“I console myself with the thought that it
is far better to live in a world with too many books than too
few…” Humiliations: the books that book critics and literary journalists are embarrassed to admit they’ve never read.

The Internet’s public enema No. 1:

‘Rotten.com’s sole purpose is to “present the viewer with a truly unpleasant experience,” and its proprietor is doing a dandy job of that. If it involves bizarre
sex, gruesome death or the sordid side of celebrity, you will find it on this site. “End times are here!” crows Rotten.com, and after a gut-wrenching hour or
two perusing the hundreds of images … archived here, it’s hard not to
agree: We are one screwed-up species.

It’s horrible. And yet, the Net is fascinated. About 200,000 visitors come to Rotten.com every day. … But Rotten.com isn’t just a database of the disgusting; it’s also a venue for making a point about censorship, at least according to “Soylent,” the
pseudonymous proprietor of Rotten.com, whose highly graphic content has earned him enemies around the world. The site is currently being investigated by
Scotland Yard and the FBI for cannibalism. The German Family Ministry has threatened Soylent with legal action if he doesn’t find a way to shield minors
from his site. And then there’s the endless cease-and-desist letters that flood in from a long list of major corporations that object to the site.’ Salon

Browsing my referrer log, it turns out someone got to me by doing an AOLSearch on “clitoral regeneration”. FmH was the 12th of 38 results of that search, because of this article from my archives. Oops, now a “clitoral” search will probably point to the current (March ’01) page as well, and I may even rank higher on “clitoral regeneration” searches. Now, if we only knew what in the world they were really after… Another search that pointed to FmH was a Google query on “prisoner’s right to give interviews in India”; it pointed to one month’s archive in which I had several blinks with the word “prisoner” in them, and several (different) blinks referring to India.

The Disturbing Search Requests weblog, whose founders started out by monitoring their referrer log, is having a similar problem, reports the Village Voice: ‘…by spotlighting the freakiest of the freaky, Disturbing Search Requests has become so loaded with
hot-button search terms that it is itself pulling in plenty of traffic from confused search engines. The site
gets more than 1500 visitors a day, most of them more interested in “nude tennis” or “hairy armpits” than in
meta-Web humor.’

How Enlightened! China takes homosexuality off list of mental illnesses. “In a reversal of previous policy, psychiatrists have decided to stop
classifying homosexuality as a mental disease.

New guidelines to be issued next month by the Chinese Psychiatric
Association will drop all references to homosexuality as a pathological
condition…” Sydney Morning Herald

A Machine Called Z: “Under a ring of water in a sealed chamber in the
middle of the New Mexico desert lies the heart of a
machine that could change the world.” Guardian [thanks, Abby]

The Swoosh Stumbles: “Why is it so tough to find a pair of Air Force Ones?” The software system to zip the right shoes into the right stores, for which Nike plunked down millions, doesn’t work. One casualty has been Nike’s stock price, of little interest to me. The Industry Standard But shoe stampedes closed several malls around the country (here’s a report from the March 4th Sacramento Bee), in this age of consumerist depravity, when queued customers — some of whom had been camped out since 3:00 a.m. — were unable to get their $140 pair of newly-launched hot shoes in the right color. “I’ve never seen anything this crazy before. It’s not worth it. I’m happy I got them, but they shouldn’t be limited. Everyone should be able to have a
pair. My little nephew almost got run over, and some guys went diving over the counter and hurt the girl at the
cash register. That was uncalled for.”

Similar stampedes have occurred recently in Oakland and Cincinnati. And two months ago in New York, a
Brooklyn Foot Locker manager allegedly set fire to his store to cover up the fact that 446 pairs of new Nike Air
Jordan sneakers were missing from his inventory. The $125 shoes were not scheduled to be released until later
that month, but the manager had been peddling them from a shop three doors down the street, authorities said.

The Retro style Air Jordans that caused such a frenzy Saturday are selling for more than $200 on eBay; chat
rooms on the Internet are devoted to when and where the latest styles will arrive.

This in the face of a recent New Scientist report on how innately human it is to cooperate while waiting in line [not on the web, I think].

“Oh, Calm Down!” James Fallows: “Some economic downturns are worse than others. This is one of the good ones.” We’re not experiencing negative growth. A downturn won’t negate “an astonishing period of material progress.” The deep forces affecting the economy remain positive, not negative. And the layoffs have hit people best positioned to adapt to them. The Industry Standard

Ten Ways to Make Windows 98 Run Better. Bought that faster Windows machine but still unsatisfied with your processing performance? It’s likely that, unless you’re a dedicated tweaker who’s done all these things already, the culprit is the operating system, and that you’ll find at least one or two helpful hints in this story. Since it’s just a modified Win 98, the tips are useful for WinME as well.

Korn, Radice and Hawes’ Cannibal: The History of the People-Eaters reviewed:

I once met an academic who was convinced that
there never had been any genuine cannibalism,
anywhere, ever.

All such stories
were a racist,
imperialist
construction of the
“other”, she
explained. She’d
had to have been
put in a pot and
boiled till she was
done to convince
her otherwise.
Such disbelievers
are now in retreat,
the authors of this
television spin-off
say.

Indeed, they propose that “cannibalism as a
feature of human behaviour is something that
has taken place throughout history, in every
continent on our planet”. Eating people is
commendably multicultural, then.
Thisislondon

Star thinkers in ‘e-learning’ launch: Filmed lectures by twelve of the “world’s greatest thinkers” will be available to the public for a month before they become the foundation of a growing archive which universities will pay a fee to access, at Boxmind.com, which is apologetic about the need to charge money for the service. Licensees will also be able to record and archive their own faculties’ lectures in the same innovative format, which its founder describes as “the Internet library students have dreamed of”:

Because the lectures are not delivered by a live webcast
but by a broadcast of filmed material, users can stop the action
at any point and follow the extensive links on each page for
in-depth background information on specific points. The lectures
can also be rewound and examined line by line for weaknesses
in the argument.

The technology used for the site – www.boxmind.com – is as
inventive as the concept. Each lecture screen is split into four. In
the top left, a talking head delivers the lecture, while
synchronised slides run in the top right. In the bottom right there
is a synchronised transcript of the entire lecture – complete with
embedded footnotes – next to the relevant web links.

The initial twelve lecturers in the series, accessible here, are:

Richard Dawkins,
Fellow of New College, Oxford, and Charles Simonyi, professor
of the public understanding of science. Survival of
the Fittest – the Fittest What?

