Ask longtime denizens of Harvard Square and they will be able to lament the exact moment the old square seemed to lose its bohemian charm, when a favored haunt or hole-in-the-wall vanished, often giving way to a national chain.” (Yahoo! News)

If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden’s attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution — and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it — I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled.

Had anyone said our president would invade a country and kill 30,000 of its people claiming a threat that never, in fact, existed, then admit he would have invaded even if he had known there was no threat — and expect America to be pleased by this — I would have thought our nation’s sensibilities and honor had been eviscerated.

If I had been informed that our nation’s leaders would embrace torture as a legitimate tool of warfare, hold prisoners for years without charges and operate secret prisons overseas — and call such procedures necessary for the nation’s security — I would have laughed at the folly of protecting human rights by destroying them.

If someone had predicted the president’s staff would out a CIA agent as revenge against a critic, defy a law against domestic propaganda by bankrolling supposedly independent journalists and commentators, and ridicule a 37-year Marie Corps veteran for questioning U.S. military policy — and that the populace would be more interested in whether Angelina is about to make Brad a daddy — I would have called the prediction an absurd fantasy.” (Miami Herald op-ed)

The adjustment will be carried out by sticking an extra second into atomic clocks worldwide at the stroke of midnight Coordinated Universal Time, the widely adopted international standard, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology said this week.

‘Enjoy New Year’s Eve a second longer,’ the institute said in an explanatory notice. ‘You can toot your horn an extra second this year.’

Coordinated Universal Time coincides with winter time in London. On the U.S. East Coast, the extra second occurs just before 7 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. Atomic clocks at that moment will read 23:59:60 before rolling over to all zeros.

…Although it is possible to have a negative leap second — that is, a second deducted from Coordinated Universal Time — so far all have been add-ons, reflecting the Earth’s general slowing trend due to tidal breaking.

Deciding when to introduce a leap second is the responsibility of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, a standards-setting body. Under an international pact, the preference for leap seconds is December 31 or June 30.” (CNN)

The 22-year-old student tearfully admitted he made the story up to his history professor, Dr. Brian Glyn Williams, and his parents, after being confronted with the inconsistencies in his account. ” (SouthCoastToday )

The work bolsters the validity of a longstanding hypothesis that the human brain takes itself back to the state it was in when a memory was first formed.” (LiveScience)

Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program. The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a ‘watch list,’ and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further. ” (South Coast Today)

Here’s why: the dynamic of a typical Bush scandal follows familiar contours…

1. POTUS circumvents the law – an impeachable offense.

2. The story breaks (in this case after having been concealed by a news organization until well after Election 2004).

3. The Bush crew floats a number of pushback strategies, settling on one that becomes the mantra of virtually every Republican surrogate. These Republicans face down poorly prepped Dem surrogates and shred them on cable news shows.

4. Rightwing attack dogs on talk radio, blogs, cable nets, and conservative editorial pages maul Bush’s critics as traitors for questioning the CIC.

5. The Republican leadership plays defense for Bush, no matter how flagrant the Bush over-reach, no matter how damaging the administration’s actions to America’s reputation and to the Constitution. A few ‘mavericks’ like Hagel or Specter risk the inevitable rightwing backlash and meekly suggest that the president should obey the law. John McCain, always the Bush apologist when it really comes down to it, minimizes the scandal.

6. Left-leaning bloggers and online activists go ballistic, expressing their all-too-familiar combination of outrage at Bush and frustration that nothing ever seems to happen with these scandals. Several newspaper editorials echo these sentiments but quickly move on to other issues.

7. A few reliable Dems, Conyers, Boxer, et al, take a stand on principle, giving momentary hope to the progressive grassroots/netroots community. The rest of the Dem leadership is temporarily outraged (adding to that hope), but is chronically incapable of maintaining the sense of high indignation and focus required to reach critical mass and create a wholesale shift in public opinion. For example, just as this mother of all scandals hits Washington, Democrats are still putting out press releases on Iraq, ANWR and a range of other topics, diluting the story and signaling that they have little intention of following through. This allows Bush to use his three favorite weapons: time, America’s political apathy, and make-believe ‘journalists’ who yuck it up with him and ask fluff questions at his frat-boy pressers.

