First draft of McCain’s R2K speech:

“Dick, I remember after your second — maybe your third —

heart attack, I remember visiting you in the convalescent

center. You looked so sickly my friend, like you weren’t

going to make it, and I remember we had a real

heart-to-heart. In addition to talking with you about your

DUI conviction, your five military deferments during the

Vietnam War, and your votes against outlawing cop-killer

bullets and plastic guns, we talked about how much you

love your country, and in particular how much you love its

oil.

America, Dick, needs you.” Salon

Review: The many meanings of ‘Nymphomania’. A social history of the concept. Have we managed to immprove on Kinsey’s quip: “A nymphomaniac is someone who has more sex

than you do” ? CNN.com

Rights for People, Not for Cultures. Should cultures have an intrinsic right to survive? What does cultural survival mean, in fact?

Play about my life is stupid, says Hawking. The cosmologist has attacked the forthcoming

play God and Stephen Hawking as “deeply offensive,

stupid and worthless.”

Rethinking the Dancing Mania. Thoughtful essay by Australian sociologist on the dancing frenzies that swept Europe during the Middle Ages. Psychopathology? Mass hysteria? Deviant religious sects? Ergot poisoning? Skeptical Inquirer

Self-destruct: Many difficult diseases with which modern medicine grapples are autoimmune. It’s been fruitful to seek infections that may precipitate the autoimmune attack on a body’s organs. Now it appears that “infection with a rotavirus, the commonest cause of

gastro-enteritis in children, may lead to childhood diabetes.

Although this suggests that rotavirus vaccines could help

prevent diabetes, it also raises fears that the vaccines

themselves could trigger the disease.” New Scientist

A game of polo with a headless goat, kiss-the-girl-or-get-horsewhipped, and other excitements. The Sunday Times of London

Give It Away. “…while the U.S. media

represent France as silly, U.S. academics seek out

those French thinkers who seem to fit the bill.

As a result, some of the most interesting scholars

in France today you never hear about at all.” David Graeber, a Yale anthropologist, profiles the Maussians. In These Times

Decline and Fall (cont’d.): The Taste of Fear. Village Voice profile of the new phenomenon of “surfing” atop New York City subway trains. So far in 2000, three deaths and two critically injuries are identified with the practice.

Ripples and Puddles (Hans Moravec): “Like little ripples on the surface of a deep,

turbulent pool, calculation and other kinds of

procedural thought are possible only when the

turbulence is quelled. Humans achieve quiescence

imperfectly by intense concentration. Much easier

to discard the pesky abyss altogether: ripples are

safer in a shallow pan. Numbers are better

manipulated as calculus stones or abacus beads

than in human memory.” Edge

The Jedediahs vs. the Daves: Does Irony Illuminate Or Corrupt? Stop me if I get too ironic; I agree with this essayist that most irony-mongers use it to convey an insupportable superiority, an attempt at a wink of the eye at an audience only too happy to share in the knowing joke. New York Times

“The police are everywhere,” said one Los Angeles resident.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever seen the LAPD walking the beat.” Reuters

Peruvian Plant Extracts Active Against TB, Other Diseases. A medical research team from Washington University, two Peruvian universities, and the GD Searle pharmaceutical company collaborating wiht the Aguaruna, an indigenous people of Peru, have found that extracts from more than 40% of plants identified by the Aguaruna as having healing properties were active in pharmacological assays. Searle will develop drugs from the medicinal plants under study.

Man Given Wish to Die When Eye Blink Fails

A British judge has granted a 19 y.o. man severely

disabled with motor neuron disease his wish to die when he loses his final means of

communicating by blinking his left eye, newspapers said Friday. Reuters

‘Clueless’ at Sea… Again

Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): Road rage taken to new a level (8/10/2000). On a back road near St. Paul MN, a man gave the finger to an erratic driver who swerved to hit him when he passed the weaving car. He was followed home and, with a ring on the doorbell half an hour later, had a cup of acid thrown in his face. Police still seek the monster who did this. [via Obscure Store]

Reno to commission outside review of

FBI’s e-mail surveillance software . “The Justice

Department will contract a major university to conduct an independent analysis of the FBI’s

“Carnivore” e-mail surveillance system, Attorney General Janet Reno said Thursday.” UCSD is being considered. Nando Times

Netscape 6 preview release 2 is out. I can’t get bookmarks to work right. Netscape plans one more beta release this year before releasing the final by the

end of the year. Wired

A brief guide to post-’60’s American fiction: The introductory chapter to The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors.

