Already-at-War Dept: US operatives are said to be active in Iraq.

About 100 US Special Forces members and more than 50 Central Intelligence Agency officers have been operating in small groups inside Iraq for at least four months, searching for Scud missile launchers, monitoring oil fields, marking minefield sites, and using lasers to help US pilots bomb Iraqi air-defense systems, according to intelligence officials and military analysts who have talked with people on the teams.

The operations, which also have included small numbers of Jordanian, British, and Australian commandos, are considered by many analysts to be part of the opening phase of a war against Iraq, even though the Bush administration has agreed to a schedule of UN weapons inspections. Boston Globe

Clifford Pickover’s ESP Experiment. This has been around the web for a long while but has begun to attract attention. See how long it takes you to figure out how it is done.

365 days:

For the entire year of 2003 (January 1st to December 31st) this page will feature one mp3 file (every day) to download. The content will be focused on musical pieces, but will also include spoken word. Listeners of the incredibly strange and outsider realm take note, for this is the majority of material that will be made available. Obscure and out-of-print recordings will be the primary focus, although once in a while there may be a change.

Alan Alda (“I’m not a scientist but I do play one on TV”) takes on President Bush on the issue of his national science advisor.

Above, all, Mr. President, I think your science advisor needs to help you help our country learn to be comfortable with uncertainty, and—as hard as this might be to believe—to put reason ahead of belief.

• College Dumps Body Parts with Construction Waste
  
• Man Who Nearly Lost Hand Vanishes
  
• Artist Defends Baby-Eating
  
• Human Foot Found in Laundry
  

— and scary

Nick Imearato, a research fellow at the Hoover Institute, said he expects the federal government to require cameras be placed every 400 feet or so in airports to monitor all aspects of airport security, from cargo areas to boarding areas. Over time, as the technology gets cheaper, he said, “This will migrate to millions of businesses and even homes.”

Such constant surveillance, even in the name of homeland security, scares civil libertarians, who feel it amounts to an illegal search of everyone who passes within view of a camera. San Jose Mercury News

Penn Jillette has an encounter with airline security that is a neat complement to, although has a very different outcome than, last week’s story by an LA writer about the treatment he and his pregnant wife received. Doesn’t hurt to be a celebrity, although Jillette’s head seems in the right place about it.

I kept saying, “Please get the police,” and they kept saying, “You’re free to go, we don’t need the police.” I insisted and they got a higher up, female, supervisor. I was polite, cold, and a little funny. “Anyone is welcome to grab my crotch, I don’t require dinner and a movie, just ask me. Is that asking too much? You wanna grab my crotch, please ask. Does that seem like a crazy person to you?” I had about 4 of them standing around. Finally Metro PD shows up. It’s really interesting. First of all, the cop is a BIG P&T fan and that ain’t hurting. Second, I get the vibe that he is WAY sick of these federal leather-sniffers. He has that vibe that real cops have toward renta-cops. This is working WAY to my advantage, so I play it.

The supervisor says to the cop, ‘He’s free to go. We have no problem, you don’t have to be here.” Which shows me that the Feds are afraid of local. This is really cool. She says, “We have no trouble and he doesn’t want to miss his flight.”

I say, “I can take an early morning flight or a private jet. ” The cop says, “If I have a citizen who is saying he was assaulted, you can’t just send me away.”

Declan McCullagh on what surveillance technology will be like in a decade: “…(T)he biggest problem with the criticism of the Total Information Awareness system is that it’s too shortsighted. It’s focused on what the Poindexters of the world can do with current database and information-mining technology. That includes weaving together strands of data from various sources–such as travel, credit card, bank, electronic toll and driver’s license databases–with the stated purpose of identifying terrorists before they strike.

But what could Poindexter and the Bush administration devise in five or 10 years, if they had the money, the power and the will?” CNET

Search for Bigfoot Outlives the Man Who Created Him

“This wasn’t a well-planned plot or anything,” said Michael Wallace, one of Ray’s sons. “It’s weird because it was just a joke, and then it took on such a life of its own that even now, we can’t stop it.”

Bigfoot defenders, including at least two scientists and a clinical psychologist who says he ran into the Big Guy two years ago in southern Oregon, are undeterred.

They give Mr. Wallace credit for the hoax, which led to news stories around the world and began thousands of campfire debates. But, they say, other evidence is too strong to let a prank kill something that has become ingrained in the culture. NY Times

“The primary goal is not so much to obtain treatment for people who might still be sick more than a year after the attack, health officials say, but rather to interview people to get a broader picture of who was affected and to look for patterns in illness and recovery that individual physicians and clinics might have missed. The power, registry planners say, will be in the numbers.” NY Times

The evidence is massive,” said Gavin Menzies of his new theory. ”I’ve got it coming out of my eyes!” His voice was filled with excitement, just as you’d expect from someone propounding one of the most revolutionary ideas in the history of history. A retired navy man with white hair, Menzies still has a hint of red in the eyebrows that frame his ocean-blue eyes. Dressed in a handsome sports jacket and tie, he cheerfully invited me into his stately Georgian house in the Canonbury section of London. What he had to say, his publicists had warned me in breathless e-mail messages, would make ”every history book in print obsolete.” NY Times

Hunting skills may not after all have triggered the tremendous burst of human evolution at the beginning of the ice ages nearly two million years ago. Instead of man the hunter, the driving force behind this evolutionary surge may have been woman the gatherer, with both mother and grandmother playing a vital role. New Scientist

If one man sits at the nuclear fulcrum of the three countries President Bush calls the “axis of evil,” it may well be Abdul Qadeer Khan.

The 66-year-old metallurgist is considered the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb. He is a national hero at home, where hospitals bear his name and children sing his praises. U.S. and other Western officials do not. They say Khan is the only scientist known to be linked to the alleged efforts of North Korea, Iraq and Iran to develop nuclear weapons. LA Times

‘Allies, not Lickspittles’

History suggests caution. Not only is the majority razor-thin, but senators are a fiercely independent lot, often reluctant to do their president’s bidding. Bill Clinton, for instance, had a rocky ride with a Democrat-controlled Congress between 1992 and 1994, famously failing to persuade lawmakers to pass his ambitious healthcare plan. Nonetheless, Mr Bush has several big advantages. First, many Republican lawmakers are all too aware that they owe their jobs to the president’s popularity and his prodigious campaigning before November’s election. Equally important, Bill Frist, the Senate’s new majority leader (and hence top agenda-setter), is a certified Friend of George. The Economist

Well, only the Statue of Liberty so far, but they have ambitious plans. CNN

Several months ago I blinked to a piece about efforts to reconstruct the Buddhas of Bamiyan from digital data.