8. Reporters and media outlets obfuscate and equivocate, pretending to ask tough questions but essentially pushing the same narratives they’ve developed and perfected over the past five years, namely, some variation of ‘Bush firm, Dems soft.’ A range of Bush-protecting tactics are put into play, one being to ask ridiculously misleading questions such as ‘Should Bush have the right to protect Americans or should he cave in to Democratic political pressure?’ All the while, the right assaults the ‘liberal’ media for daring to tell anything resembling the truth.

9. Polls will emerge with ‘proof’ that half the public agrees that Bush should have the right to ‘protect Americans against terrorists.’ Again, the issue will be framed to mask the true nature of the malfeasance. The media will use these polls to create a self-fulfilling loop and convince the public that it isn’t that bad after all. The president breaks the law. Life goes on.

10. The story starts blending into a long string of administration scandals, and through skillful use of scandal fatigue, Bush weathers the storm and moves on, further demoralizing his opponents and cementing the press narrative about his ‘resolve’ and toughness. Congressional hearings might revive the issue momentarily, and bloggers will hammer away at it, but the initial hype is all the Democratic leadership and the media can muster, and anyway, it’s never as juicy the second time around…

Rinse and repeat.

It’s a battle of attrition that Bush and his team have mastered. Short of a major Dem initiative to alter the cycle, to throw a wrench into the system, to go after the media institutionally, this cycle will continue for the foreseeable future.” (Salon Premium)

The memorandum, released yesterday by the National Archives, made recommendations concerning a lawsuit against former Attorney General John N. Mitchell over a wiretap he had authorized without a court’s permission in 1970. The government was investigating a plot to destroy underground utility tunnels in Washington and to kidnap Henry A. Kissinger, the national security adviser.

The White House said yesterday that the issues discussed in that memorandum were not the same as those posed by President Bush’s orders to the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on international communications without warrants.” (New York Times )

The NSA, with help from American telecommunications companies, obtained access to streams of domestic and international communications, said the Times in the report late Friday, citing unidentified current and former government officials.” (New York Times ) via Yahoo!)

For centuries, doctors followed Hippocrates’ injunction to hold out hope to patients, even when it meant withholding the truth. But that canon has been blasted apart by modern patients’ demands for honesty and more involvement in their care. Now, patients may be told more than they need or want to know. Yet they still also need and want hope.

In response, some doctors are beginning to think about hope in new ways. In certain cases, that means tempering a too-bleak prognosis. In others, it means resisting the allure of cutting-edge treatments with questionable benefits.” (New York Times )

On one side is the national-security camp, made even more numerous by loyalty to a wartime president. On the other are the small-government civil libertarians who have long held a privileged place within the Republican Party but whose ranks have ebbed since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The surveillance furor, at least among some conservatives, also has heightened worries that the party is straying from many of its core principles the longer it remains in control of both the White House and Congress.

Conservatives have knocked heads in recent months over the administration’s detainment and treatment of terrorist suspects, and as recently as yesterday over provisions of the Patriot Act. Strains also have grown among conservatives over government spending and whether to loosen U.S. immigration rules.

But the current debate over using the National Security Agency for domestic surveillance — which the administration has defended as legal and necessary — hit a rawer nerve because it pits national-security concerns against a core constitutional right, in this case, the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures.” (Wall Street Journal)

In a study at their own facility, a group of scientists from the Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health in Melbourne secretly numbered 70 teaspoons and tracked their movements over five months. Supporting their expectations, 80 percent of the spoons vanished during the period — although those in private areas of the institute lasted nearly twice as long as those in communal sections.

‘At this rate, an estimated 250 teaspoons would need to be purchased annually to maintain a workable population of 70 teaspoons,’ they wrote in Friday’s festive edition of the British Medical Journal.

They said their research proved that teaspoons were an essential part of office life and the rapid rate of disappearance proved that this was under relentless assault.