Anne Applebaum, a London political columnist working on a history of Soviet concentration camps, writes about Russia’s Dying Democracy

But if

there was any silver lining to the chaos and corruption of the

Yeltsin years, it was that at least something resembling a free

press together with what was starting to look like democratic

political parties remained in their wake. Now, although some

elements of informal civil society are still intact …, the press is less and less free and the

democratic politicians are vanishing fast. Why destroy them?

Couldn’t economic reform have been carried out within the

framework of democracy?

Clearly, Putin thinks not. And the dangers are clear. While some

in the West will applaud any attempt to force through some

economic reform, Putin’s elimination of his potential opponents

leaves open not only the possibility of a relatively benign, even

“progressive” dictatorship, but for far less benign future

dictatorships led, perhaps, by Putin’s assassin, or by his

bodyguard, or whoever. When the palace coup happens, nobody

will be around to object.

Slate

The fight to free the West Memphis 3: “Six years after the conviction of three young men in the

‘Paradise Lost’ triple homicide, a burgeoning movement

insists they’re innocent.” I was convinced after I saw the first film several years ago…Salon

Vegetarian Mothers Have More Girls. “A British study of how diet affects the health of

new mothers and their babies produced the surprise finding that

vegetarian women are more likely to have girls, one of the report’s

authors said on Tuesday.”

Top 10 Morose Records of all time, by NME. Joy Division have two albums on the list.

Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): Chrome Wheels May Have Led to Family’s Killing. “An Arizona teenager has been

charged with the brutal killing of a woman and her two young

children — a crime that may have been committed for the chrome

wheels from the victim’s Ford Thunderbird. Police say the killings appear to have been the result of a carjacking on Friday in the parking lot of

the family’s Tucson apartment complex. The mother’s body was found in the lot at about 4:30

p.m.; the (6- and 7-year-old) children’s bodies were discovered about a half-hour later… a

short drive away.”

Oh, what a pity: Lilly Set Back by Appeals Court Ruling on Prozac. The company’s proprietary rights protecting it against generic competitors are not extended through 2003 as it had hoped. Competing versions might appear in the marketplace as soon as Feb. 2001.

What’s at Stake in the Verizon Strike? Does organized labor have a place in the “new economy”? Slate

Pinochet Ruled No Longer Immune From Prosecution. Despite this unprecedented ruling, Pinochet is still a long way from being prosecuted and the country is gearing up for a fight about whether his health shold preclude his standing trial or even being examined for fitness to stand trial in the first place. The decision pits the administration of President Ricardo Lagos — the first Socialist in power since Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973 — against the hierarchical military, not in the least because it clears the way for many other prosecution of Pinochet-era officers. The court ruled that the “Desaparecidos” of the junta era be considerd kidnappped and that, since the kidnappings are still in progress, the crimes are exempt from the amnesty Pinochet declared on political crimes during the early years of his rule. The military warns that vulnerability to prosecution may dissuade them from coming forward with any information they may have on the Disappeareds, as they had previously promised to do. Could we be heading for another right-wing overthrow of a democratic Socialist Chilean government? New York Times

Why It Sounded So Familiar . Former Clinton speechwriter says Bush echoes both themes and specific language from Clinton speeches. Washington Post

Armed Occupation at Vodka Plant.

Two rival directors

backed by armed guards occupied different

wings of the company that makes

Stolichnaya vodka today, in a dispute for

control over one of Russia’s most

renowned distilleries. ABC News

The Surrealist Compliment Generator, e.g.: “An ocean-going tin of crosseyed mussels could never match the melodious burblings of

your sister’s husband.”

Democrats’ lecture to Hollywood angers industry leaders. The “Responsible Entertainment” provision in the “Valuing Our Families” section of the Democratic Platform, asking Hollywood to tone down its product, is another example of how the Democrats strategy to beat the Republicans is apparently to be better Republicans.