50 art events not to miss in 2003. [Although the verbiage has shades of “must-see tee-vee”, a phrase I disliked even before it made this year’s list of banned clichés, the list is worth your attention. — FmH] Guardian UK

In the most recent issue of the Proceedings of the Archivist of the United States, a crack team of historians lead by Harvard Professor Emeritus Ruth Ascidy announced the conclusion of a sixteen year study of the 43rd U.S. President during which the team determined “to a degree approaching absolute historical certainty” that “the 43rd President of the United States was not, as supposed by some popular conspiracy theories, George W. Bush.”

The study, commissioned jointly by the Office of the Archivist and the Smithsonian Institute’s Committee on Special Inquiries, aims to put to rest decades of speculation about the actual identity of the 43rd President. “Gore’s presidency has been a hotly disputed issue in the popular media,” explains Professor Ascidy. “And, though theories claiming a Bush presidency have not been taken seriously among academic historians, the Committee felt that the ‘Bush question’ should be put to rest once and for all.” futurefeedforward

In the most recent issue of the Proceedings of the Archivist of the United States, a crack team of historians lead by Harvard Professor Emeritus Ruth Ascidy announced the conclusion of a sixteen year study of the 43rd U.S. President during which the team determined “to a degree approaching absolute historical certainty” that “the 43rd President of the United States was not, as supposed by some popular conspiracy theories, George W. Bush.”

The study, commissioned jointly by the Office of the Archivist and the Smithsonian Institute’s Committee on Special Inquiries, aims to put to rest decades of speculation about the actual identity of the 43rd President. “Gore’s presidency has been a hotly disputed issue in the popular media,” explains Professor Ascidy. “And, though theories claiming a Bush presidency have not been taken seriously among academic historians, the Committee felt that the ‘Bush question’ should be put to rest once and for all.” futurefeedforward

“is to be released next February, on what would have been his 60th birthday.

The collection of Harrison and Beatles covers is being recorded under the title ‘Songs From The Material World’ and is due for release on February 25.

Dave Davies from The Kinks and Roger McGuinn of The Byrds will feature on the record alongside the likes of Julian Lennon and Fleetwood Mac legend Peter Green.

Todd Rundgren, Donovan, the MC5’s Wayne Kramer and Midge Ure are also scheduled to record for the album, while a cover of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is expected to feature an ‘all-star’ line-up.” dotmusic

“When Susan Clancy, a psychologist at Harvard University, wanted to study people with memories of events that had never happened, she cast her net wide.

Psychonarratology : Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response: “The field of psychonarratology represents an interdisciplinary collaboration between cognitive psychology and discourse processing, and narratology and literary studies. This work provides a broad, integrative framework for pursuing research that is approachable by researchers from both disciplinary backgrounds. Marina Bortolussi and Peter Dixon survey the important problems in literary studies and demonstrate how the methodological and empirical tools of cognitive psychology are applied in this new approach.” amazon.com

“Don’t look, but today the Sun is a little bigger than usual. That’s because Earth is “at perihelion” on January 4th. What is perihelion? Our planet’s orbit is not a perfect circle, it is an ellipse. Our distance from the Sun therefore varies throughout the year; perihelion is our closest approach to the Sun.” SpaceWeather

You and i Do. Prof. Joseph Turow, form the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, wants ‘internet’ uncapitalized (and wants the internet “de-capitalized”…). “Capitalization irked him because, he said, it seemed to imply that reaching into the vast, interconnected ether was a brand-name experience… The capitalization of things seems to place an inordinate, almost private emphasis on something.” While Mr. Turow’s editor at the MIT Press agreed, the New York Times swallows hard and holds down the fort for at least a little while longer:

Allan M. Siegal, a co-author of The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage and an assistant managing editor at the newspaper, said that “there is some virtue in the theory” that Internet is becoming a generic term, “and it would not be surprising to see the lowercase usage eclipse the uppercase within a few years.”

Nominations are now being accepted for the Third Annual Weblog Awards.

“Federal and state Justice Department officials are aggressively pursuing an antitrust investigation of New Times Corp., owner of the SF Weekly and the East Bay Express, and Village Voice Media and are looking into whether the two alternative newspaper chains are cutting back on news coverage.” Essentially, the two companies may have acted in restraint of trade in a ‘horse trade’ in which each of them agreed to shut down one of its papers in a city where the other one had a competing paper. The Justice Dept. is oh-so-concerned about the cutback in “hard-hitting news coverage and analysis” that occurs when competition is killed in this fashion. It certainly does seem that the alternative weeklies are “moving farther away from their progressive, grassroots origins and acting more like the gargantuan daily newspaper conglomerates they were meant to provide an alternative to”, as this SF Bay Guardian piece opines (although, as an aside, it ought to be “conglomerates to which they were meant to provide an alternative”, not to be pedantic or anything…). However, can’t you just see Ashcroft and his minions salivating at the chance to go after the Village Voice while ignoring the far more egregious control of the information flow practiced by the media giants?

… and gets a $28 ticket. The Seattle Times

The technological predictions in The Guardian‘s Survival guide to 2003 are pretty — what else? — predictable: Bluetooth, increasing broadband penetration, WiFi, home networking, 3G mobile phones, Doom III and Xbox, blah blah blah… But there’s an interesting notion which I hadn’t considered before, of the weblog phenomenon as the new usenet.

Usenet newsgroups were rendered worse than useless by wayward discussion and wall-to-wall spam. Now, according to some web theorists, blogs are bringing back the newsgroup idea, albeit by the backdoor. The idea is that, on blogs that let readers discuss links and find out where similar ideas are being discussed elsewhere on the web, we’re seeing the rise of a kind of twenty first century Usenet – more focused, more responsive, more integrated into the rest of the online world.

There’s something enticing about the prospect, for those of us who have been online long enough to have been usenet newsgroup fanatics before the rise of other aspects of the net. But I’m not sure I see the convergence, and I’m not sure I would welcome it either. Classically, blogs continue to adhere to a one-to-many, or few-to-many, format. Although there may be reader comments and interactivity, they are not the point of most blogs (Slashdot and MeFi apart). What commands one’s loyalty for a particular weblog is its distinctive, opinionated and often idiosyncratic auteur. Arguably, a blog that became a newsgroup would in important senses no longer be a blog anymore, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein. Maybe we’ll see the rise of such a post-newsgroup phenomenon, but I hope it would not replace currently-configured weblogging. And why would the low signal-to-noise ratio in such a public discussion blogosphere not make it a ‘twenty first century Uselessnet’ with similar ‘wayward discussion and wall-to-wall spam’? Finally, could someone explain to me exactly how these beasts would be ‘more focused, more responsive, more integrated into the rest of the online world’ than the Usenet newsgroups were or are?

