature of governance, and the role of aid money. That data and those connections, in turn, can help us to think through the second task.”

Does Western-style development fueled by foreign aid defuse the potential for terrorism embodied in the rage of the dispossessed? “In a world where development is state-driven, what will happen to countries without minimally functioning states? What institutional alternatives should we be thinking about where an effectively functioning state is a distant reality?”The National Interest

“… (W)hat tends to do in the wrongly convicted is the kind of evidence that seems clinching, that often is clinching—namely, eyewitness identifications and confessions. But the human memory is not a video recorder; eyewitness testimony is notoriously flawed. And although most of those who confess are guilty, people can and do confess to crimes they did not commit… Two simple measures could go a long way toward ensuring that findings of criminal guilt are genuine“, says Margaret Talbot, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation

. She suggests that lineups of criminal suspects be conducted sequentially instead of en masse, under the direction of police personnel who do not themselves know which of those in the lineup is the suspect; and that all interrogations be videotaped so that later reexamination can detect how much coercion had been used. The Atlantic

‘Some books are necessary, some are wonderful, few are both. In that select group belongs Joseph Epstein’s Snobbery: The American Version… With Snobbery, Epstein undertakes a book-length essay in a series of interconnected essays, each of two dozen chapters addressing a different type of snobbery. The amazingly alert and perceptive author pursues snobbishness from its spotlighted stages to its hidden breeding grounds and discovers striking varieties in crannies the rest of us would have overlooked.” LA Times Calendar

Reading Cesare Pavese:

“Non scriverò piú.” With these solemn words, which mean “I will not write anymore,” the Italian novelist, short-story writer, and poet Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) concluded his diary, and killed himself nine days later by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

Of what is a writer’s suicide emblematic? Of writing’s inability to save a life? Ardent lovers of literature may even find it hard to believe that a talent like Pavese’s could not somehow have kept on producing, plunging anew into the toils of composition as a way of resolving perfunctorily (or at least of putting off) the comparatively minor problems of unrequited love and daily living. But of course I am waxing ironic. It is arresting and, I daresay, grimly informative that Pavese’s extraordinarily lucid and pessimistic diary is entitled Il mestiere di vivere (1952), a book translated into English as This Business of Living and all too significantly emphasizing the “métier” or “trade” of living–as in, say, “Mastering the Trade of Living.” Context