Nixon was prepared for astronaut eulogies:

When man first landed on the moon 30 years ago, President Richard Nixon had a speech all ready in case man would not get off again.

A contingency statement was prepared for Mr. Nixon, an eerie, poignant tribute that he would deliver while the astronauts were still alive but when there was no longer any hope for them.

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace wills stay on the moon to rest in peace,” says the statement, incorporated in a memo titled “In Event of Moon Disaster.”

The memo is dated July 18, 1969, two days before the moon landing.

Mr. Nixon never had to act on it. Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin made it safely off the moon, back to the command module with Michael Collins, and home. The words were drafted by William Safire, then a Nixon speechwriter and now a columnist for the New York Times.

The memo ended up in the National Archives and was reported by the Los Angeles Times. Associated Press

‘Many of Andy Goldsworthy’s sculptures last only as long as nature allows. A new movie, ‘Rivers and Tides,’ captures his ephemeral efforts.’ Boston Globe I’ve loved Goldsworthy’s work since my time in Scotland years ago. It is time for a broader appreciation…

A manifesto:

As I see it, here in the early 21st century, triage requires we look beyond our management-plan differences and unite to fight for all our Places, for all our kids — cowboys and Indians, multi-generational rancher and rural-refugee relative-newcomer (just more in a multi-millennial line of migrators) — or we’ll soon have nothing left to argue about. If we can’t look past our personal political agendas toward some deeper shared roots, then it just may be that all of the meaningful nooks and crannies left on the land will be engineered, profiteered, privatized, regulated, marketed, and paved away. We can argue about the details, but first we must unite against those who have no meaning of Place beyond the money that can be extracted from the land; and who, in that money-worshipping land-sacrificing, will suck the Place out of the places needed by those of us who still need that meaning. In a growth-buzz addicted culture, even the stems and seeds get smoked.

Here’s my new bumper sticker: Save the wild people. I envision next to that slogan the picture of a little kid giving the finger. — Ken Wright, The Exquisite Corpse Manifesto Issue

Outlaw manifesto of the century:

In March 1967, at the dawn of what became known as the summer of love, Otto Muehl published “ZOCK,” one of the most fanatical nihilist credos ever written. In this intense instance Otto might be compared to Sergei Nechaev–Dostoyevsky’s model for the fictional Verkhovensky in The Possessed–and his very real Catechism of the Revolutionist. Both manifestoes carried to an ultimate extreme lewdness and severity, of mystical satire in praxis. In both there are suggestions of older, shadowy millenarian uprisings, the writer depicting himself as a complete immoralist, bound to commit “any crime, any treachery, any baseness or deception” to create a New World order. The stories of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, even Jesus and Judas are taken not as rogue elements but implicitly as paradigms of brotherhood, of fierce love. Both Nechaev and Muehl oppose history to project the future of mankind into a primordial time when communication between heaven and earth, gods and mortals, was not merely possible, but easy and within the reach of all mankind. In both there is an unstated belief in redemption through sin. Every acute and radical Utopianism that is taken seriously tears open an abyss in which by inner necessity these antinomian tendencies and libertarian moral conceptions gain strength. — William Levy, The Exquisite Corpse Manifesto Issue

Walt Whitman (1819–1892), Leaves of Grass:

79. Thought

Of obedience, faith, adhesiveness;

As I stand aloof and look,

there is to me something profoundly affecting in large masses of men,

following the lead of those who do not believe in men.

(dedicated to George W. Bush, as one of a series of posts honoring ‘banned’ poets)

“On this day in 1922, James Joyce’s fortieth birthday, Ulysses was first published. Joyce was very superstitious, and very apprehensive of a hostile reception for the novel that had been seven years in writing and sixteen years in gestation; he chose the birthday publication for luck.” Today in Literature

“A man who mistook a salami for an automatic pistol triggered a major police operation on Friday in southern Germany, involving 10 police cars and a helicopter.” Yahoo! News

Richard Reeves: “A foolish President brags about assassination: ‘ Oh, you don’t think that happens here? Americans don’t do such things?