Alot that’s of interest in the New York Times tonight, as you’ll see from the blinks below. Jorn Barger is suggesting that unregistered users may have to use “http://channel.nytimes.com…” instead of “…www10.nytimes…” Since I’m registered with ’em, there’s no way for me to tell if “www10” is still working. Can somebody please let me know? Thanks…

Coke Wars, Texas Style

IBM’s Linux-powered wristwatch PDA: “…no ordinary wristwatches, however. On one hand, they’re bulkier, and the

rechargeable lithium-polymer battery lasts only two to four days. Yet the watches have as much

memory and storage space as an older desktop computer. In two years, IBM expects battery life to

improve to last several months…

About two-dozen of the prototypes have been created so far. The watches run on an ARM-based

EP7211 processor made by Cirrus Logic and have 8MB of memory to run programs and 8MB of flash

memory to substitute for a hard disk. The watches also include an infrared and wireless radio

connection and a touch-screen display. The watch can tell time and has a calendar and to-do list that

can remind the wearer of appointments…” A photo is here.

How Culture Molds Habits of Thought. Richard Nisbett’s work indicates that culture shapes not only the content of thought but manner of thinking — degree of tolerance for ambiguity, distribution of attention among foreground and context, linearity, categorization, induction vs. deduction, etc. While there is a long and venerable (although not mainstream) tradition of speculation that this is true, Nisbett’s work is apparently the first based on tighly-controlled empirical investigation. This New York Times article highlights one interesting implication —

When it came to interpreting events in the social world, the

Asians seemed similarly sensitive to context, and quicker

than the Americans to detect when people’s behavior was

determined by situational pressures.

Psychologists have long documented what they call the

fundamental attribution error, the tendency for people to

explain human behavior in terms of the traits of individual

actors, even when powerful situational forces are at work.

Told that a man has been instructed to give a speech

endorsing a particular presidential candidate, for example,

most people will still believe that the speaker believes what

he is saying.

Yet Asians, according to Dr. Nisbett and his colleagues, may

in some situations be less susceptible to such errors,

indicating that they do not describe a universal way of

thinking, but merely the way that Americans think.

Think, for example, about McCain’s endorsement of George W. last week at the convention.

A Nuclear War Feared Possible Over Kashmir Secret U.S. intelligence estimates after the Kargil incident lie behind President Clinton’s recent pronouncements that the Indian subcontinent is “the most dangerous place in the world.” Kargil showed that the bilateral presence of nuclear armaments has not acted as a deterrent against new conflicts. Analysts also warn that the expected expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal if the U.S. builds the National Missile Defense would add further momentum to the Indian-Pakistani arms race. The continuing demonstration of American contempt for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty also cripples U.S. plausibility in asking, as Clinton did when he recently addressed the Indian parliament, that the combatants abandon their nuclear arsenals. We’ve also lost leverage over Pakistan and probably nadvertently fueled its nuclear ambitions by failing to resume economic and military

assistance to Pakistan that Congress cut off in 1990 because

of the Pakistani nuclear program, according to former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Robert Oakley. It appears that each country could deliver in the vicinity of twenty-five atomic weapons to the other’s population centers by bomber and/or missile. New York Times

Palm Introduces New Models. Hoping to become the must-have style accessory for the less-geeky fashion-conscious… New York Times

Big Apple Circus Cries Foul as Ringling Bros. Introduces a Competing Holiday Show

The skinny on the West Nile virus, and what to expect from it: ‘…the current frenzied focus on

West Nile will ebb eventually, and it will be added to the

growing list of diseases on the fringe – never as familiar as

flu or rabies or even meningitis, but something always to

consider when a bird dies, or an old man spikes a fever in

the summertime.

“It will become one of the diseases in America that we have

to watch for. And we should be getting

ready for the next one.” ‘ New York Times

Reading Glasses, as Inevitable as Death and Taxes. Or Are They?

“Finding a better fix for presbyopia is rapidly becoming the

Holy Grail of experimental ophthalmology, especially as

researchers and entrepreneurs begin to calculate the profits

that might accrue from curing an annoyance affecting every

single adult in the population.

But the basic disagreements as to why the process occurs

have meant that viable solutions are slow to emerge, and

are extremely controversial when they do.” New York Times

New Tactic in Physics: Hiding the Answer. Observer bias may turn out to be as much of a problem in particle physics as in the human sciences, and physicists are resorting to a version of the time-honored “double-blind” methodology to protect their objectivity. New York Times

“Cyberterrorists”? Are you listening? Here’s your roadmap. ZDNet

The Perseid meteor shower peaks on August 12 and coincides with a moonset spectacle. “This year the bright, nearly-full Moon

will outshine the Perseids most of the night, but

for an hour between moonset and sunrise on

Saturday morning, star gazers could witness a

brief but beautiful meteor shower. The setting

Moon may put on a show of its own Saturday.