Niall Ferguson,
Professor of political and financial history, at Oxford. The Cash Nexus – Money and Power in the Modern World

Sir Martin Rees,
Astronomer Royal and Royal Society professor at Kings
College, Cambridge. Cosmic Evolution

Daniel Dennett,
Professor of philosophy, and director of the Center for Cognitive
Studies at Tufts University, Massachusetts.
Consciousness: More Like Fame Than Television

Peter Atkins,
SmithKline Beecham fellow and tutor in physical chemistry at
Lincoln College, Oxford. The Second Law

John Kay,
Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, and visiting professor of
economics at the London School of Economics.
The Foundations of Corporate Success

David Womersley,
Fellow and tutor in English literature and senior tutor of Jesus
College, Oxford. Tragedy and Individuality in
Othello

John Searle,
Mills professor of the philosophy of mind and language,
University of California at Berkeley.
Consciousness, Free Will and the Brain

Sir David Weatherall,
Regius professor of medicine at Oxford. The
Human Genome Project and the Future of Medical Practice

Ian Stewart,
Professor of mathematics at Warwick University.
Order and Chaos in Mathematics and Nature

Nicola Lacey,
Professor of criminal law at LSE. Criminal Law and
Modern Society

Steven Pinker,
Peter de Florez professor in the department of brain and
cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. The Ingredients of Language

I am interested in trying out this format, which sounds on the surface as if it is a great way to utilize web capabilities for disseminating information rather than trying to sell anything. I do wonder how much bandwidth a home user will need to view these without it being a frustrating experience. The Guardian

Some police see through killer’s lies. “Shown
videotapes of an interrogation of a murder suspect speaking a language
they didn’t understand, some British police officers consistently knew
when the man was lying and when he was telling the truth. Other officers
detected lies and truths about as well as if they had guessed, and some
detected lies less often than if they had guessed, report Aldert Vrij and
Samantha Mann, both psychologists at the University of Portsmouth in
England.

Their study, published in the March-April Applied Cognitive Psychology,
assesses, for the first time, people’s ability to size up a highly motivated
liar.” The study showed police officers a foreign videotape of a suspect denying a murder accusation during an interrogation; he later confessed to the crime. I’d be interested in interviews with the officers who could easily recognize a liar to see if they could articulate the nonverbal cues they use. Science News

New Files Tie U.S. to Deaths of Latin Leftists in 1970’s. “A
recently declassified State
Department document shows that
Latin American officers involved in
Operation Condor, the joint effort in
the 1970’s by right-wing
governments to crush left-wing
opposition, used an American communications installation to share
intelligence.” New York Times

Promise-Breaker  – George W. Bush retracts his foreign policy campaign pledges: “… isn’t it a tad
peculiar to shoot your mouth off about U.S. military readiness
first, and then assign fact-finders to verify?” Slate

Although I’m glad the upshot appears to be that there will not be a vast increase in military expenditure, I also appreciate someone’s pointing out that he campaigned in ignorance and/or dishonesty, taking nonviable positions to get elected by pandering to rightwing sentiment. And it’s worth noting that revising his position is less a matter of having “come to his senses” than a realpolitik recognition that an illegitimate and crippled administration presiding over a legislative branch and an electorate neatly split down the middle is (thankfully) not likely to accomplish anything sweeping. How he spins things in an ongoing attempt to save his hide in the face of this inherent ineptitude is likely to remain entertaining viewing for at least four years.

Drug’s Effect on Brain Is Extensive, Study Finds

Heavy users of
methamphetamine …
are doing more damage to their
brains than scientists had thought, according to the first study that
looked inside addicts’ brains nearly a year after they stopped using
the drug.

At least a quarter of a class of molecules that help people feel
pleasure and reward were knocked out by methamphetamine, the
study found. Some of the addicts’ brains resembled those of people
with early and mild Parkinson’s disease. But the biggest surprise is
that another brain region responsible for spatial perception and
sensation, which has never before been linked to methamphetamine
abuse, was hyperactive and showed signs of scarring. New York Times

Despite Blocks, Napster Users Can Still Get Protected Files. ‘…the system for restricting access to files
could only block files by a specific name; a misspelling, intentional
or unintentional, could stump the blocking software. Thus a user
looking for Metallica’s “Fade to Black” would not be able to get the
song, while one typing in “Fade 2 Black” would turn up numerous
entries…’ New York Times

“The most dangerous psychiatrist in America”? A Critic Takes On Psychiatric Dogma, Loudly. Dr. Sally Satel, in magazine articles, op-ed pieces in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and her Dec. 2000 book PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine, about which I previously blinked,

describes well-known public health researchers as “indoctrinologists,” accusing them of
promulgating a “social justice agenda” by focusing on racism and
poverty rather than health education and disease- fighting
strategies. She criticizes feminists for construing
wife-battering as a symptom of a patriarchal society. She argues that psychiatry is being co-opted by a culture of
“victimology,” which undermines personal responsibility and
ultimately damages patients. Dr. Satel shares office suites with such conservative luminaries as
Newt Gingrich, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Robert H. Bork in her tenure as a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the Shrub sought her counsel on drug policy during his campaign and has reportedly invited her into his Administration. While, as a clinical psychiatrist, I find her views on increased personal responsibility among our patients and avoiding the medicalization of social ills superficially beguiling until you examine the public policy implications of voicing them loudly instead of patiently within our interactions with those we treat. New York Times

Yes, Size Matters: Gene-tweaking British evolutionary biologist believes that the genes that control body size also control longevity, and smaller is better. The Times of London

Press release: Juno Announces Virtual Supercomputer Project. “Distributed
computing facility to harness unused resources of Juno subscriber
base, with theoretical computing power of world’s fastest supercomputer.”

Australia Outlaws E-Mail Forwarding: ‘Outrageously strict Internet copyright laws which have just gone into
effect throughout Australia make it illegal to forward an e-mail memo
without the author’s permission, and could result in fines of $60,000
or five years in the slam, according to a story by the Aussie Sunday
Telegraph.

“It’s quite possible that the forwarding of an e-mail could be a
technical infringement of copyright,” an unnamed legal advisor to Oz
Attorney General Daryl Williams told the paper.

“E-mailing is a ‘communication’ under the Digital Agenda Act, and
so is putting something up on a Web site,” the source added.

This could rank as the world’s most copyright-friendly and
common-sense-hostile piece of legislation yet devised.’ The Register

After Three Strikes, Is La Niña Out? “La Niña-like conditions that have persisted in the
Pacific Ocean for three years might finally subside
this Fall. The change could pave the way for a weak
El Niño — and a surge of hydroelectricity for
power-starved California.” NASA

1,300 Media To Cover McVeigh Execution. It’s projected to be not only a media circus but a bonanza for local commerce.

isometric screenshots: “A series of drawings from an isometric perspective, in the style of a computer game. The subject of each drawing is the image, or
images, that created a popular cultural event. Historical events (like the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel)
are used interchangeably with fictionalized events (like the picnic scene from The Sound of Music).” Click on each picture to seee the full 800×600 image, which the artist executed in Photoshop. Go to the FAQ for identifications of each picture you don’t recognize.