The other piece of welcome prophecy in The Guardian essay is that of the imminent return of William Gibson:

The most influential SF writer of the last two decades, his ideas have come to change the way we think about computers and networks. But William Gibson has always been unhappy with the future visionary tag. SF is actually about the present has been his mantra. Pattern Recognition, his new novel (his first for three years) does something he’s always threatened. It’s set in the present, not the future, in London, and follows a trend-watching heroine who’s over-sensitive to corporate logos and obsessed with tracking a “garage Kubrick” who is releasing fragments of an art film on to the net. It’s published here by Penguin in April.

Wired News put out a call to readers for the technological wonders they most looked forward to in 2002 but never saw because developers delayed release or, in some cases, abandoned them altogether. Then we tabulated nominations and selected the top 10 — or should we say bottom 10? — most-waited-for-in-vain products.

For the first time, there were quite a few winners that also made last year’s list. In the fast-moving world of technology, it’s unusual for products to be hung up long enough to qualify two years in a row, but a number of hard-working companies heroically managed it.

Interesting front in the battle for hearts and minds. Sen. Frist, new majority leader and former surgeon, assisted at the scene of a rollover accident on a Florida highway where two of six passengers died. ‘The Democratic Underground’ and the warbloggers, among others, are lining up with their take on the incident. Is Frist to be demonized and ridiculed, or lauded for his involvement? Last time I was so entertained by the political haymakers was Paul Wellstone’s funereal spectacle.

“Ticket stubs are everywhere, one of the many receipts in our daily lives – but we all save some from time to time. The Ticketstub project is a place where you can upload scanned images of your saved stubs, and tell a story about that night, that concert, that movie, what happened on that date; basically, ask youself why you saved the stub as a reminder.”

Dan Hartung at lake effect describes hashing, which is new to me but, I agree with Dan, sounds like it would be wicked fun for the right people. “Hashers play a modified game of the schoolboy game Hares and Hounds, basically hide and seek in reverse. The game involves people who lay out a trail, hares, and hounds who follow the trail. Usually it’s chalk, but flour may also be used. The main modification is that hashers (optionally) drink, before, during, and often after a run, turning them into what they call “a drinking club with a running problem”. Hashers tend to call each other by rude and sometimes obscene nicknames. The Chicago club has been featured on Wild Chicago, and I’ve always been curious — it looks like a fun crowd.” As he points out, here’s a Washington Post article about the phenomenon.

Lee Felsenstein’s Jhai Computer, which the New York Times named one of the best ideas of 2002, is attracting alot of thoughtful attention from estimable webloggers like Danny O’Brien and Rafe Colburn, who takes the occasion to dismiss the uselessness of dismissive Slashdot readers’ comments. The Jhai Foundation‘s (“Reconciliation is the opposite of war”) project needs contributions, and this seems like a worthy meme to spread.

Robert Malley, Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group and special assistant to President Bill Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs from 1998 to 2001: “The responsibility today, especially for those who wish to oppose a conflict, is to think about what will happen if war is avoided.” NY Times op-ed

Paul Krugman: “What Game Does the Nation Think It’s Playing in Korea? The Bush administration’s Korea policy has systematically violated the simple principle that deterrence requires a credible commitment to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior.” NY Times op-ed

New Year’s must’ve made me and at least one of my readers nostalgic for the FmH ver. 1.0 header. Do you welcome it or is it a step backward?

Try sleeping those pounds off.‘

That advice may sound like it comes from a bad infomercial, but recent research suggests chronic sleep deprivation can affect the body’s metabolism, which, in turn, directly affects your ability to shed those extra pounds.

Sleep deprivation is becoming an American phenomenon. The National Sleep Foundation’s 2002 “Sleep in America” poll found that Americans are chronically behind in their slumber hours, with only 30 percent of adults getting eight or more hours of sleep on weeknights and only 52 percent getting their eight hours on weekends.

Many Americans may also suffer from one or more sleep disorders. The same poll found that 74 percent of respondents experienced at least one symptom of a sleep disorder a few nights per week or more. Fifty-eight percent reported experiencing at least one sign of insomnia a few nights a week.

Could this be why one source says 90 percent of Americans fail to achieve their New Year’s resolutions?

Increasingly, science is suggesting the answer is “yes.” HealthScoutNews

‘Overused cliches, wordy redundancies and hyperbolic phrases — including the Bushism “make no mistake about it” — were declared banished on Wednesday by the university overseers of an annual list of banned words.’ Reuters puts this in their ‘Oddly Enough’ category, but [wouldn’t you expect FmH to say so?] it doesn’t seem at all odd to me… Here’s the actual list.

“As Britain struggles with the issue of the euro, the Germans and Dutch want their own currencies back… Citizens of the euro zone had no vote specifically on the change, and now 57 percent of Germans and 55 percent of the Dutch are keen to see the return of the Deutsche mark and Netherlands guilder, according to a survey by European Internet company Tiscali.” CNN

Nick Hornby reviews six graphic novels for The New York Times.

Risks of neuroacoustically data-reduced music: “Unlike with compression and decompression of computer programs (e.g. ZIP), that is to say, during lossy data compression (data reduction) the original signal is not reconstructed 1:1, but to reduce the data amount, only control signals for a synthesizer programs (called CODEC) get recorded, those are optimized in a way that during rendition the CODEC can reconstruct from these an approximation of the original picture or sound signal that appears as similar as possible for the human conscious perception, but is not identical to the original signal. The danger of this exploitation of human perception flaws is that especially by lossy audio data compression sound portions get destroyed those, although the brain would not pass them to the conscious awareness, are likely necessary for the human hearing’s own perpetual calibration.” Does anyone who knows anything about this kind of stuff think this is plausible? [via the null device]

<input type=”image” src=”http://drunkmenworkhere.org/189.php?image=1&#8243; id=”risk” alt=”click for World Domination [TM]”

onclick=”setTimeout(‘document.getElementById(\’risk\’).src=\’http://drunkmenworkhere.org/188a.php?image=\’+Math.random();’,1000);return true;”>

“Every visitor who clicks on (this) image … will conquer a piece of land (2° by 2°) for (FmH).

All territory (my) site has conquered is in the same colour on the world map.

The amount of land (FmH) has conquered determines the position of (my) site in the high score list.”