If so, then you were not watching and listening carefully to the president last Tuesday night. I literally leaped out of my seat when Bush said this…’ [more]

The Strange and the Beautiful: “It takes a while to figure out why Dr. Mark Mahowald’s grainy sleep-lab videos are so spooky. One immediate reason is the phenomena on the footage — a class of disorders called ”parasomnias,” which are defined as unwanted and involuntary behaviors during sleep and are by definition occult, because they appear when most people are unable to witness them. But even the scientists who stay up late by profession never quite get used to what they see.” NY Times

‘Many of Andy Goldsworthy’s sculptures last only as long as nature allows. A new movie, ‘Rivers and Tides,’ captures his ephemeral efforts.’ Boston Globe I’ve loved Goldsworthy’s work since my time in Scotland years ago. It is time for a broader appreciation…

Light Particles Are Duplicated More Than a Mile Away Along Fiber: ‘Employing a facet of quantum mechanics that Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” scientists have taken particles of light, destroyed them and then resurrected copies more than a mile away.

Previous experiments in so-called quantum teleportation moved particles of light about a yard. The findings could aid the sending of unbreakable coded messages, which is limited to a few tens of miles.

The new experiment used longer wavelengths of light than earlier ones, letting the scientists copy the light through standard glass fiber found in fiber optic cables.’ NY Times

The Tribal Rites of America’s Military Leaders:

‘This Saturday, more than a thousand of America’s top military and government leaders and their guests are scheduled to gather at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., for a secretive tribal rite called the 103rd Annual Wallow of the Military Order of the Carabao. And they won’t be singing “Kumbaya.”

In fact, on what these days feels like the eve of war, nothing says “imperialism” better than the annual Wallow, which celebrates the bloody conquest of the nascent Philippine Republic a century ago in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.’ Village Voice

Teresa Nielson Hayden goes in search of the truth about animal hoarding and writes a post several people have pointed me to. Lay readers will find the phenomenon disturbing and fascinating. As a psychiatrist I see more than my share of these folks coming to the attention of the mental health authorities and hospitalized on my service for being unable to care for themselves. While TNH, too simply, notes that “hoarding used to be thought of as an eccentricity, but more and more it’s being recognized as a social problem–and, more to the point, a form of mental illness”, there are delicate decisions and a complicated evaluative process to be faced in each given case to decide if it is evidence of psychiatric disturbance or merely an eccentricity of which an (often socially isolated) person should not be deprived and for which they should not be penalized with the loss of their autonomy. It may be both; the tolerable quirkiness of the longterm ‘cat lady’ may turn eventually — only in the end — to tragedy for both the animals and their benefactor when she (almost invariably a woman, almost invariably elderly) is disabled by physical or mental illness or inanition and no longer able to care for them. It is psychiatrically trendy to recognize hoarding as a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (don’t forget, OCD is treated by the best-selling serotonin reuptake inhibitor class of antidepressants — Prozac and its cousins — and, if your favorite tool is a hammer, it pays to see everything as if it were a nail) and to lump animal hoarding in with other bizarre and out-of-control collecting pnehomena. This is too simple, however; in cases where animal hoarding is due to an illness, the definitive stroke in the person’s inability to care for herself and her animals is often a dementing process such as Alzheimer’s Disease or a late-life psychotic disorder instead.

One point that has struck me over and over again is how serendipitous it usually is that the squalor and misery in which such a person is living comes to anyone’s attention and provokes an intervention. TNH cites statistics about the estimated prevalence of the problem, but my strong instinct is that the recognized cases represent the tip of the iceberg. As such, they dramatize the epidemic of social neglect of the elderly in our society. I would love to see statistics of the prevalence of animal hoarding in other societies correlated with their community and social welfare infrastructure.

As she concludes her post, which does an impressive job of collecting and presenting what she has gleaned from intelligent googling on the topic, TNH starts to slide down the slippery slope of villifying — or citing sources which villify — the ‘cat ladies’ for their denial and their control motivations. Again, I would emphasize that this is tarring with a broad brush, and it is largely the brush of the animal welfare advocates who share the social prejudices about the odd, the different, the deviant, the offensive. Every case is different; some are harmless eccentrics; most are mentally ill and not in control, and needing help rather than prosecution (although I fully support the interventions of the animal welfare agencies and the health departments which often have to condemn the dwellings in which these unfortunate scenes have played themselves out). Very few are malevolent in their conscious intent.