Government’s 50 Greatest Endeavors: An Opinion Survey for the Brookings Institution: “…a project on
what the federal government tried to do and what it achieved. The project began
with a cataloging of major laws passed since World War II, followed by the
grouping of these statutes by their objective, and the selection of the top 50
endeavors for a national survey of historians and political scientists. The survey
results identify government’s greatest achievements and failures taking success,
difficulty and importance into account.” When was the last time you believed your government could achieve difficult, important objectives for the good of the country or the world?

We Can Always Hope: ‘Heat vent’ may diminish global warming: ‘The Pacific Ocean may open a “heat vent”
above it that releases enough energy into
space to reduce projected climate warming
caused by the build-up of greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere.’ BBC

‘Snuffy Smith’ cartoonist Fred Lasswell dies at 84.

The picture is cribbed from the “vast repository of toonological knowledge”, Don Markstein’s Toonopedia.

But Markstein’s site has neither hide nor hair of some of my favorites, Dan O’Neill‘s “Odd Bodkins” and the late Vaughn Bodé‘s Deadbone (“…a billion years ago, across the winter blue past, there is
a ugly mountain standing in the cold afternoon wind. It is
the first place to look for the roots of western sanity… “) etc.

Duke researchers reverse damage of heart failure with gene therapy. “After previously demonstrating that they could use gene therapy to prevent heart damage in rabbits with
congestive heart failure, Duke University Medical Center researchers have now gone one step further to use gene therapy to
actually reverse the damage already done to the rabbits’ heart tissue.” EurekAlert!

Moderate earthquakes rattle Acapulco. More clustering? Does the earth groan in discontent?

Members of Blue Man Group say they haven’t sold out. Guerrilla theatre does Intel and Grammy. Nando Times

Data Accessory Musings: Handspring hopes to gain an “edge”. “The new device will have an all metal case, PalmOS 3.5, 8MB RAM, a
lithium (ion or polymer are uncertain) battery, a detachable Springboard adaptor, and it will be the the lightest
& thinnest Visor yet” … Especially if it comes with a color display, the combination of that and the expansion slot might make me abandon brand loyalty and upgrade from my invaluable Palm Vx, even with the rumors of a color version coming this spring. On the other hand, there’s the Kyocera Smartphone, which integrates a Palm organizer into a cellphone neatly; this has apparently just been spotted in Verizon stores. This degree of integration of my two most important data accessories is appealing. I’ve tried some wireless web access on my current cellphone but it’s a brain-dead process with the small screen size and crippled data entry via the twelve-number keypad; I cancelled web services on my cellular account after a trial month. Here’s a primer on short messaging service (SMS), the wireless instant-messaging technology that’s very popular with the European market and, apparently, especially with the young. I honestly can’t see this catching on with me, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve scoffed at geeky developments I later came to depend upon.I don’t even see any use to instant messaging on my wired desktop, like ICU or Yahoo’s instant messaging client. As the article describes it, this appeals mostly to the Britney Spears set. Here’s an article on using an instant messaging client with a connected Palm device. Then there’s the two-way paging world of the Blackberrys etc., which I haven’t even thought about. If not a dot.com executive, I hear I’d have to be a nightclubbing NBA star for that. Your next net appliance, however, is of course going to be your car…

Update: From Robot Wisdom comes thsi pointer to Simson Garfinkel’s rave about the Handspring Visorphone PDA-cellphone combination in Salon.

Student kills 2 classmates, wounds 13 near San Diego CNN; New York teen kills father after noise dispute Nando Times; News analysis: When Children Kill BBC

Convergences: The essayist writes, “In the late 1960’s, as a college junior, I drove John Fahey through
Massachusetts for a week. He was playing a series of gigs
from Williamstown to Wellesley. Well after midnight,
somewhere on the Mass Pike, he began to ramble on about
his music and the odd and often inappropriate places it had
found a home. He told me that there were mental hospitals
in Massachusetts where his music was played over
loudspeakers as part of the therapeutic regime; psychiatrists
had decided it had the power to soothe the more agitated
patients.

‘I’m always amazed it doesn’t drive them to immediate
suicide,’ he said, cackling.”

“Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a
thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a
pufferfish.” — Bruce Sterling [via apathy] It turns out this was from a speech, “The Wonderful Power of Storytelling”, from the Computer Game Developers Conference in San Jose CA in March 1991.

Who Hit Who? Apart from the grammar, there are problems with this piece I’ve seen linked to by others. The author, Robert Morningstar, a “computer systems and imaging specialist”, says he wrote this on behalf of the captain, crew and passengers of the USS Greenville “all of whom had the duty and the right to be there.” He goes to great lengths to assert that the sub and the US Navy could not possibly have been remiss in the incident, claiming that the Ehime Maru was not really an innocent fishing vessel but probably had stealth capability, was stalking the submarine for Japanese intelligence-gathering and R&D purposes, and that it hit the sub rather than vice versa. He uses “patriot” phraseology which identifies him with the radical right. (He says he’s written for the “American Friends and Patriots Network”; a web search on that comes up with nothing, but the “American Patriot Friends Network” [“we believe Patriots should rule America”] is there and clearly comes from militia territory on the political map.)

Quinacrine Non-surgical Method of Voluntary Female Sterilization: “…already used by over 100,000 women with no reported deaths or life
threatening complications.”

“Delivered by a trained midwife or MD in any office, using a modified
IUD inserter, a 252 mg dose of 7 tiny quinacrine pellets is placed at the
fundus of the uterus. The pellets dissolve quickly. The fluid causes
inflammation and then scarring at the opening of the fallopian tubes.
This prevents further births. With two treatments a month apart, studies
show low failure rates with no evidence of cancer. As the drug is
off-patent, the cost of the pellets and inserter is under $5. Surgical
sterilizations often cost well over $2000 in the United States.” However, the method has been banned in Vietnam, India and China after unfavorable publicity, including suggestions of carcinogenicity, its proponents call a “vast disinformation
campaign by uninformed feminists and traditional family planning
opponents (which) has now been fully discredited by sound scientific
investigations and a long favorable experience with QS in Chile.” I googled (I’ve started seeing this as a verb recently; what do you think?) on “quinacrine AND sterilization” and the words that leap out at me from the results include “controversial” (over and over again), “dangerous”, “painful”, “forced sterilization” and “guinea pigs”. [via Caught in Between]