W. Va. Doctors Strike Over Insurance: “Surgeons at four hospitals began a strike Wednesday to protest malpractice insurance costs, and most operations in northern West Virginia were canceled or were being moved. In Pennsylvania, a similar walkout was averted.” Yahoo! News Years ago, the hospital where I did my psychiatric residency was one of only two of which we were aware where the house officers (interns and residents) had a collective bargaining unit. I could not have foreseen then that doctors everywhere would grow to feel as much powerless cogs in the medical machine as house officers did then. I recalled our ‘house officers’ association’ only recently as the evident discontent of my colleagues has grown and just recently had a conversation with a labor lawyer speculating about whether we would see efforts to unionize doctors. Lo and behold. As a purist and a moralist, however, the concept of a strike seems inimical to my idea of why people should go into medicine.

And, while we’re in the First-Do-No-Harm-Hah! Dept, “The state (of Massachusetts) will stop paying for artificial limbs, dentures, and eyeglasses for nearly half a million residents today in the most far-reaching reduction in medical care for the poor in more than a decade.” Boston Globe

Bush cites diplomatic path with Pyongyang. The striking part of the news conference is this outburst: ”You said we’re headed to war in Iraq,” Bush said. ”I don’t know why you say that. I hope we’re not headed to war in Iraq. I’m the person who gets to decide, not you.” Is this a lying fool, or what? Boston Globe The same puzzlement is on everybody’s lips in attempting to follow Bush’s logic. Iraq may have WMD and is not meeting our expectations for cooperation with the international arms inspection process. They have openly flouted international law. So we have to deploy force and threaten invasion and regime change to show ’em who’s boss. North Korea has WMD, has rejected monitoring, is announcing its intention to openly defy the US, and for Bush this clearly calls for diplomatic rather than military engagement. Oh, and if you don’t get the distinction, Iraq represents a threat to the US and the world economy

Yahoo! News whereas North Korea does not. Oh, and both are charter members of the AoI® (Axis-o’-Evil). Now I get it…

Related [thanks to Walker]: William Rivers Pitt, author of War On Iraq (with Scott Ritter) and The Greatest Sedition is Silence, available in May 2003, a high school teacher in Boston, MA., editorializes:

The Dead Remember: This country is headed to war with a nation we armed in the first place for a tidy corporate profit, despite the fact that there is no evidence that nation is a threat anymore. Beyond the tens of thousands of civilian deaths this war will bring to the people of Iraq, beyond the potential for hundreds or thousands of American casualties, beyond the vastly increased threat of stateside terrorism this will cause, yet another tidy corporate profit will be made. Simultaneously, corporations and our government collude to keep average Americans from being able to call to account those who poisoned children during 40 years of profitable manufacture of what appears to have been a neurological poison.

2001 was an abominable year, to say the least. 2002 was not much better. As we stride towards the brave new year 2003, a moment of pause should be taken. Is this the country you want? Is this the government you want? Is this the world you wish to leave for your children?

The New Year is meant for resolutions. Consider yours carefully, and keep it after you make it. truthout

U.S. Says Pakistani Guard Shot Soldier in Afghanistan

An American soldier wounded in the head during a border patrol on Sunday was shot by a Pakistan border guard, and the United States responded by calling in a coalition plane that bombed the area, the United States military said today.

The Pakistani guard was part of a unit cooperating with American forces on border control. It was not clear why he opened fire, but it appears he strayed over the border into Afghanistan.

When the American patrol ordered him to move back into Pakistan, he retreated with several others to the cover of a building and opened fire, grazing the American soldier’s head, said a statement from the press center at the United States air base at Bagram, north of Kabul.

The American patrol called in air cover after the shooting, and a coalition plane dropped a 500-pound bomb on the area, according to the statement. NY Times

Another example of striking ineptitude — on someone or other’s part — in the WoT®. Not clear from this depiction if the Pakistanis fired because they were miffed at being ordered to retreat by US forces, or mistaking the identities of the Americans as hostiles, or whether they were really ‘cooperating’ with American forces at all. Both US and Pakistani sources say no, but are the hearts of at least some of the Pakistani security forces with the Taliban? And what’s up with responding with a bombing run? At least two Pakistanis were killed, it is said…

(All Together Now: In Moderation!): “Many drugs can save your life or kill you, depending on how much of them you take. Only one comes on the rocks with a twist, in a chilled mug with a foamy head, or in a goblet with lingering overtones of raspberry and oak.

Alcohol has become the sharpest double-edged sword in medicine.

Thirty years of research has convinced many experts of the health benefits of moderate drinking for some people. A drink or two a day of wine, beer or liquor is, experts say, often the single best nonprescription way to prevent heart attacks…” NY Times

Equality, It Seems, Is Relative

In science, no truth is forever, not even perhaps Einstein’s theory of relativity, the pillar of modernity that gave us E=mc2.

As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in particular the speed of light — 186,000 miles per second — are the same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving.

Generations of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical consequences of Einstein’s deceptively simple notion, which underlies all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes using the word “relative.”

Guided by ambiguous signals from the heavens, and by the beauty of their equations, a few brave — or perhaps foolhardy — physicists now say that relativity may have limits and will someday have to be revised.

Some suggest, for example, the rate of the passage of time could depend on a clock’s orientation in space, an effect that physicists hope to test on the space station. Or the speed of a light wave could depend slightly on its color, an effect, astronomers say, that could be detected by future observations of gamma ray bursters, enormous explosions on the far side of the universe. NY Times

Temperatures Are Likely to Go From Warm to Warmer: “Climate experts say global temperatures in 2003 could match or beat the modern record set in 1998, when temperatures were raised sharply by El Niño, a periodic disturbance of Pacific Ocean currents that warms the atmosphere.” NY Times

Rafe at rc3 comments:

How bad is the current state of US foreign relations? Let’s take a step back and look at the big picture. Before Bush was elected, who would have guessed that at the end of 2002, Germany would have sided with Iraq against the United States, and that South Korea would side with North Korea against the United States? To be honest, I would have considered those things outside the realm of possibility. Relations between Israel and the Palestinians are as bad as they have been since the start of the intifada. Islamist parties are gaining ground all over the world, despite our concerted efforts over the past year to deter Islamism wherever we can. It’s a given that the Bush administration has done a poor job domestically, the counter argument is that events have demanded he focus on foreign policy. Ironic that we’re perhaps doing even worse on that front. I expect that countries like France, Russia, and China would oppose the US agenda as a matter of course — not so with countries like Germany, South Korea, and Turkey.