Wildfires and dust storms have filled parts of

our atmosphere with aerosols. A low-hanging Moon

seen through such dusty air can take on a

beautiful pink or orange hue.”

Gender-based differences in response to stress tied to hormonal influence. Testosterone governs “fight or flight”, and oxytocin mitigates for “tend and befriend,” reports new research. USA Today

R.I.P. Sir Alec Guinness, at 86. This New York Times obituary mentions all the right things — Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Ladykillers, Tunes of Glory, Bridge on the River Kwai — as well as the Obi-Wan Kenobi roles for which most remember him most recently. I’ve cherished other aspects of his craft as well — his TV characterizations of one of my favorite characters, John Le Carre’s George Smiley; and the film version of one of my favorite novels, Joyce Carey’s The Horse’s Mouth, in which he not only nailed the central role on the head but wrote the screenplay. I wish I’d seen some of his Shakespearean stage acting.

Of Sir Alec’s acting technique, Kenneth Tynan, the late critic,

writer and director, once said:

My point is that the people

Guinness plays best are all iceberg characters, nine-tenths

concealed, whose fascination lies not in how they look but in

how their minds work. The parts he plays are, so to speak,

injected hypodermically, not tattooed all over him; the

latter is the star’s way, and Guinness shrinks from it.

Sir Alec, I’ll miss you and treasure your memory. I’m heading out to the video store…

I didn’t realize it, but my dial-up access is into the first ISP.

Anti-Breastfeeding Lobby in Force at R2K. ‘ “Breast-feeding is an immoral act,” he

deadpanned. “It leaves people with an oral

fixation. And the worst part of it is, the child

doesn’t have a choice.” ‘ Not clear if this was for real or a hoax [via Obscure Store]

Ron Reagan Less Than a Fan of George W.

“The big elephant sitting in the corner is that George W. Bush is

simply unqualified for the job. He’s probably the least qualified person ever to be nominated by

a major party. …What is his accomplishment? That he’s no longer an

obnoxious drunk?

“The defining moment for me was his Karla

Faye Tucker smirk, joking about a woman he would put to

death. No adult would ever do that. It wouldn’t even cross the

mind of a grown-up to joke about something like that.”

Washington Post

Corpse beheading not a shock to all. A man in Toldeo asked for a few minutes alone with the body of his uncle, then used a handsaw to behead the corpse and take the head home. Reportedly psychiatrically ill, he had published a flyer some time ago describing a method of resurrecting a loved one by consuming their brain.

Allegedly, William Gibson’s screenplay for Neuromancer, circa 1990. [via Null Device]

Motorola unveils Web-enabled car device. “The carmakers are betting that millions of drivers will be willing to pay as much as $30 a month for the Internet-access gadgets, which are

expected to be standard equipment in all new cars by 2004 or 2005.” Nando Times

Among the Mooks “As entertainment entrepreneurs align the fantasy

lands of rap, rock, wrestling and pornography, a

generation of fans grows ever more brutish.” It doesn’t exactly make its case; some of what this obviously scared and appalled observer finds “brutish” is just “different”, but on the other hand there’s plenty of “brutish” too. New York Times Magazine

Outrage over Holocaust remarks “A prominent religious leader in Israel has
caused outrage by referring to the six million
victims of the Holocaust as “reincarnated
sinners”.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who heads the country’s
third biggest political party, made the remarks
at a religious gathering in Jerusalem on
Saturday.”

Straight to the Point: “Cuban

President Fidel Castro today called George

W. Bush and Al Gore the most “boring and

insipid” presidential candidates the United

States could possibly have.” ABC

Breathe Deep To Get High. It’s widely known that the lack of oxygen in aircraft cabins contributes to the majority of air travel

woes, including tiredness, dehydration, rapid drunkenness, and most of all, air rage. However, what

few people also realise is how dramatically this cabin environment can affect their lungs.

In commercial aircraft, air pressure is rarely equal to that at sea

level. At cruising height (generally around 10,000 meters), pressurised

cabins allow comfortable respiration, but the oxygen content is only

the equivalent of the air breathed at an altitude of 2400 meters.