Am I Going Down? ” A guide to your likelihood of personally experiencing full loss equivalency.” [via metafilter]

The Skyscraper and the Barometer

“What does the unique election of 2000 mean for health policy in the United States? The answer is complex. The closeness of
the presidential vote and the divided Congress suggest that changes will be modest and incremental. Yet Democratic
and Republican voters differ sharply in their views on many issues concerning health care, such as the role of the federal
government and access to abortion…. In this article, we use data from public-opinion polls and other sources to highlight the differences in views on health policy
between Republican and Democratic voters. We then discuss the implications of the 2000 election.” New England Journal of Medicine

You can buy happiness… it costs
£1m . “Economists have for the first time discovered the price of
happiness, and it is at least £1m. New research suggests that,
contrary to folklore, money can bring happiness, but it takes a
large amount.” Sunday Times of London

The Famine the World Forgot. More than a million reportedly face starvation in drought-ridden Afghanistan. The draconian policies of the Taliban are destroying the livelihood of the country and willl prevent access to international relief agencies. This regime runs a close second, IMHO, to the Khmer Rouge’s fabled reign of terror in Cambodia in their ability to destroy their country with a slavish adherence to doctrine. UN Sanctions against the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, compound the issue. Time

A couple of pieces about disparate English transplants to America:

“Swift, devastating and alert…, a first-rate hater”: The Guardian reviews Unacknowledged Legislation by Christopher Hitchens, English polemicist who has mastered “the fine art of causing maximum offence to most people,” although the reviewer admits he doesn’t understand much of what Hitchens fumes about, since Hitchens now writes from and about the U.S.

Getting uppity in suburbia: “While the sun has long since set on the
British Empire, its legacy lingers at a cul-de-sac near you.” Anglophilia graduates from cultural tradition to
powerful branding tool.
. Salon

Pylons are cancer risk – official. After many previous negative studies, an epidemiologist in the UK reports a small but significant increase in cancer risk among children living near high tension power lines. The article has links to take you further in investigating this issue should you desire. This finding may open a floodgate for lawsuits by affected families. Sunday Times of London

Knowing Thyself in San Jose: a visit to the world headquarters of the mysterious Rosicrucians. SF Weekly Online

CIA’s Anti-Drug Message for Kids; it joins other federal agencies in projecting a clean and sober message. However, it doesn’t come clean on its complicity in fostering international narcotrafficking.

I searched in vain on the CIA’s Web site for any mea culpa regarding the agency’s
support for counterinsurgency campaigns waged by various drug-smuggling “freedom
fighters.”

There was no mention of massive amounts of still unaccounted-for U.S. aid to
Pakistani military officers and Afghan mujahadeen rebel leaders, which helped
grease a major arms-for-heroin pipeline in Southwest Asia during the 1980s. Much of
the dirty cash was laundered through institutions such as the scandal-ridden Bank of
Credit and Commerce International, which functioned, not coincidentally, as a conduit
for CIA operations in the region.

At the same time in Central America, Lt. Col. Oliver North and high-level CIA
personnel aided and abetted big-time cocaine smugglers who ferried weapons to the
Nicaraguan contras fighting the Sandinista government.

How to Blow $700 Million a Year on a Bad Habit: “DARE, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, took
its first step toward recovery on February 14 — it admitted it had a problem.
Eighteen years after its inception, DARE finally acknowledged what study
after peer-reviewed study has found: Despite expending $700 million per
year, the DARE program has not helped reduce teen drug use. In fact,
according to the latest government study, teen drug use has risen since 1990
and remains stable at record-high levels.” Tompaine.com

Michael Kinsley among the snobs, on O’Reilly Among The Snobs Washington Post

How to say “Oh my God! There’s an axe in my head!” in 68 languages. [via Red Rock Eaters]

Levy’s Nine Laws of the Disillusionment of the True Liberal [thanks, Ivan]

On Day of Sub’s Accident, Tour Was Its Only Mission. “The Feb. 9 training run of the U.S.S.
Greeneville, which led to the
accidental sinking of a Japanese
fishing trawler, was made solely to
accommodate the Navy’s efforts to
promote itself.” New York Times

On Day of Sub’s Accident, Tour Was Its Only Mission. “The Feb. 9 training run of the U.S.S.
Greeneville, which led to the
accidental sinking of a Japanese
fishing trawler, was made solely to
accommodate the Navy’s efforts to
promote itself.” New York Times

On Day of Sub’s Accident, Tour Was Its Only Mission. “The Feb. 9 training run of the U.S.S.
Greeneville, which led to the
accidental sinking of a Japanese
fishing trawler, was made solely to
accommodate the Navy’s efforts to
promote itself.” New York Times

On Day of Sub’s Accident, Tour Was Its Only Mission. “The Feb. 9 training run of the U.S.S.
Greeneville, which led to the
accidental sinking of a Japanese
fishing trawler, was made solely to
accommodate the Navy’s efforts to
promote itself.” New York Times

Computer ‘can talk like a baby’.

“An Israeli company has created a
conversational computer program it claims
could revolutionise the way people interact
with machines.

Artificial Intelligence Enterprises (Ai) says its
Hal program can already converse convincingly
and has the vocabulary and grasp of language
of a 15-month-old child.

Already transcripts of conversations generated
by the computerised child have reportedly
fooled independent judges into thinking they
were reading a write-up of a real conversation.

Now, the company is working on giving its
creation the conversational ability of a
five-year-old. Then it plans to use the program
to do away with keyboards and let people
simply talk to their computers.”

BBC

If you lick your envelopes?? Latest urban legend/hoax meme chainmail I received via email. And a Google search on “lick envelopes cockroach tongue”. Update: As Ed Fitzgerald points out, this legend is debunked at http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/tacobell.htm, as part of the authoritative and entertaining Urban Legends Reference Pages site. [thanks, Ed]

Everyday fantasia: “With the help of sophisticated behavioral
brain-imaging and molecular genetic methods,
researchers are coming closer to
understanding what drives the extraordinary
sensory condition called synesthesia.” First psychologists showed that, in synaesthetes, the associations across sensory modalities are stable over time and involuntary (even when they interfere with normal perception), implying a fixed and automatic mechanism in their brains. fMRI studies showed that the cross-modality sensory areas were actually activated, as one would expect — for example, in a synaesthete who “sees” music s/he is hearing, the visual areas are active as well as the auditory.