While I love as much as anyone to drip with contempt for the Bush dysadministration, the point is not just the craven ineptitude in the management of our foreign policies. While conflicts in the non-Western world are ramping down, the dysadministration’s mismanagement — provoking North Korea, dismantling the fragile stability of arms control accords, paradoxical encouragement of virulent Islamic fundamentalism, and utter disregard for the multilateral foundations of security and stability — is singularly responsible for making this a much much more perilous planet on which to live, endangering my life and, more important, those of my children…

This is a reprise and an amplification of a New Year’s Day post from FmH in years past:

Years ago, the Boston Globe ran a January 1st article compiling folkloric beliefs about what to do, what to eat, etc. on New Year’s Day to bring good fortune for the year to come. I’ve regretted since — I usually think of it around once a year (grin) — not clipping out and saving the article; especially since we’ve had children, I’m interested in enduring traditions that go beyond getting drunk [although some comment that this is a profound enactment of the interdigitation of chaos and order appropriate to the New Year’s celebration — FmH], watching the bowl games and making resolutions. A web search brought me this, less elaborate than what I recall from the Globe but to the same point:

“Traditionally, it was thought that one could affect the luck they would have throughout the coming year by what they did or ate on the first day of the year. For that reason, it has become common for folks to celebrate the first few minutes of a brand new year in the company of family and friends. Parties often last into the middle of the night after the ringing in of a new year. It was once believed that the first visitor on New Year’s Day would bring either good luck or bad luck the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor happened to be a tall dark-haired man.

“Traditional New Year foods are also thought to bring luck. Many cultures believe that anything in the shape of a ring is good luck, because it symbolizes “coming full circle,” completing a year’s cycle. For that reason, the Dutch believe that eating donuts on New Year’s Day will bring good fortune.

“Many parts of the U.S. celebrate the new year by consuming black-eyed peas. These legumes are typically accompanied by either hog jowls or ham. Black-eyed peas and other legumes have been considered good luck in many cultures. The hog, and thus its meat, is considered lucky because it symbolizes prosperity. Cabbage is another ‘good luck’ vegetable that is consumed on New Year’s Day by many. Cabbage leaves are also considered a sign of prosperity, being representative of paper currency. In some regions, rice is a lucky food that is eaten on New Year’s Day.”

The further north one travels in the British Isles, the more the year-end festivities focus on New Year’s. The Scottish observance of Hogmanay has many elements of warming heart and hearth, welcoming strangers and making a good beginning:

“Three cornered biscuits called hogmanays are eaten. Other special foods are: wine, ginger cordial, cheese, bread, shortbread, oatcake, carol or carl cake, currant loaf, and a pastry called scones. After sunset people collect juniper and water to purify the home. Divining rituals are done according to the directions of the winds, which are assigned their own colors. First Footing:The first person who comes to the door on midnight New Year’s Eve should be a dark-haired or dark-complected man with gifts for luck. Seeing a cat, dog, woman, red-head or beggar is unlucky. The person brings a gift (handsel) of coal or whiskey to ensure prosperity in the New Year. Mummer’s Plays are also performed. The actors called the White Boys of Yule are all dressed in white, except for one dressed as the devil in black. It is bad luck to engage in marriage proposals, break glass, spin flax, sweep or carry out rubbish on New Year’s Eve.”

Here’s why we clink our glasses when we drink our New Year’s toasts, no matter where we are. Of course, sometimes the midnight cacophony is louder than just clinking glassware, to create a ‘devil-chasing din’.

In Georgia, eat black eyed peas and turnip greens on New Year’s Day for luck and prosperity in the year to come, supposedly because they symbolize coppers and currency. Hoppin’ John, a concoction of peas, onion, bacon and rice, is also a southern New Year’s tradition, as is wearing yellow to find true love (in Peru, yellow underwear, apparently!) or carrying silver for prosperity. In some instances, a dollar bill is thrown in with the other ingredients of the New Year’s meal to bring prosperity. A similar New Year’s meal in Norway also includes dried cod, “lutefisk.” The Pennsylvania Dutch make sure to include sauerkraut in their holiday meal, also for prosperity.

In Spain, you would cram twelve grapes in your mouth at midnight, one each time the clock chimed, for good luck for the twelve months to come. The U. S. version of this custom, for some reason, involves standing on a chair as you pop the grapes. In Denmark, jumping off a chair at the stroke of midnight signifies leaping into the New Year. In Rio, you would be plunging into the sea en masse at midnight, wearing white and bearing offerings.

In China, papercuttings of red paper are hung in the windows to scare away evil spirits who might enter the house and bring misfortune.

Elsewhere: pancakes for the New Year’s breakfast in France; banging on friends’ doors in Denmark to “smash in” the New Year; going in the front door and out the back door at midnight in Ireland; making sure the first person through your door in the New Year in Scotland is a tall dark haired visitor. Water out the window at midnight in Puerto Rico rids the home of evil spirits. Cleanse your soul in Japan at the New Year by listening to a gong tolling 108 times, one for every sin. It is Swiss good luck to let a drop of cream fall on the floor on New Year’s Day.

However you’re going to celebrate, my warmest wishes for the year to come!

Born to Be Happy, Through a Twist of Human Hard Wire:

In the course of the last year, the woman lost her husband to cancer and then her job. But she did not come to my office as a patient; she sought advice about her teenage son who was having trouble dealing with his father’s death.

Despite crushing loss and stress, she was not at all depressed— sad, yes, but still upbeat. I found myself stunned by her resilience. What accounted for her ability to weather such sorrow with buoyant optimism? NY Times

Will the world’s population plummet in the next century? Boston Globe

The Mind Explains It All

One afternoon in my psychiatric practice, I saw two patients suffering from depression in back-to-back sessions.

Each had classic symptoms, including what is called diurnal variation of mood: depressed patients typically feel worse in the morning and get better toward evening. The pattern is believed to be caused by the daily fluctuations of hormones and neurotransmitters.

This theory was not, however, how my patients understood their symptoms. The first patient explained that he felt bad during the day because of work pressures, and he improved in the evening because he was alone and could relax. The second patient, a musician, said her solitary days made her depressed; it was only when she arrived at work in the evenings and was around people that she felt like herself.

I suspect that the two patients’ reasoning reflects a phenomenon that crops up constantly in therapy: the post hoc “explanation” of feelings and behaviors. Patients attribute their symptoms to specific life events — an approach that appears to make sense.

But this drive to come up with the causes of events is hardly limited to therapy patients. Neurophysiologists discovered the same phenomenon in a radically different context. While mapping the brain, they were amazed to find that when the area responsible for an emotion was electronically stimulated, subjects experienced the mechanically induced feeling, then instantly came up with reasons for their responses. NY Times

The Fusor.net Newbie Center

Pictured above is Philo T. Farnsworth. On the left is the difficult thing that he invented in the 1920s. You are probably familiar with it. It’s called “television.”