Regretting that scientific literature was ‘strangely bereft’ of teaspoon-related research, the scientists offered a few theories to explain the phenomenon.

Taking a tip from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books, they suggested that the teaspoons were quietly migrating to a planet uniquely populated by ‘spoonoid’ life forms living in a spoonish state of Nirvana.

They also offered the phenomenon of ‘resistentialism’ in which inanimate objects like teaspoons have a natural aversion to humans.” (Yahoo! News)

‘What a surprise,’ says Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) researcher Rob Suggs, who recorded the impact’s flash. He and colleague Wes Swift were testing a new telescope and video camera they assembled to monitor the moon for meteor strikes. On their first night out, ‘we caught one,’ says Suggs.” (NASA)

A collection of theater artists from around the country will present work inspired by various neurological conditions, including:

• Amnesia (Korsakov’s Syndrome)
• Aphasia
• Autism
• Capgras Syndrome
• Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD)
• Dementia
• Meniere’s Disease
• Synesthesia
• Tourette’s Syndrome”

Few drugs are being marketed, and most of those that have been introduced are enormously expensive and provide few of the benefits that patients expect. Officials of the Food and Drug Administration suggest that the failures may result from an obsolete testing system.

There is growing evidence that X-rays, long the standard, may not accurately assess a patient’s disease. The drug agency is creating collaborations to develop imaging, blood and other tests that better signal the progression of cancer.” (New York Times )

The emphasis is on speed and weight hoisted, not technique. And the importance placed on quantifiable results has attracted hard-charging people like hedge fund managers, former Olympians and scientists. But some exercise experts are troubled by the lack of guidance for beginners, who may dive into stressful workouts as Mr. Anderson did. (He had not worked out regularly for two years.) ‘There’s no way inexperienced people doing this are not going to hurt themselves…'” (New York Times )

Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified, intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said. Several members repeatedly lied to cover their motives even while professing religious beliefs, he said.” (Wired News)

The sudden influx of drug companies to India resembles the gold rush frontier, according to Sean Philpott, managing editor of The American Journal of Bioethics.” (Wired News)

In Geneva last week, the World Meteorological Organization reported that 2005 thus far is the second warmest year on record, extending a trend climatologists attribute at least partly to heat-trapping ‘greenhouse gases’ accumulating in the atmosphere. In New York, NASA’s Goddard Institute projected that 2005 will surpass 1998 to end as the hottest year globally in the 125 years since reliable records have been kept. It said warming has accelerated and is now boosting the mercury every decade by more than 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit.” (Wired News)

The researchers were startled to find bears having to swim up to 60 miles across open sea to find food. They are being forced into the long voyages because the ice floes from which they feed are melting, becoming smaller and drifting farther (apart.” Sunday Timesof London)

The decision is likely to reopen the already heated but inconclusive debate across Europe about how far doctors and hospitals can go in helping those who are determined to end their lives.” (Guardian.UK)

The singer has signed on to serve as host of a weekly one-hour program on XM Satellite Radio, spinning records and offering commentary on new music and other topics, starting in March. The famously reclusive 64-year-old performer said in a statement yesterday that ‘a lot of my own songs have been played on the radio, but this is the first time I’ve ever been on the other side of the mike.'” (New York Times )

Peter C. Whybrow of U.C.L.A. and John D. Gartner of Johns Hopkins University Medical School make their cases for an immigrant-specific genotype in their respective books, American Mania and The Hypomanic Edge. Even when times are hard, Whybrow points out, most people don’t leave their homelands. The 2 percent or so who do are a self-selecting group. What distinguishes them, he suggests, might be the genetic makeup of their dopamine-receptor system – the pathway in the brain that figures centrally in boldness and novelty seeking.” (New York Times Magazine)

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seemed skeptical of the Bush administration’s defense of secret laws and regulations but stopped short of suggesting that such a rule would be necessarily unconstitutional.

‘How do we know there’s an order?’ Judge Thomas Nelson asked. ‘Because you said there was?’