In fact, it may be the concept, not the percept, that causes the sensory experience (for example, in one synaesthete tho experiences colors for numbers, presenting him with “5+2” causes him to experience the color associated with the concept “7”). This would turn on its head the usual “bottom-up” notion of sensory processing and would suggest that synaesthetes demonstrate a lack of the usual inhibition of “feed-backward” connections from high-level multisensory areas to single-sense cortical areas. Another theory suggests that synaesthetes’ brains may be richly crosswired with extra connections, perhaps a connectivity with which we are all endowed at birth but which normally devolves. This is not an alien concept; brain development is known in other regards to depend on the dying-off of neuronal connections as much as the elaboration of new ones over time. Any neurophysiological theory of synaesthesia would have to account for the fact that the phenomenon is temporarily induced by hallucinogenic drugs; it would be hard to imagine that the drug experience stimulates the rapid growth of new neuronal connections which then disappear after the drug is out of the user’s system.

Whatever theory is correct, an implication that occurs to me is that there is probably a continuum of synaesthetic experience from total absence to fullblown. While I’m certainly not a robust synaesthete, I suspect I have a degree of the overconnectivity, since I’ve always noticed I have vivid and enduring experiences of colors associated with various concepts — numbers, sounds, names of people and the days of the week. For example, “Monday” is a kind of lime green and “Thursday” a rose-tinged grey, and always has been — no, really! On the other hand (indulge me for a moment), these may not be neurophysiological correlations at all, but rather unconscious psychological ones — i.e. not classically-described synaesthesia at all. For example, while writing this paragraph, endeavoring to describe the color experience I have for “Friday,” I was just now surprised to find that what first came to mind was the phrase “fried-egg-yolk yellow.” It immediately made me wonder if the connection is the sound-association between “Friday” and “fried”, not a cross-modality experience at all. In other words, “Friday” may be that shade of yellow because it reminds me of “fried egg.” There may be similar associative reasons for the other color experiences that are there despite remaining opaque to me so far. Oh, well.

In any case, interesting to me in my professional work, where I focus on the phenomenology of psychotic symptoms, is the suggestion by some researchers that synaesthesia may share some neurobiological similarity with hallucinations. Could schizophrenics think thery’re hearing voices talking to them because they’re, unbeknownst to themselves, experiencing “crosstalk” from a sensory experience in a disparate modality such as taste or vision? This does not at all square with my own theory of hallucinatory experience, but it’s intriguing nonetheless, although difficult to study both because its experiencers are in distress to an extent that would make it hard for them to cooperate with neurophysiological investigation; and because most actively psychotic patients accessible to study are medicated (and it would be unethical not to medicate them, IMHO!).

One curiosity I’ve always had about synaesthesia is if the “crossed” sensory modalities ever include the kinesthetic sense. Often considered our “sixth sense”, this is our visceral body experience — i.e. our perception of the position, extent, and movement of our body parts in space. Are there synaesthetes who, for example, experience a sound or a color when they swing their arm around, take a step, open their mouth? How about the reverse — experiencing movement in or change of position of a body part as part of the perception of a sound or a shape? [Could this relate to the visceral component of aesthetic experience? (Benjamin Whorf: “Probably in the first instance metaphor arises from synesthesia and not the reverse.”)]

A number of fascinating hits emerge from a Google search on “(synesthesia OR synaesthesia) AND (kinesthesia OR kinaesthesia)”, including this collection of interesting analyses of Beatles music.

Love’s illusions: Americans tend to be overly optimistic about their chances of marital success.

Does Being a Jock Make a Man Gay? Timothy Noah:

‘The theory that ring finger size is destiny has resurfaced.
Faithful Chatterbox readers will recall that a year ago this
column asked, “Does A Short Index Finger Make You Gay?”
Chatterbox cited a study published in Nature (click here to
read a press release on the findings) maintaining that lesbians
tend to have ring fingers that are exceptionally long relative to
their index fingers, apparently because their mothers had high
levels of male hormones in the womb. A less intuitive finding
was that gay men also tended to have long ring fingers, owing,
again, to their mothers having high levels of male hormones in
the womb, though this correlation was more tentative. Mark
Breedlove, the Berkeley psychology professor who authored
the study, used the occasion to suggest that gay men, far from
being feminized men, were in fact hypermasculinized men.
Chatterbox himself struck a rigorously neutral pose, then
stated Chatterbox’s Law of Biological Determinism:
Conservatives believe that genes determine everything
except homosexuality, while liberals believe that genes
determine nothing except homosexuality.’ Slate

Although scientists still aren’t sure what human consciousness is, they are coming up with something just as
intriguing — neurobiological evidence for the human unconscious state. In psychoanalysis, a core concept is that signal anxiety — the unconscious anticipation of an adverse outcome when presented with a situation reminiscent of an unpleasant event from the past — prompts our neurotic reactions. Now two scientists — Philip Wong of the New School in NY and Howard Shevrin of U. Michigan — have demonstrated neurobiological evidence for the existence of this “immaterial” unconscious process. Psychiatric News

A reader pointed me to this — Frontline: the merchants of cool, a report on the creators and marketers of popular culture for teenagers and the symbiotic relationship they have with modern youth. Interviews with cultural critics, media executives and market researchers, as well as reactions from teens and a dissection of media conglomerates. There’s a feature on “how to get really close to teens’ lives” and another on “what it’s like hunting for ‘cool’ “. It’s going to take some delving into…

The Browser in the Belly. Jorn Barger, of Robot Wisdom, thinks web-based phrase-searching is the key to success in scholarship:

“Searching at http://www.google.com has been made so efficient that I
almost called this article ‘the Google in the Belly’: the first step to
becoming an Internet scholar is to train yourself so that whenever
and wherever you see an unfamiliar phrase, your immediate gut-
instinct is to copy it into Google…

But for literary research in particular, Web search-engines offer
something far, far more powerful than a super-encyclopedia– they
effectively offer a _super-concordance_ of every document on the Web…
and not just the simple word-by-word concordances that scholars have
learned to settle for– if you understand the search-syntax, you can
search for any _phrase_ in every document on the Web.”

Here’s Jorn’s customized Finnegans Wake search page (you might find it useful for other things too…)

‘Noted Weed’ (sonnet 76): Bard ‘used drugs for inspiration’. “Scientists in South Africa have uncovered
evidence that Shakespeare might have been a
cannabis user who took the drug as a source
of inspiration.

Research published in
the South African
Journal of Science
shows that pipes dug
up from the garden of
Shakespeare’s home in
Stratford upon Avon
contain traces of
cannabis.” BBC

At Lehman’s, the Only Thing That Gets a No Is Electricity. This mail order company has provided the Amish community with a source of non-electric alternatives to all sorts of appliances and equipment for more than 40 years. (Ironically, its website brings in a good proportion of its sales). Now the California energy crisis has greatly boosted the company’s sales volume. LA Times

Not-Really-Surprising-News Dept.: ‘Community work linked to happiness, a new study finds.