Abstract:

Much of perception, learning and high-level cognition involves finding patterns in data. But there are always infinitely many patterns compatible with any finite amount of data. How does the cognitive system choose ‘sensible’ patterns? A long tradition in epistemology, philosophy of science, and mathematical and computational theories of learning argues that patterns ‘should’ be chosen according to how simply they explain the data. This article reviews research exploring the idea that simplicity drives a wide range of cognitive processes. We outline mathematical theory, computational results and empirical data that underpin this viewpoint. Trends in Cognitive Science [via BioMedNet]

Tubers, scavenging, and women — “this might have been the winning combination that spurred human evolution about 2 millions years ago, according to a provocative hypothesis by American anthropologists.

Writing in the current issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, University of Utah anthropologist James O’Connell and colleagues challenge the conventional wisdom that meat, brought home by man the hunter and shared out, fueled the rise of early humans.” Discovery

1.618 is the magic number

Think of any two numbers. Make a third by adding the first and second, a fourth by adding the second and third, and so on. When you have written down about 20 numbers, calculate the ratio of the last to the second from last. The answer should be close to 1.6180339887… [Technically, this is the number which is one more than its reciprocal, i.e. the solution to the equation x-1=1/x, which is 1/2(1+sqrt[5]). — FmH]

What’s the significance of this number? It’s the “golden ratio” and, arguably, it crops up in more places in art, music and so on than any number except pi. Claude Debussy used it explicitly in his music and Le Corbusier in his architecture. There are claims the number was used by Leonardo da Vinci in the painting of the Mona Lisa, by the Greeks in building the Parthenon and by ancient Egyptians in the construction of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Guardian UK

Primates found popping prenatal drug: “A Madagascan lemur has been revealed as the first animal known to

self-medicate when pregnant. Female sifaka eat plants rich in poisonous

tannins in the weeks before giving birth, researchers have discovered.

It is unclear why the sifaka does this. In other mammals, small doses of

tannins kill parasites and stimulate milk production. And vets often use

tannins to prevent miscarriage, raising the intriguing possibility that by

eating the plants the sifaka is protecting its developing baby.” New Scientist

“A steady diet of hamburgers, fries and foods high in fat and loaded with calories may not only pile on the pounds — some scientists are questioning whether it could be addictive.

Researchers who have been testing the biological effects of fast foods are discovering that they can trigger hormonal changes in the body which could make it difficult to control eating.” NY Times

“The ultra-modern view of consciousness turns science upside down, writes Colin Tudge in The Guardian: “Is the brain simply a computer, and is consciousness merely the feeling we get when we think? Or is consciousness a primary component of the universe, which the brain can latch on to, like a radio receiver? A definitive answer will always be elusive, but scientists are making intriguing forays into the subject, and if they are not explaining consciousness, they are certainly telling us a great deal about the nature of science.”

Lie Detection: “A new technique which interprets facial gestures has been developed by scientists at Manchester Metropolitan University and could be the most accurate lie detector yet created. ‘Silent Talker’ detects and analyses the thousands of “microgestures” which indicate someone might be telling untruths and which go unnoticed by both trained and untrained professionals.” BBC

“Urging his nation to “see the big picture” and not focus on one issue, British Prime Minister Tony Blair today explained that unflinching support for President George W. Bush is particularly necessary now if Great Britain is ever to become the 51st U.S. state.” BBSpot [via Walker]

Who will build our biodefenses? “Pharmaceutical firms would like to create the drugs needed in the war against terrorism. But governments have yet to make it worth their while.” The Economist

A THOUGHT went up my mind to-day	

That I have had before,	

But did not finish,—some way back,	

I could not fix the year,	

  

Nor where it went, nor why it came

The second time to me,	

Nor definitely what it was,	

Have I the art to say.	

  

But somewhere in my soul, I know	

I ’ve met the thing before;	

It just reminded me—’t was all—	

And came my way no more.



                     — Emily Dickinson

(dedicated to George W. Bush, as one of a series of posts honoring ‘banned’ poets)

Will a war once again bail out a faltering presidency? Or will it crystallize for voters all of the contradictions of the Bush regime? Robert Kuttner: “Bush’s stock was not particularly high on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The economy was wobbly. He had alienated Republican moderates and sacrificed GOP control of the Senate. He was using a tenuous mandate to push radically conservative policies at odds with what most Americans had voted for. Then terrorists struck, and the Bush presidency was transformed.