There are some engineering issues behind this, but it is mostly due to

penny-pinching on the part of the airlines. Pilots are routinely

instructed to disengage some of the equipment responsible for

bringing fresh air into the aircraft, meaning that a high-proportion of the air inside the plane is being

re-breathed. Shutting off the equipment means the engines don’t have to work as hard, thus saving fuel

costs.

Beyond 2000

America’s New hangup: Cell Phone Rudeness: “…seething

bystanders have had it up to here with the constant rrring of the

brave new wireless world.” CNN

Advertise your favorite mortal sin(s).

Comparison of online Ulysses editions Jorn Barger’s labor of love is finally complete.

The Dawn of Micropower: “Small, local power plants offer a cheap way into (recently deregulated)

markets. Even if the power they produce is more costly

at source—which it often is—they do not suffer huge

transmission losses when sending it to consumers. On

top of that, the surplus heat they generate can be

employed for useful purposes, such as warming

buildings, whereas that from big generators located in

the middle of the countryside is usually wasted. The

result is that local power generation has now become

economically competitive.

A second reason for the rise of micropower is

environmentalism. Ever-higher emission standards have

made it unattractive to build new coal-fired plants in the

rich world. ” The demand for uninterruptible reliable power in the face of more frequent brownouts and blackouts will also help to make micropower attractive in the U.S. The Economist

Massachusetts man charged with stealing human corneas. He says he thought the foam package was filled with lobsters.

“Hollering fire in a crowded theater”

The FBI’s chief negotiator during the Waco siege says

critics and conspiracy theorists are sowing dangerous

discord. He dismisses the 1997 documentary “Waco: The Rules of Engagement” (which presents evidence that the government fired first) as tantamont to fiction, and he says the Danforth report exonerating the government deserves to be taken at face value. Salon

Beware of geeks bearing gifts: “Microsoft’s

decision to slash the price of the

Windows Millennium Edition

upgrade from $89 to $59 — a whopping 33 percent savings

— made headlines this week. But the public should beware

of geeks bearing gifts. Windows Me has some significant

improvements, but for most users those improvements do

not justify the pain and potential dangers they will face with

this upgrade. Microsoft can lower the price of Windows Me

and give it a few great features, but it can’t fundamentally

make Me a better operating system than Windows 95,

because of underlying technical flaws with the whole

Windows operating environment.” Salon

Philadelphia police spokespeeople call the allegations a mixture of exaggerations, half-truths and flat-out lies, but protesters’ reports of police brutality seem widespread and consistent. Salon The Philadelphia Independent Media Center (IMC)is a collective of journalists and independent media organizations continuing to cover the condition of the jailed protesters. The LA IMC is up and running with pre-convention coverage of ‘D2K.’ And the Boston IMC notes that organizing for a response to the first major Presidential debate, scheduled for Bsoton on October 3, is proceeding. And a disorganized group of hackers helped reporters cover police activity around the convention. Wired

Man says cell phone makers caused his brain tumor

Dr. Christopher Newman, a Maryland neurologist, has filed an $800 million lawsuit

against a number of cell phone makers claiming that the mobile phones that they

made caused a malignant tumor in his brain.

Massachusetts man charged with stealing human corneas. He says he thought the foam package was filled with lobsters.

Anarchism, the Creed That Won’t Stay Dead. ‘The protests have often been condemned in the mainstream

news media as imbecilic and chaotic, all action and no

theory. But that is also an anarchist trait. Its adherents have

long been dismissed as uneducated and unwashed.

Anarchism’s most memorable slogan, coined by Enrico

Malatesta of Italy, is “propaganda by deed.”

“With the decline of socialism, you have seen anarchism go

through a revival as an easy way to oppose global

capitalism,” said Paul Avrich, a leading historian of anarchism

who teaches at Queens College in New York.’ New York Times

Flu vaccine shortage prompts US to test half-doses

NASA satellites monitor western wildfires from space

As soot-covered firefighters face the billowing roar and crackle of the convulsing

flames on Earth, NASA’s Earth Probe satellite hangs in the silence of space

monitoring the plumes of smoke 740 km below.

Every few hours, a global map of smoke and other aerosols detected by Earth

Probe are updated at the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) web site.

Humphrey Bogart And Marilyn Monroe, Sort Of

“A futuristic mafia drama set on a spaceship

and starring celluloid greats Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe

would be the greatest movie ever, according to a survey by

online retailer Amazon.co.uk.”