A nationwide survey conducted by Harvard University and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University
examined “social capital” — the connections that bind people together and strengthen the places they live.

Researchers found that areas where residents had high civil involvement were happier than those with more
wealth but less community participation.’ Nando Times

The keys to a quick mind: “If you want your children to extend their
minds, develop skills in multiple dimensions
and become ‘whole’ human beings, forget
yoga, vitamin C and green vegetables. Insist,
instead, that they learn music.” The Telegraph

Soul-Searching Doctors Find Life After Death. ‘The first scientific study of “near-death”
experiences has found new evidence to suggest
that consciousness or the “soul” can continue to
exist after the brain has ceased to function.

The findings by two eminent doctors, based on a
year-long study of heart attack survivors, could
provoke fresh controversy over that most profound
of questions.’

Silence of the Lambs: the election story never told. All along, it’s seemed that this was the bigger travesty in Jeb Bush’s Florida, as investigative journalist Greg Palast reports:

Here’s how the president of the United States was
elected: In the months leading up to the November
balloting, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary
of State, Katherine Harris, ordered local elections
supervisors to purge 64,000 voters from voter lists on the
grounds that they were felons who were not entitled to
vote in Florida. As it turns out, these voters weren’t
felons, or at least, only a very few were. However, the
voters on this “scrub list” were, notably,
African-American (about 54 percent), while most of the
others wrongly barred from voting were white and
Hispanic Democrats.

Beginning in November, this extraordinary news ran, as
it should, on Page 1 of the country’s leading paper.
Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain.

An examination of the docility of the American press. mediachannel.org

Expert proposes new ideas about technology and evolution. “Complex tool-making, which required fine motor skills, problem-solving
and task planning, he argues, may have influenced the evolution of the frontal lobe, and co-evolved with the gift of
grammatical language 300,000 years ago.” EurekAlert!

Hallucinogens on the Internet: A Vast New Source of
Underground Drug Information: “Using the Internet, potential hallucinogen users can
bypass traditional channels of medical information and learn in great detail how to obtain and use numerous drugs with unknown hazards”. American Journal of Psychiatry

Fourth Alzheimer’s Drug Approved: “Alzheimer’s sufferers are about to get a fourth
medication option to help slow the worsening of the devastating
brain disease.

The Food and Drug Administration approved
Reminyl, a drug derived from daffodil bulbs, late Wednesday.” The generic name of Reminyl is galantamine. It works via the same mechanism of existing Alzheimer’s drugs — it’s an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. Early animnal research indicated that it might have other neuroprotective properties as well and, thus, be superior to existing medications for Alzheimer’s dementia. But in preapproval testing, the drug’s manufacturer Janssen tested it only agsinst placebo, nto against other Alzheimer’s drugs.

Pentagon Unveils Plans for a New Crowd-Dispersal Weapon. Non-Lethal Weapons: <a href=”http://www.zarc.com/english/non-lethal_weapons/nlt-usaf.html
“>Terms and References, and the British Non-Lethal Weapons Research Project Research Report [via Red Rock Eaters]

Scholars lament Afghan relic purge “Defying international
condemnation, Afghanistan’s ruling
Taliban turned to artillery and explosives
on Friday to destroy two giant rock-hewn
Buddhas they decry as un-Islamic.

Mortars and cannon were being used to destroy the Buddha
statues in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, defying protests and
diplomatic pressure, sources in Kabul said.” The Taliban have been deaf to plaints from the United Nations, the European
Union, Russia, Pakistan, and India to reconsider. They
consider their efforts to be a campaign against idolatry. I have long cherished my memory of my visit to the Bamiyan Valley in the mid-’70’s, and wish there were some effective way to halt this ignorant travesty. New York Times

Connection duo, WBUR disconnect permanently. The Boston Globe describes the concluding blows in this dispute on which I blinked earlier. While the WBUR management issued a statement describing Lydon and McGrath’s “inform(ing) WBUR that they are leaving their employment to pursue careers in a for-profit, independent production company”, Lydon countered with a statement that WBUR had unilaterally terminated negotiations afteer locking them out for a week. Both Lydon and the station are the losers here, but of course the real losers will be The Connection‘s listeners. WBUR says it will continue the show with a series of guest hosts until they designate a replacement in late spring, but it remains in doubt whether anyone can follow Lydon’s “tough act” of wit, depth, literacy and passion. Lydon and McGrath seem to want to find other outlets to deliver similar content, but an erudite, receptive audience will elude them unless Boston’s other NPR station WGBH hosts them. They’d be blown out of the water by audiences anywhere else in the talk radio universe. These competing statements sound for all the world like the positions the players take in a classical labor-management dispute — essentially, countercharges of greed vs. exploitation — and should be understood in the context of recent struggles between creative personnel and celebrities on the one hand and the producers and media channels that distribute their content on the other hand, for control of the equity value of thier charisma, celebrity or creativity.

Author Bill McKibben recently profiled Lydon and the dispute in Salon, making his biases clear at the outset:

“The
Connection” is the best call-in radio show that anyone’s ever
done; Lydon is America’s best interviewer; and the hours
between 10 a.m. and noon feel lonely as hell without him.

Those are large claims, but you can test them out for yourself at
theconnection.org, where a full archive of recent shows can be
accessed via streaming audio…

If you think this is easy, listen to “Talk of the Nation,” the main
NPR chat show, some afternoon. Juan Williams currently
presides over the festivities, sounding uncannily like a man
ordering cheeseburgers over a drive-through microphone. He
is no nincompoop; “Eyes on the Prize,” his TV history of the
civil rights movement, was hot stuff. But the radio has clearly
defeated him. With its intimacy and its acres of open time, it
requires a nimbleness that he can’t muster.

Pow! Wham! Permission Denied! No homoerotic exegesis of Batman for DC Comics, thanks. Lingua Franca

Arsenic: A new type of endocrine disrupter? “Recently, it has become clear that decades
of exposure to very low doses of arsenic — such as levels found in drinking water in many areas of the United States — may
substantially increase the risk of vascular disease, diabetes and several types of cancer. Until now, little was known about
how arsenic might contribute to these diseases, however.

Using cultured animal cells, a team led by toxicologist Joshua Hamilton, director of Dartmouth’s Toxic Metals Research
Program, found that exposure to very low concentrations of arsenic disrupts the function of the glucocorticoid receptor, a
steroid hormone receptor that regulates a wide range of biological processes.” EurekAlert!

You’re not as nice as you think you are. EurekAlert!

Evidence of Celtic ritual cannibalism in Iron Age Britain.