On the right is the “impossible” thing that he invented in the 1950s.. You are probably less familiar with it. In fact you are probably not familiar with it all, because the device was never perfected nor made practical. At least, not yet. Indeed, the impossible takes slightly longer. In this case, about 40 years longer…

The device is a nuclear fusion reactor. [via slashdot]

Bubbly Threat to Spain’s Rare Lynxes:

“Cracking open the New Year bubbly could contribute to the first feline extinction since the prehistoric Saber-tooth tiger, wildlife campaigners said on Friday.

Lynxes in Spain and Portugal are becoming critically endangered as their cork-forest habitat dwindles.

With demand waning for traditional corks in favor of synthetic stoppers in wine and champagne, farmers are felling the cork forests to make way for more profitable crops and the pointy-eared Iberian lynx could become one of the casualties.” Reuters

“Saddam Hussein doesn’t need his people’s love to command their loyalty, Iraqis contend, saying the U.S. faces a populace primed to fight back.” LA Times

So bOing bOing mentions a weblog I’d never heard of called Silflay Hraka, of all things. It didn’t reallly captivate me but I became curious about the name. Turns out it is an epithet in the rabbit language of Watership Down, which I had never read. Here is a glossary, in case someone swears at you in a gutteral, otherwise unintelligible tongue and you’re interested in the derivation.

In the grand tradition of year-end reviews — The Good, The Bad, The Worst:

“As years go, they don’t get much worse than 2002. The year’s main saving grace – that we haven’t yet invaded Iraq – suggests that, believe it or not, 2003 could be even worse.

A year that came on the heels of 9/11 was probably doomed from the start. Yet the ongoing War on Terrorism that most characterizes our times has cast a muddy shadow on public life that hints of the paranoia and knee-jerk nationalism of the 1950s.

Although we have experienced no acts of domestic terrorism in the 15 months since the Sept. 11 attacks, our country is becoming increasingly unrecognizable – constricted by fear, hysteria, xenophobic intolerance and a whole new set of laws and government intrusions that most of us couldn’t have imagined in the relatively rosy days of pre-9/11…” — Don Hazen, AlterNet

And:

Happy New Fear: “…(I)t’s been another bumper year for half-baked scares and misinformed hysterias.

Like White Christmas and Auld Lang Syne, some are timeless classics. So, we’ve seen further alarms this year about the contraceptive pill, pesticide residues on our food and the drug ecstasy. Mobile phones continue to fry our brains, apparently, if they’re not causing us to crash our cars. Passive smoking and air pollution are giving us lung cancer, so we’re told. If global warming doesn’t get us, a ‘global killer’ asteroid will….” [more] sp!ked

…So Few Hacks: “Hole after hole, breach after breach, flaw after flaw is found — and most of the time, it’s in a Windows system. Yet hackers generally don’t exploit them. Why is that?” Wired

Wired reports number portability is finally coming to cellular customers in November 2003. Cellular providers have resisted this for a long time for obvious reasons — both the cost of providing this service and the fact that their customers would no longer be hostages to their lousy service. After Sprint complained, the FCC gave them a year’s reprieve for this requirement that was originally intended to go into effect this month. With Michael Powell at the helm of the FCC, I’m actually surprised he is doing this to his chums at the telecomm giants at all. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Wired

cites what I find an amazing statistic of a 30% annual ‘churn rate’ — the number of customers who change providers — even without the ability to preserve their numbers. The cellular companies used that fact to argue that customers don’t need number portability, but a good proportion of those who switch these days may be doing it not because of dissatisfaction with their providers as, in a sense, their providers’ dissatisfaction with them (grin) — by which I mean they may be the customers who get shut off for not paying their bills rather than customers whose lifestyle or business depends on the stability of their contacts being able to reach them at a consistent number. Number portability may indeed open as yet unforseen floodgates.

I don’t know if I’m lucky or just masochistic; while I admit that having to tell everyone in my address book of a new number would have been an enormous disincentive to switching, I have kept my cellular provider and my cellular number without the temptation to switch ever since I first contracted for service in 1993. I don’t think my standards are low; I just haven’t been dissatisfied with either the customer support and technical assistance I’ve gotten or the quality of my signal (since going from analogue to digital years ago, I can count the number of dropped calls on the fingers of one hand), but maybe I’m just dense and don’t know what I’m missing. Could the best be yet to come? I do look forward with curiosity to seeing if the threat of a switch brought about by this regulation does improve my service.

A Grieving Dad Takes His Own Vengeance: “After his son was beaten to death by white supremacists, a Phoenix man is hunting down the alleged killers. He has police support. LA Times [via boing boing]

“…A shadowy group is using some severe tactics to rid the computer world of Spam — and with some effectiveness. NPR’s Dan Charles reports.” NPR Morning Edition [with link to Real Audio]

Here’s the SPEWS site.

“SPEWS is a list of areas on the Internet which several system administrators, ISP postmasters, and other service providers have assembled and use to deny email and in some cases, all network traffic from.

This private list is now available for the general public to read and/or use for email filtering.”

The Best of 2002 from the Spike Report: “From a Wal-Mart wedding to the Hitlers of Long Island, Spike selects the most intriguing items published online during the past year.” If he didn’t exist we would’ve had to invent him. OJR

Reporter Becomes Actor in Human Clone Drama

Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, the chief scientist for Clonaid, a company founded by a sect that believes life on Earth was created by aliens 25,000 years ago, raised eyebrows around the globe on Friday by announcing the arrival of the world’s first cloned baby.

She backed up her assertions by producing not the baby nor the mother nor pictures nor genetic tests, but a journalist, Michael A. Guillen. Dr. Guillen, a former science editor at ABC News, declared that it would be his job “to put her claim to the test.”

From Clonaid’s perspective, Dr. Guillen — who says he is not a member or employee of the sect, the Raëlians — is brimming with credibility. He has a doctorate in theoretical physics, mathematics and astronomy from Cornell University. He taught physics to undergraduates at Harvard. He is an Emmy-award-winning science journalist who appeared regularly on “Good Morning America,” `20/20″ and other ABC news programs for 14 years before leaving the network in October.