Replied Joshua Waldman, a staff attorney for the Department of Justice: ‘We couldn’t confirm or deny the existence of an order.’ Even though government regulations required his silence, Waldman said, the situation did seem a ‘bit peculiar.'” (CNET)

…The ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, …was asked about two Iraqi detention facilities from which some detainees had been transferred to the hospital, and to comment on remarks from some Iraqi interior ministry officials characterizing the handling of the detainees as slapping. Mr. Khalilzad said he has received reports that pointed to more extreme treatment.” (New York Times )

Every entry can be edited by anybody. An entry can contain a bit of sheet music, a MIDI file, textual information about the work and the composer, and last but not least the Parsons Code, a rough description of the melodic contour, to make the encyclopedia searchable by melody.

Musipedia uses the “Melodyhound” melody search engine. You can find and identify a tune even if the melody is all you know. You can play it on a piano keyboard, whistle or sing it to the computer, or directly use the Parsons code. To “name that tune”, you don’t need to know the key signature, exact rhythm, or intervals.”

When the two are guests on a ‘Larry King’-type cable show, Murch tells the mother of a dead soldier that he, too, wishes her son could return home. If he did, Murch said, the young GI would tell her that the fight was not in vain. Oops, bad move. Murch’s words are enough to stir the dead, and what they have to say doesn’t exactly jibe with the president’s talking points.” (Reuters)

Fearing a repeat of the 1992 race riots in which 52 people died, police, schools and community groups have been told to prepare for violence if clemency is not granted.” (CTV)

The idea of large galaxies being assembled primarily by mergers rather than evolving by themselves in isolation has grown to dominate cosmological thinking. However, a troubling inconsistency within this general theory has been that the most massive galaxies appear to be the oldest, leaving minimal time since the Big Bang for the mergers to have occurred.” (National Optical Astronomy Observatory News)

At 1001 metres, the enormous tower would be almost twice the height of the world’s tallest building today, the Taipei 101 in Taiwan, which stands at 509 metres. The new building would also dwarf the Burj Dubai, a building under construction in Dubai that is expected to stand 700-800 metres tall once completed in 2008.

…Mohsen Zikri, a skyscraper expert with the UK engineering company Arup, says such an immensely tall building would pose extraordinary challenges for its designers. For example, it could be tricky to include enough elevators (lifts) to move people up and down efficiently.” (New Scientist)

The program groups emails by sender, and then prioritises senders according to the number of times that you have communicated with them recently and the frequency with which you reply to them. So you should be able to home in on emails that are likely to be especially urgent or interesting.

Called the Social Network and Relationship Finder (SNARF), the software was released online on 30 November. It works with Outlook, but may soon be configured for Yahoo and Gmail.” (New Scientist)

Let me explain.” — Chris Mullin, member of the British Parliament (Los Angeles Times)

…If there is something vaguely quaint about Mallomars because they are available only during certain seasons, there is also something venerable. They are as old as the Federal Reserve System and Camel cigarettes. Unlike crossword puzzles, which also made their debut in 1913, they have not undergone a name change. When The New York World published that first puzzle, it was a “word-cross.” Mallomars did not begin life in 1913 as Marsomalls.” (New York Times )

Truman and Eisenhower were the casualties of historical forces in the postwar world which only coincidentally arose during their second terms and would have been daunting to the public perception of their adequacy in doing their job even if they had occurred immediately after their first elections… in which case we would not, of course, be talking about second-term woes, as we did not when Johnson was defeated by the public weariness over the morass in Vietnam and Bush Senior was done in by first-term economic conditions.

Nixon and Reagan committed scandalous abuses of their power after emboldened and corrupted in their first terms. Clinton’s scandalous behavior was in the sphere of private character failings but was exploited by his political opponents, having had time by his reelection to marshal their opposition. Unfortunately, significant segments of the American public have subsequently, hypocritically, forgotten to hold their President accountable for character flaws…

…Which brings us to George W. Bush, whose woes are not second-term woes, for several reasons. First of all, he was elected legitimately neither the first time nor the second time, in the credible opinion of many. Second, there is nothing about his failings that is specific to his second term except the reasons that it took so long for the American public to recognize his failings. His ineptitude, unpreparedness to govern, his deceitfulness, and his collection of the most unscrupulous cabal of advisers and managers, make him the uncontested worst president in the postwar era. Admittedly, it took the majority of the American public until the second term to make a realistic appraisal of his performance — a failing grade — but that was only because his first-term approval was artificially inflated by the political manipulation of 9-11, which created the most destructive consensus that opposition was disloyal and dangerous since McCarthyism.