It has taken 20 months for Bush’s slide to resume, yet he has an uncanny ability to step around blunders and deceptions that would sink an ordinary president. Will he do it again with another national security crisis, this time of his own invention?” The American Prospect

Fred Kaplan: The problem with showing our Iraq evidence at the U.N. : “…U.S. intelligence officers, who are putting up fierce internal resistance to declassifying the Iraqi evidence, probably have good reasons for their dissent.

Their big concern is that the United States will blow a lot of highly sensitive intelligence data—the sort of sources and methods that are rarely even discussed, never deliberately revealed—and the cache still won’t be persuasive enough, especially not to the layman, to justify war.

Nobody on the outside knows exactly what sort of data dump Powell is assembling. But one can make some guesses and extrapolate reasons why the spy agencies might be nervous… Slate

Why recordable DVDs won’t last: “Don’t worry if that Best Buy hawker convinced you to invest in a DVD burner—or, for that matter, a DVD recorder for your TV. The self-burned DVD still has a few years of glory left, and they’re perfect for backing up the files on your computer. But if you’re on a tight budget, and all you really want to do is swap video files with your friends, keep in mind that you likely won’t need a DVD burner to share 2005’s Man vs. Beast IV: Final Confrontation.” Slate

Nationwide Mosquito Alert Forecast Information: “By using local

air temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, and drought/soil

conditions, Skeeterbites.com forecasts mosquito activity throughout the

U.S. The 3-week forecast is updated weekly and predicts your probability of

being bitten.” Courtesy of Cutter®

Lawrence F. Kaplan: “Bush gambled that inspections would make it easier to go to war. He gambled wrong.” The New Republic This is essentially an elaboration on the point I made here the other day — if we know better than the inspectors how much Iraq is supposedly concealing, then why insist on the inspection process. Bush is caught in a trap of his own devising. Actually, it may be symptomatic of the fundamental divisions inside the dysadministration between the more diplomatic and the more rabid.

So how does the administration get out of the inspections trap? One way would be to orchestrate an “Adlai Stevenson” moment in which the Bush team unveils a smoking gun– a la Stevenson’s presentation to the United Nations 40 years ago of photographs showing missiles in Cuba. The problem is, the administration has no smoking gun. What it has instead, according to senior administration officials, is a collection of guns that smell vaguely smoky, which a task force under deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley is busily sifting through–photographs of activity around suspected weapons sites, evidence of Iraqi attempts to conceal items before the arrival of weapons inspectors, and communications intercepts. Powell plans to present this evidence to the United Nations on February 5. But State Department and Pentagon officials remain far from certain that even a dramatic presentation will change many minds overseas, where any evidence that bolsters America’s case tends to be viewed as suspect.

Option number two is to hope that the French and others will abandon their opposition on the eve of war, when the prospect of an Iraq closed to French business looms more immediately. If even this fails to budge the Europeans, the argument goes, then surely images of liberated Iraqis rejoicing in the streets will. If all this seems like wishful thinking, well, this is where the inspections route has gotten the administration. Its members were right the first time around: The inspections process was bound to be a sham. But so was their effort to pretend it was anything else.

White House Cancels Poetry Symposium:

“Two former U.S. poet laureates criticized the White House on Thursday for postponing a literary symposium it believed would be politicized. Stanley Kunitz and Rita Dove characterized the decision as an example of the Bush administration’s hostility to dissenting or creative voices.

The Feb. 12 symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice” was to have featured the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. The postponement was announced Wednesday and no future date has been set for the event, to be held by first lady Laura Bush.” Austin American-Statesman

I propose that like-minded webloggers (close kin to poets in sensibilities…) enact their scorn for the Administration’s fear of free speech and honor the memories of Whitman, Dickinson and Hughes by featuring their poetry prominently in the days between now and Feb. 12th.

“Windows that double as television screens, computer monitors or stereo systems are being unveiled today, on the first day of the International Builders’ Show in Las Vegas, by Andersen Corp., the country’s largest window manufacturer.” Washington Post

‘Self-organizing wireless-sensor networks, a realization of the Pentagon’s “smart-dust” concept, have reached the prototype stage worldwide. The smart sensors, or Motes, were created by the University of California at Berkeley and Intel, and are being tested out worldwide today…

Researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) proposed the smart-dust concept four years ago. The idea was to sprinkle thousands of tiny wireless sensors on a battlefield to monitor enemy movements without alerting the enemy to their presence. By self-organizing into a sensor network, smart dust would filter raw data for relevance before relaying only the important findings to central command.’ EE Times