But Dr. Guillen’s critics say that as a reporter he was too credulous of fantastic pseudoscience claims, citing his earnest news reports about astrology, ESP, healing at a distance, auras and cold fusion — topics dismissed by most scientists as nonsense. NY Times

“The Internet has become a staple source of information for American households about health care, government services and potential purchases, a survey to be issued on Monday finds.” NY Times … which neatly seques into this:

Killing prompts suit against Internet brokers: This story about the obsessed father reaching out to sue anyone he could after his daughter’s murder is “no different from that of other parents who lose a child”, as even this article concedes. But the obsessed killer, that’s a different, chilling, matter:

Boyer and Youens graduated from Nashua High School in 1997. Though her family says she never knew him, Youens had an obsession for Boyer that went back to junior high.

The infatuation was chronicled on a Web site where Youens described his murder plot in gruesome detail.

“I don’t love her anymore, I wish I did but I don’t,” he wrote. “I wish I could have killed her in Highschool (sic). I need to kill her so I can transport myself back into highschool. I need to stop her from having a life.”

Youens paid Docusearch Inc. of Boca Raton, Florida, about $150 to get Boyer’s Social Security number and other information, including her work address.

“Docusearch pulled through (amazingly) it’s like a dream,” Youens wrote on his Web site.

A few weeks later, Youens pulled alongside Boyer’s car after she left her job at a dental office and shot her 11 times before killing himself. CNN

Poll shows Margaret Thatcher admired more in US than J Lo Ananova. Lest you think this is an informed opinion, however, the most-admired man in the poll was, for the second year in a row, (drumroll)… Dubya.

“This Christmas, Santa’s sack will not be weighed down by any one particular consumer electronics product. The recession has hit the market fairly badly, not just in terms of economics, but in terms of innovative products coming to market. And this is likely to continue in 2003. For the first time in recent memory, the consumer market lacks a killer app. Analysts have pointed to several consumer segments making small, but interesting, progress in 2003. This week, Electronic News examines what’s in store for the consumer market in 2003.”

Mark at wood s lot is featuring poet John Tranter today.

Wal-Mart Yanks Pregnant Barbie Pal from Shelves:

“Barbie’s long-time pal, Midge — now married and pregnant — was yanked from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. shelves earlier this month after customers complained about the doll, a company spokeswoman said.

Midge is sold as part of the “Happy Family” set, wearing a tiny wedding ring and a detachable stomach with a curled-up baby inside. Her husband, Alan, and 3-year-old child Ryan are sold separately.” Yahoo! News

Wal-Mart declined to comment on whether shoppers’ objections were based on the suggestion of teenage pregnancy embodied in the doll’s being sold alone, rather than only in a ‘happy family’ unit. Parents who bought this doll for their children would have to discuss pregnancy, also unpalatable for Wal-Mart’s customer base.

“War is Heller. It is also Tolstoy, Owen, Vonnegut and Hemingway, among many others.

But according to the Pentagon, war — at least the impending war in Iraq — is Shakespeare, the 5th-century BC Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and two modern bestsellers about heroism and wartime correspondence. Before Christmas the US Defence Department began distributing free, pocket-sized copies of these books to its troops, to ensure that soldiers are improving their minds while removing Saddam. More than 100,000 copies have been given away so far.

The project, set up by a group of publishers with charitable support and Pentagon help, is a deliberate echo of the mass distribution of paperbacks to American soldiers that took place in the Second World War; the largest handout of free literature in history. In 1942 the US War Department hit on the idea of the Armed Services Edition, books specifically for servicemen in the field. The books were cheap to produce, horizontal in format, oblong-shaped to slip into an ammunition pouch, with large print to be read by candle or torchlight and cover designs resembling film posters. The titles catered for every brow height, from the Odyssey to Forever Amber; from Dickens to Twain to Virginia Woolf; literary classics, popular novels, non-fiction and even plays. ” Times of London

Of course, the publisher-organizer of the project, which echoes the mass giveaway of paperbacks from the highbrow to the low- to GIs during WWII, chose to include a book he himself edited among the four books distributed so far.

Michiko Kakutani reviews the year in arts for the New York Times:

So why do so many newer acts and projects feel so synthetic? The thinking behind movie franchises, certainly, is that it’s easier to sell and merchandise a brand-name product — familiarity, the reasoning goes, makes for bigger opening weekends, and a longer shelf life with spinoffs, video games, soundtracks and other corporate tie-ins. And in the music industry, the growing use of digital processing (using software like Pro Tools, which makes it possible to correct pitch and adjust timing) has made for more synthetic-sounding recordings, while changing the criterion by which singers are judged. As Billboard magazine noted: “Major-label executives readily admit that signing an act now is as much about star presence as it is about the artist’s actual ability to consistently sing the notes.”

As 2002 slouches to a close, however, all was not lost. Amid the cultural wreckage, there were potent albums from the alternative country band Wilco and the Detroit garage band the White Stripes, and novels by Ian McEwan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Richard Flanagan, Bruce Wagner and Alice Sebold that were as emotionally powerful as they were ambitious. Several new television shows like “24” and “Boomtown” tried, however unevenly, to push narrative conventions in new directions; and Larry David’s HBO show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” gave us a hilarious look at the absurdities of modern life, as seen through the eyes of an endlessly put-upon curmudgeon.

Both Kakutani and John Pareles, who does the year-end review of music for the Times, feel that puerile pop is dead, supplanted by “unvarnished sincerity — or a decent facsimile…”, as Pareles puts it. Would that it were so! Many other year-end cultural pundits have made a similar observation, although no one has a plausible explanation for such a hopeful trend in the tastes of Western pop culture consumers.

“The issues championed today by traditional civil rights groups, from affirmative action to ending racial profiling, have become virtually identical to the Democratic Party platform, and many are antithetical to the race-neutral goals of Republicans. The most egregious forms of discrimination were essentially dealt with in the sweeping legislation of the 1960’s and 70’s, supported by mainstream members of both parties.” NY Times

Mark at wood s lot is featuring poet John Tranter today.