Better Living Standards, Childhood Leukemia Linked

“Leukemia cases among young British children

are increasing and doctors suspect improved living standards

could be the cause.

Youngsters are exposed to fewer common infections than they used to be so their immune

systems are weaker and not as good at combating illnesses, British researchers said Friday.”

POPULATION: 1 Old Rancher and The Manson Family

“Thirty years ago, a census taker had a brush with weirdness on the Spahn Ranch.”

Eight blacklisted Hollywood writers finally get screen credits for their work.

Parental Discretion: “A simple question no one seems to want to ask: If Dick

Cheney loves and is proud of his openly lesbian

daughter, why is he supporting a man who wants her to

live under the threat of criminal sanction? It’s no secret

that Governor George W. Bush has publicly supported

Texas’s still-extant gays-only sodomy law, which makes

private, consensual sex between gay adults a crime.

Does Cheney agree with his running mate’s position?” The New Republic

Aim 7 million cameras at a vacuous event, and it’s still

vacuous.

I couldn’t believe how pitiful it was. Bo Derek honored to be reading scripted comments at the Republican convention, and tongue tripping over some token Spanish. And, no less pitiful, this National Review columnist complaining that the celebrity decks are stacked so far to the left that poor old Bo just won’t be enough to sway the tide:

Sadly, this isn’t going to be enough, and even more sadly, this matters. In

our tranquil, ill-educated times, showbiz sets not only the cultural, but the

political agenda. The drip, drip, drip of a predominantly liberal message

in the movies, TV, and the other entertainment media is bound to wear

through to the ballot box. We saw this in Britain, where a hostile cultural

scene proved to be the harbinger of the crushing Conservative defeat in

the 1997 election. Writing in the London Sunday Times the following

year, the newspaper’s then-resident leftist, the writer Robert Harris, noted

— with, probably, some satisfaction — that he couldn’t think of one

single “important” British writer or, for that matter, a film director, theater

director, composer (“apart from Lord Lloyd Webber”), actor, or painter

who was a Conservative.

As Mr. Harris went on to point out, “the entertainment and fashion

industries are now two of the biggest economic sectors in the world.

Never have we lived in a time more conscious of style, and never in

democratic history has it been less stylish to be on the right.”

Now, he was writing in a British context, but, like it or not, it’s not too

difficult to see the same process gathering pace over here. It’s not going

to be easy to reverse. On this battlefield, the Right are simply too few.

Eugene Kennedy’s long investigative report Mike Barnicle and American Twilight

on the Boston Globe‘s poorly justified firing of the outspoken commentator two years ago. Barnicle was by many accounts the most popular Globe columnist, offending many by tweaking their political correctness left and right. Kennedy feels it was one particular Globe editor’s self-serving hypocrisy that brought Barnicle down over a non-issue without an adequate opportunity to defend himself. It deserves looking at again since the Globe just did something seemingly similar to Jeff Jacoby, their only columnist with conservative credentials.

“That’s American twilight: Being found half guilty in the half light that’s too dim to

illuminate the whole truth, the truth that is complex while accusations are simple and

live forever on the Internet. Dusk is a great equalizer, right and wrong, honor and

dishonor, they look the same after sundown.” Jim Romenesko’s Media News

Tensions Cool in Philadelphia Streets. No ‘days of rage’ for Philadelphia 2000, says the mainstream press (it would be interesting to hear the perspective of the demonstrators). The police commissioner said: “They were folks who came here hell-bent on causing disruption. The Philadelphia Police Department is in control of the situation. Make no mistake about that.” The nascent new movement — energetic and focused, spontaneous and decentralized — touted in the aftermath of the WTO and IMF showings does not appear much in evidence. In fact, some protesters were quoted explaining that the protests had petered out because “their leaders” had been jailed early on. Strategists of the movement have offered that they will be targeting the Democratic convention in more force, because the Democrats are more prone to listen and be influenced by their agenda. Meanwhile, the one moment of any controversy on the convention floor almost seemed more than what fizzled on outside.

Judge Sets FBI Email Scanning Disclosure. The judge has granted the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s request for expedited processing of its Freedom of Information Act inquiry into the inner workings of ‘Carnivore’, after Janet Reno had decreed that the details would only be revealed to a “group of experts.” EPIC and ACLU say the tremendous potential for violation of constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure mitigates for full and open disclosure of how Carnivore works. Once installed at an ISP site by court order, it “sniffs” or scans all traffic through the site, although the FBI assures us that only data related to criminal activity is filtered in and reviewed. How good are the FBI’s programmers at writing ‘perfect’ search filters? how invested?