Slaughter of the innocuous. A vet and researcher into the history of
foot-and-mouth at the University of
Manchester (UK) writes: “From the panic and the headlines you would imagine that this
is a most dreadful disease. Yet foot-and-mouth very rarely kills
the animals that catch it. They almost always recover, and in a
couple of weeks at that. It almost never gets passed on to
humans and when it does it is a mild infection only. The meat
from animals that have had it is fit to eat. In clinical terms,
foot-and-mouth is about as serious, to animals or to people, as a
bad cold.

Why, then, the concern? And why the policy of wholesale
slaughter? The concern, of course, is economic. This is a
financial issue, not an animal welfare issue, nor a human health
one.” The Times of London

The British Medical Journal reviews Vivisection or Science? An Investigation into Testing Drugs and
Safeguarding Health. Italian scientist Pietro Croce used to do it himself, but now says animal experimentation is unethical — not because of what it does to the animals, but what it does to us. As Russ points out, however, a response by a Dr JH Botting to the favorable review of this book points out: ‘The antivivisection literature is replete with emotive propaganda and exaggerated claims of “bad
science”. However a definitive examination of the literature generally exposes criticisms as spurious.
Their perpetuation in books such as “Vivisection or science” does nothing for the ethical debate.’

Bush’s Death Squad 2001: ‘The bill, the Terrorist Elimination Act of 2001, was introduced on Jan. 3 by Republican Bob Barr. It would nullify parts of
three previous executive orders prohibiting assassination or conspiracy to commit assassination. The new bill states that,
“as the threat from terrorism grows, America must continue to investigate effective ways to combat the menace posed by
those who would murder American citizens simply to make a political point.” ‘ Critics say this just legitimizes what we’ve been doing all along, that the prohibition on state-sponsored assassination has never been taken seriously. eye [via Wood s Lot]

With excitement I clicked on this link in Wood s Lot; an Interview with Samuel R. Delany! Alas, it is from 1996. Left me wondering what he’s up to now; found this interview from November, 2000. Interesting aside — he apparently interviews himself. “K. Leslie Steiner”, from the 1996 conversation, is said to be a pseudonym of his. The discussion early in the interview about how he declined face-to-face contact and insisted they conduct their interchange in written form takes on new meaning in that light.

protonic.com : “fast free technical support — an online
community which provides
technical support to computer
users for free.

All the techs are volunteers,
and we have been featured in
many media publications.”

He beat me to the punch! I swear, I had the same association Chuck Taggart, at Looka!, had. As he put it:

“He reads! He reads! Here is my favorite line from The
Blank Stare’s address to last night’s joint session of Congress:

Some say my tax plan is too big, others say it
is too small. I respectfully disagree. This plan is just
right.

Even though it’s claimed that this man does not read books, we
can all rest in confidence that he has at least read “Goldilocks
and the Three Bears” (or at least his speechwriter has).

I guess this is how they’ll try to sell this thing to us — by
assuming that the American public is as simpleminded as Shrub.”

Eugenics Alive: coming soon to a country near you. On the threshold of human genome engineering, ‘fretting about the ethics of these issues is a thing that only Western countries are going to do. Elsewhere, eugenics — including
“genetic enhancement” — will not be fretted about or debated, it will just be done.’

A rough kind of eugenics has, in fact, been practiced in China for a long time. Several years ago, when I was living in that country, I mentioned Down’s
Syndrome in conversation with a Chinese colleague. She did not know the English term and I did not know the Chinese, so we had to look it up in a
dictionary. “Oh,” she said when she got it. “That’s not a problem in China. They don’t get out of the delivery room.”

As I said: While we are agonizing over the rights and wrongs of it, elsewhere they will just be doing it. National Review

And speaking of eugenics:

The “Genius Babies,” and How They Grew: the ‘truth’ about the “Nobel Prize sperm bank”, the Repository for Germinal Choice. Slate

Once-Weekly Prozac Approved by FDA. The formulation contains 90 mg. of the active ingredient, fluoxetine, in a time-release formula, and is intended for patients whose depressive symptoms have stabilized but need continued maintenance drug therapy to prevent a relapse. The truth of the matter, however, is that fluoxetine has such gradual rate of metabolism and elimination from the body that the plain old original Prozac formulation, which is usually 20 mg., can be given less frequently than daily — in some cases as infrequently as once a week — for many maintenance purposes, and (as scandalous as its price seemed when it first entered the marketplace in the early ’80’s) is considerably less expensive. Eli Lilly’s last decades of profit were built upon Prozac’s cash cow, but it has seen its market share erode with the introduction of subsequent (and in some cases superior) antidepressants, and the company will take a big hit in August when it loses patent protection over Prozac and a generic fluoxetine is launched by a competitor. A new formulation like Prozac Weekly will regain them proprietary rights.

In a similar maneuver, they’ve recently released the product Sarafem for premenstrual tension symptoms. This is plain old fluoxetine as well! The clinical literature has long noted benefit from SSRIs for PMS symptoms whether the sufferer is depressed or not, and many of us have long prescribed Prozac for that indication. There’s nothing different about Sarafem [except its ability to support Lilly’s stock prices?]

This is the second psychiatric instance of a new pharmaceutical marketing trend that seems particularly disingenuous from my vantage point. Here was the first — have you seen any of the TV ads for Zyban, marketed as a smoking cessation aid? The ads tell you it’s “not for everyone,” in particular mentioning that you shouldn’t take it if you’re taking the antidepressant Wellbutrin. They don’t explain why, but the reason is a simple one — Glaxo Wellcome’s Zyban is identical to Glaxo Wellcome’s Wellbutrin; they’re both, generically, bupropion, in the same 150 mg. sustained release form, at virtually the same price.

In my opinion, there is no justification except the attempt to increase market share through deceptive marketing for one company to push the same pharmaceutical under different brand names for different indications. Instead, the product labelling of their existing product should be changed to reflect any added indications they receive from the FDA. I have already seen several cases in which patients have been prescribed Zyban by their primary care MDs while receiving Wellbutrin from mental health practitioners, either because of a lack of crosstalk among the parties or ignorance on the part of one practitioner of the ingredients in the other prescription. And the potential medical consequences of such inadvertent “doubling up” of bupropion dosing, including seizures, are nontrivial! TV advertising which prompts patients to develop brand recognition of medications and ask for products from their physicians by brand name is part of the problem. I find that, over the last decade, there’s been erosion in patients’ understanding of the concept of generic equivalents of medications. Unless there’s a good reason to prefer a particular company’s brand (and there rarely is), I do all my prescribing by the generic name of the medication.

Sex-Change Deputy to Break New Ground. “Another milestone was reached
on Tuesday in the Lone Star state when a Texas sheriff said one of his top deputies would
become the first police officer in the state to undergo a sex change operation.