More than two thousand American GIs and countless Iraqi civilians, to start with, have died as a result of this morally bankrupt deceit. But it is a mistake, of course, to focus merely on the war as the source of discontent. The coffers of corrupt corporate administration cronies have been enriched unbelievably off the backs of suffering Americans, our descendants will pay the price of irresponsible economic policy which has bankrupted our fiscal security. The abandonment of the unfortunate and underprivileged has accelerated at an unprecedented pace. The environment of the world has been irrevocably and severely degraded at a quickening pace. Multinational cooperation has been compromised by craven American unilateralism, military adventurism and abrogation of international agreements and civility. Goodwill has been squandered and debased. We have set a precedent for illegal detention and torture that other countries are certain to emulate. We have disavowed and undone a half-century of progress in the containment of the nuclear threat. Never before has an administration so egregiously limited the scope of the polity to which it considers itself answerable to such a partisan sectarian base. The list goes on and on.

Smith’s proposal for a single six-year term of office, which I hope was made facetiously, would not address the problem of the election of an unqualified, inept and duplicitous man in the first place and would compound the problem by prolonging his tenure, with no public recourse, for two further disastrous years. Four years of ineptitude is more than enough! The solution to Smith’s observation that, under the present system, the first-term President uses his power to campaign for his second term from the White House, is not to eliminate the only source of the remaining accountability an irresponsible President has to the electorate. There are other ways to contain partisanship in the exercise of Presidential power but, if partisan we are to be, a provision for a recall election of a President as scandalously bad as Bush would be a better Constitutional reform than a one-term limit, be it four years or six. Finally, it is telling that Smith starts his historical review with Truman, conveniently ignoring the case of his predecessor. Franklin Roosevelt, whose heroic presidency shepherded us through national emergency on both the domestic and the international front, illustrates the Founding Fathers’ wisdom in providing for reelection, especially when an effective leader has inspired the national confidence in times of crisis.

While Smith’s analysis of the situation may be a scurrilous attempt to reflect H.L. Mencken’s observation that “every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under,” it does nothing to help bolster the democratic process by warning the public against repeating the mistakes it made by being fooled into electing a man like George W. Bush. Both one-term presidencies, and second-term woes, are reflective of the debasement of the political process and the increasing difficulty the electorate has in assessing the character and leadership potential of presidential candidates through the slickness and superficiality of the campaign process. Campaign spending caps, frank candidate debates that are not opportunities for a dog-and-pony show, the inclusion of minor party candidates, a compressed campaign season to avoid the ad nauseum repetition of platitudes, legitimate in=depth scrutiny by a responsible and independent press, and the public determination not to get fooled again, would go far further in electing a man — or woman — of integrity who would have the capacity to govern for eight years, regardless of historical vagaries, without the public becoming disenchanted. Oh yes, and avoiding electronic voting without a paper trail, of course.

—
Eliot Gelwan MD, Brookline MA, USA”

The change follows complaints from a high-profile US journalist about an entry that falsely implicated him in the assassination of both US President John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby Kennedy.

In an editorial published in USA Today on 21 November, John Seigenthaler Sr criticised Wikipedia for failing to spot and correct the error and for allowing its creator to remain anonymous. In the article, Seigenthaler said the error had remained on Wikipedia for several months and described the website as a ‘flawed and irresponsible research tool’.” (New Scientist)

But Mr. Romero has also become a lightning rod, with a band of vociferous internal critics saying that civil liberties are not his top concern. They have seized on his failure to inform the board about a settlement with the New York attorney general over privacy breaches on its Web site and his signing of a government fund-raising agreement that the organization later renounced. In both cases, they say, Mr. Romero was not entirely forthcoming even after those controversies came to light.” (New York Times )