Giant Trap Set for Monster in Lake. Scientists hope to net Nessie’s Norwegian cousin Selma.

Web Site Asks for Donated DNA Samples, appeals to donors’ altruism to help it build a DNA database it hopes will allow correlation between medical conditions and genetic loci. ‘The privately held company will use the data to “offer several products and services” to

other firms and research facilities, another section of the Web site explains. Among other

revenue-generating projects, the firm intends to “provide aggregate health and genetic

information to outside research facilities,” and to “sell and/or lease clinically useful genetic

associations to public and private research and product development institutions.” ‘

Fidgeting is neat

What to Do About All the Uncompassionate Conservatives? “Reject immediately this absurd notion that the

Republican convention lacks drama. For starters, there’s the extremely

dramatic ideological cosmetology. The Republicans want to show they

are compassionate conservatives, but that means they have to do

something with all the folks who are … you know … uncompassionate

conservatives.” Washington Post

Acme Klein Bottle:

“These are the finest closed,

non-orientable, boundary-free

manifolds sold anywhere in our three

spatial dimensions.”

CNET.com page of downloads of Napster alternatives

J.S. Bach, Man of the Ear: On the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, an attempt to grapple with how challenging it is to listen to his work.

Woven of independent and self-sufficient

musical lines that interact with split-second imitations and

sinuous counterpoint, his multiple-voiced works unsettle the mind

because, even at their simplest, there seems to be more

happening than can be comprehended through mere listening. His

fugues make us want to reach for the remote and stop time, so as

to untangle and hold up for scrutiny the passing show of musical

logic.

What happens to Bach’s music between the notes on the page

and what we hear remains enigmatic. There have been periodic

attempts to define the larger, sociological resonance of his

music, attempts to answer the question, “How do we as a society

hear Bach?”

…All of this lies to the side of the most troubling and most

rewarding aspect of Bach’s music: that its complexity still

terrifies us like no other body of composition. Bach remains the

intimidating composer par excellence. His contrapuntal

complexity has become synonymous with the very definition of

profundity in music. Composers seeking to demonstrate depth in

their work–from Beethoven to Liszt to Shostakovich–turn to the

fugue, a highly ordered work of multiple interacting lines of

counterpoint, as if it were the only form adequate to express the

most serious imagination.

Washington Post

Australia’s monetary policy body plagued by gnomes blocking front steps of building where it meets monthly.

It’s going to be a little harder to be a big man on the stock exchange floor.

Presumed twin removed from 4-month-old boy’s belly, Cairo newspaper reports.

The Call From the Wild . Stories of cell phone calls saving lives in the wilderness are becoming common, yet using a cell phone in the backcountry risks raising the hackles of other climbers or backpackers. Objections arise from the aesthetic violation of the isolation of the wilderness, the perception that having a cell phone facilitates a backcountry traveller taking more risks than is prudent, and the wastefulness of unnecessary search and rescue missions “resulting from frightened people giving in to the temptation to call when they get tired or lost, instead of relying on themselves.” Washington Post

Cold War Oncology – Bismuth-213, part of the decay chain from uranium-233 left over from weapons-grade uranium stockpiles at Oak Ridge TN, may be a boon to cancer chemotherapy.

Planet lovers campaign to save Pluto Express – NASA’s first unmanned expedition to Pluto and the Kuiper disc is threatened with cancellation, partly because of the two failed missions to Mars. The Planetary Society wants its 10,000 members to lobby Congress to preserve the Pluto trip.

The letter carrier wants to know your email address. If you sign up for this service the U.S. Postal Service wants to offer, your existing email address will be cross-referenced in a giant USPO database with your street address. Anyone could send you an email if all they know about you is your snailmail address. Think about the spam possibilities! ZDNet

Please Change Beliefs is conceptual artist Jenny Holzer’s May ’99 web installation. Holzer’s subversive aphorisms are playing a prominent part at the anti-Republican demonstrations in Philadelphia, acording to news sources. Artcyclopedia

World War II prisoner emerges. He is presumed to be a Hungarian thought to have died in WWII but in reality incarcerated in a Russian mental hospital for the 55 years since. Piecing together the story is complicated, however, since he is confused and does not recall who he is or what happened to him. This man never learned Russian and can barely speak his native Hungarian; he has had no one to speak to since another prisoner’s release twenty years ago. BBC

Sounds like a plot from one of those tacky Indian films…

National Abortion Rights Action League’s factsheet on the record of Republican vice-presidential nominee Dick Cheney: “During his ten years in the U.S. House of Representatives, former

Rep. Cheney cast 27 votes on abortion and reproductive rights. Of

that number, 26 were anti-choice votes.” The details follow.