Bexar County Sheriff Ralph Lopez said he had given the male deputy permission to start
wearing a woman’s uniform and ordered the other deputies not to razz him about it.” Might be the first time Texas lawmakers are ordered to mind their manners with a lady…

Open Season on the Outer Planets. Space scientists at the recent Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston brainstormed about the next two decades of exploration of the outer planets under NASA’s newly-formed Outer Planets Program Directorate. Outer planet projects are expected to be picked in open competition among a concentration of innovative and sometimes outrageous proposals.

Today’s New York Times could fill a weblog, as in the next six entries:

In Dawn of Society, Dance Was Center Stage. An Israeli archaeologist says he has pieced together evidence of a role for dance as early as the transition from hunter-gatherer to pastoral society in the Middle East. New York Times

A Short, Speckled History of a Transplanted Hand. After twenty-nine months, the hand is amputated by the same surgeon who had originally done the transplant. The patient says he feels the best he has since he received the hand, and acknowledges his responsibility for not keeping up with the anti-rejection drug regimen and the physical therapy necessary to maintain its viability. This man who originally told his surgeons he had lost his hand in an industrial accident turned out to instead have received the injury while in prison serving time for fraud. His con game evaded months of pre-transplant interviewing and psychological testing. Nine patients in six countries have since received transplanted hands, including three who have gotten double transplants of both the right and left hands. The New York Times report says that all appear to be doing well.

Experiment in Assisted Living Exposes Regulatory Confusion. The article describes the way assisted living in New York has been transformed [and I’ve seen the same thing here in Massachusetts]. Starting out as a means of allowing a continuum of escalating care so that elders can “age in place” in a setting of their own choosing, assisted living centers have instead become ways to house enfeebled Alzheimer’s patients with less regulatory oversight, and hence less adequate care, than in nursing homes. In essence, the industry has backed its way into being part of the healthcare industry rather than a housing alternative, in the process securing itself a niche in which it’s protected from regulation that would eat into its profits.

The headline says “China Ratifies Human Rights Treaty.” But read further and you see that they “voted not to accept a key provision in the pact.” Human rights groups are guardedly optomistic that this will make a real difference, but I’m dubious. This seems like window-dressing to deflect scrutiny of China’s record on human rights two weeks before a U.N. human rights conference in Geneva. New York Times

Clinton Pardons Called ‘Accident Waiting to Happen’: “From the beginning of his presidency,
Bill Clinton moved to take away the Justice Department’s
traditional role of being first to review requests for
clemency, the agency’s former pardon attorney told a
congressional committee Wednesday.

‘The final Clinton pardons were an accident waiting to
happen,’ Margaret Colgate Love, who served as pardon
attorney from 1990 to 1997, told the House Judiciary
subcommittee on the Constitution. New York Times

A 7.0 Earthquake Shakes Pacific Northwest. Does it seem to you that newsworthy earthquakes seem to hit disparate places on the globe in clusters? Within the month, we’ve seen the Gujarat quake, the El Salvador quake, and now this. Is this a geophysical clustering or a sampling effect of what the media pay attention to? In related news, researchers studying the magnitude-7.7 Indian quake now say that faults beneath California’s populous areas “could
produce larger earthquakes than
previously thought… The type of fault that produced the deadly Jan. 26 quake – a
blind thrust fault – is also found in California, including at least
one running directly beneath the skyscrapers of downtown Los
Angeles.” Blind thrust faults are difficult to map because they do not break the surface. Earlier estimates capped the potential force of a blind thrust quake in California at not much more than the 1989 San Francisco earthquake or the 1994 Northridge quake, but the researchers are revising their estimates considerably upward after looking at Gujarat.

Barbara Ehrenreich reviews Trust Us, We’re Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber:

“… a gripping exposé of the public
relations industry and the scientists who
back their business-funded,
anti-consumer-safety agendas. There are two kinds of “experts”
in question–the PR spin doctors behind the scenes and the
“independent” experts paraded before the public, scientists who
have been hand-selected, cultivated, and paid handsomely to
promote the views of corporations involved in controversial
actions. Lively writing on controversial topics such as dioxin,
bovine growth hormone, and genetically modified food makes this
a real page-turner…”

Polar Bears and Three-Year-Olds on Thin Ice : Donella Meadows’ last Global Citizen column before her death, which I previously noted here.

LA Times op-ed piece by two Rand Corporation analysts on why the NMD (national missile defense) program could make China a bona fide nuclear threat.

The only thing that stands between China and a large strategic nuclear arsenal is
motivation. And that could be deeply affected by the decisions that the United
States makes about national missile defense and perhaps even theater missile
defense in Asia.
Ultimately, the United States may decide that, on balance, its security would be
better off with a national missile defense, even if China expands its nuclear forces
significantly. But China’s possible response and all of its implications must become
part of the debate.

As the Spike Report pointed out, this piece carries one of the more idiosyncratic headlines seen on an op-ed page in a long time.

Skeptic Magazine editor Michael Shermer’s exposé of How Psychics and Mediums Work: a case study of James Van Praagh. “Throughout much of 1998 and 1999, the best-selling book in America was by a man who says he can talk to the dead (and so can you, if you buy his book).” Shermer concludes, “The freedom to grieve and love is one of the fundamentals of being human. To try to take tht freedom away on a chimera of feigned hope and promises that cannot be filled is inhuman…”

Happy Mardi Gras! …your last chance for awhile?

humanspellcheck.com: spelling-bee survivors R us. The quest for typographical and orthographical excellence on the web.

More fMRIe (functional magnetic resonance imaging excitement): Location of Sense of Humor Discovered. Activity in a region in the orbital prefrontal cortex correlates with the experience of appreciating a joke or a pun. It makes sense that the arguably uniquely human (cf. for example the 1938 classic Homo Ludens: a study of the play element in culture by historian Johann Huizinga) capacity to appreciate the complex phenomenon of a joke resides in this uniquely human cortical area. Independent

Online debate “What is the evidence for and against the modern theory of
evolution?” between Dr. Jonathan Wells, who has Ph.D.’s in molecular and cell biology (Berkeley) and religious studies (Yale) and is the author of the recent Icons of Evolution, who argues that therre are serious chellenges to the “neo-Darwinian idea
that random mutations can create new body plans and organisms”; and Dr. Massimo Pigliucci, director of the Evolutionary Ecology Lab at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and prize-winning teacher of evolution. The URL above links you to the complete debate in Real Video. The recent event was hosted by U.T.’s Theatre dept. as part of a week commemorating the
75th anniversary of the Scopes-Monkey Trial.