Fusing Beauty and Terror, Reverence and Desecration: The Fallen Concorde. “Critic’s notebook” commentary in the New York Times. Abit over-the-top but has a useful punchline. “The Concorde crash,

in other words, ought to shock people out of retro ways of

thinking in all spheres of culture.”

Asylum Plea by Chinese Sect’s Leader Perplexes the U.S.. We either deny asylum and turn a religious leader over to persecution, or we grant it and tell the Chinese we harbor elements they find offensive. Complicating the matter further, China has accused him of criminal activities. The U.S. and China have no extradition treaty, so it appears to be a matter of U.S. discretion. New York Times

Break all the rules. In the last year, researchers have begun to suspect that the speed of light has slowed since the big bang.

One argument in support of a changing light speed is the fact that temperature

and density are relatively uniform across the Universe. There’s no way such far-flung corners of space can be causally

connected unless light once travelled faster than it does now.

Now theoreticians argue that, if this is true, it requires that electric charge must have appeared out of nowhere.

…If the speed of light isn’t

constant, then charge conservation–another central tenet of physics–will be violated. One way to understand their proof is to think of

light as a wave of oscillating electromagnetic fields with an associated electric current shuttling charge back and forth. If the speed of

the wave falls, the associated current will deposit charge faster than it picks it up, resulting in a net creation of positive charge.

If the speed of light were falling gradually as the universe expands, we would expect to see evidence of the violation of charge conservation, which we don’t. But, if the decrease in the speed of light occurred rapidly in the first seconds after the big bang and has stayed constant since then, it might account for another vexing problem in cosmology — the apparent asymmetry the universe has in terms of favoring matter over antimatter. New Scientist

Break all the rules. In the last year, researchers have begun to suspect that the speed of light has slowed since the big bang.

One argument in support of a changing light speed is the fact that temperature

and density are relatively uniform across the Universe. There’s no way such far-flung corners of space can be causally

connected unless light once travelled faster than it does now.

Now theoreticians argue that, if this is true, it requires that electric charge must have appeared out of nowhere.

…If the speed of light isn’t

constant, then charge conservation–another central tenet of physics–will be violated. One way to understand their proof is to think of

light as a wave of oscillating electromagnetic fields with an associated electric current shuttling charge back and forth. If the speed of

the wave falls, the associated current will deposit charge faster than it picks it up, resulting in a net creation of positive charge.

If the speed of light were falling gradually as the universe expands, we would expect to see evidence of the violation of charge conservation, which we don’t. But, if the decrease in the speed of light occurred rapidly in the first seconds after the big bang and has stayed constant since then, it might account for another vexing problem in cosmology — the apparent asymmetry the universe has in terms of favoring matter over antimatter. New Scientist

Break all the rules. In the last year, researchers have begun to suspect that the speed of light has slowed since the big bang.

One argument in support of a changing light speed is the fact that temperature

and density are relatively uniform across the Universe. There’s no way such far-flung corners of space can be causally

connected unless light once travelled faster than it does now.

Now theoreticians argue that, if this is true, it requires that electric charge must have appeared out of nowhere.

…If the speed of light isn’t

constant, then charge conservation–another central tenet of physics–will be violated. One way to understand their proof is to think of

light as a wave of oscillating electromagnetic fields with an associated electric current shuttling charge back and forth. If the speed of

the wave falls, the associated current will deposit charge faster than it picks it up, resulting in a net creation of positive charge.

If the speed of light were falling gradually as the universe expands, we would expect to see evidence of the violation of charge conservation, which we don’t. But, if the decrease in the speed of light occurred rapidly in the first seconds after the big bang and has stayed constant since then, it might account for another vexing problem in cosmology — the apparent asymmetry the universe has in terms of favoring matter over antimatter. New Scientist