‘On this day in 1917, H. L. Mencken’s “A Neglected Anniversary,” his hoax article on the American invention of the bathtub, was published in the New York Evening Mail. Mencken’s lifelong campaign to deride and derail Main Street America — the “booboisie” — had a number of easy victories, but this joke succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. In the omniscient tone of newspaper editorials, Mencken lamented and reprimanded that such an august cultural moment as the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bathtub should arrive and “Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day.” This was worse than unhygienic; it was unpatriotic.’ Today in Literature

Although Mencken has generally been dismissed because of his racism and anti-Semitism, you can’t fault this curmudgeon’s generic misanthropy. While we’re on the topic, in honor of Mencken, here’s how you say “curmudgeon” in some other languages:

Nederlands (Dutch):

chagrijn, vrek

Français (French):

grincheux, râleur

Deutsch (German):

Griesgram

Ελληνική (Greek):

τζαναμπέτης, στραβόξυλο

Italiano (Italian):

bisbetico

Português (Portuguese):

avarento (m), rabugento (m)

Русский (Russian):

брюзга

Español (Spanish):

gruñón, malhumorado

Svenska (Swedish):

gnidare, bitvarg

中国话 (Simplified Chinese):

存心不良的人, 难以取悦的人

中國話 (Traditional Chinese):

存心不良的人, 難以取悅的人

日本語 (Japanese):

気難しい人

  العربيه (Arabic):

‏(الاسم) عجوز ذو طبع حاد‏

  עברית‬ (Hebrew):

‮רע, קמצן‬

“Is the global computer network to blame for the current electricity crisis? Lackeys of the power industry want us to think so.” Salon

Poison Valley: “Is workers’ health the price we pay for high-tech progress?” Salon

“(C)olleges… seem to reproduce the inequalities of American society in ways that they can’t avoid, despite their best intentions. Perhaps it’s time to stop pretending otherwise and deceiving minority applicants into thinking that they will achieve the same academic and social success as their white counterparts — or even be held to similar standards.” Chronicle of Higher Education [via Arts & Letters Daily]

The New York Times’ Arts and Ideas editors solicited the most overrated and underrated ideas of 2002. The “Axis of Evil”, of course, makes the list, and I don’t have to tell you in which category. So does moralizing in general, according to several luminaries. But no one mentions my personal favorite, vastly overrated concept, the entire WoT® (“war on terrorism”).

Bill Keller: “I miss Trent Lott already. I was thoroughly enjoying the amazing crescendo of contrition.” NY Times op-ed

This site “list(s) the latest new software products in over 160 categories. If you have a Software Product released within the last 6 months please feel free to submit it for inclusion in our directory.” Currently there are more categories than links, but it might catch on. Since endusers are usually pretty specific in what kind of software they’re searching for at a given moment, the pigeonholing seems appropriate.

At a reader’s request, I went back to Blogger’s configuration and reset my XML feed to provide full content rather than headlines only. I can’t figure out why I hadn’t had it set up that way from the beginning. If you find it elegant or efficient to read your content via XML, here’s the Follow Me Here RSS feed.

I’m very happy with Amphetadesk under Windows as an XML reader, BTW. If you use AmphetaDesk, you can simply click here to subscribe to FmH in XML. I’m also playing with Feedreader, also free, which has a slightly more cumbersome interface but, unlike Amphetadesk, doesn’t choke on an il-fomed feed, it just skips the individual item with the error. For example, there’s something wrong with the XML version of one of the FmH posts today.

Although I’ve explored this before in some detail, here’s a Guardian article on RSS newsreaders that introduces the scene.

BTW, if you go to any FmH archive pages, you’ll find that some of the image links are broken. That’s because I just finished converting all my .GIFs to .PNGs, both because they load abit faster and because they avoid the contention about whether the .GIF format is proprietary. The archive pages still link to the now nonexistent .GIF images. Forgive me for not correcting this on each and every page. [If I were to wipe out all my archive files and then told Blogger to rearchive, would it use the new version of the template, I wonder?] Addendum: Yes; republished and fixed now.

“Requesting prayers and joining virtual prayer circles has become commonplace on the Internet, as worshipers can e-mail an order of nuns and request a prayer or enter a chat room and ask whoever reads their message to pray on their behalf. But e-mailing a prayer for the intercession of a saint is new.” NY Times This somehow reminds me of my bemusement to find enormous water- and wind-driven prayer wheels everywhere in my wandering among the Buddhist monasteries of Nepal in years past. It is easy to understand the handheld versions which send out a prayer every time one is mindful to twirl them (I have one at home which, indeed, charms my children…). Mechanical means of spinning the prayer wheels which remove the need for human intercession, on the other hand, seemed somehow to miss the point.

“Steel salvaged from the wreckage of the World Trade Center will be used to build the … warship named in honor of those who perished in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.” Boston Globe

Getting Into Gang War: Beginning with the superficial similarities between The Two Towers

and Gangs of New York as regards bloody hand-to-hand combat, Salman Rushdie writes a Washington Post op-ed piece contrasting the moral certainty of the War of the Rings with the “amoral world of bare-knuckle power” of Scorsese’s New York. Here’s his punchline: “Ambiguity is out of fashion, however. We will be given a war of heroes against villains at all costs. After all, The Two Towers is a vast popular success, and Gangs of New York is doing no better than modest business. Perhaps when the time for the Oscars comes round, the academy will see fit to reward the more profound complexities of the Scorsese movie. But by March we may all be preoccupied by a greater, darker contest than the one for the Academy Awards.”

“One hundred tigers and 2,000 alligators have been flown from Thailand to China to grace an animal park where visitors will be able to admire and eat some of the creatures displayed, a park official said Thursday.” Houston Chronicle

Fly Guy

Brutal Christmas for stores CNN

“The Jesus pictured on the cover of this month’s Popular Mechanics has a broad peasant’s face, dark olive skin, short curly hair and a prominent nose. He would have stood 5-foot-1-inch tall and weighed 110 pounds, if the magazine is to be believed.

This representation is quite different from the typical lithe, long-haired, light-skinned and delicate-featured depiction of the man Christians consider the son of God.

Israeli and British forensic anthropologists and computer programmers got together to create the face featured in the 1.2-million circulation magazine, which occasionally veers from its usual coverage of motors and tools to cover the merger of science and religion.” CNN

The Raelians, a ‘religious cult‘ based in Quebec, have been saying for the past year that they would be the first to clone a human. Now they say they have. CTV.ca

“So I’ve been wondering why Google doesn’t setup a URL that weblog software can “ping” each time a new entry is posted.” — Jeremy Zawodny’s blog

but, more to the point, St Stephen’s Day:

“St. Stephen was a Christian martyr who was stoned to death for his belief in Jesus. He is the patron of stoneworkers and also is associated with horses. This day ‘drew in’ other more ancient traditions. In Ireland, boys go from door to door gathering money for a ‘dead wren’ they carry, supposedly stoned to death, but really a remnant of ancient Druidic wren sacrifices for the winter solstice. In Poland, people throw oats at the priests and walnuts at each other – things supposedly symbolic of the stoning, but in reality these things were done long before as fertility rituals.”

“Give a toast to those who try to do good despite the odds, and a toast to those who struggle to do better despite tough circumstances.”

“Moscow prosecutors have opened an investigation into whether the Harry Potter series of children’s books incite religious hatred, an official said Wednesday.

The investigation was started at the request of a Moscow woman who was upset by the novels, said Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for the Moscow city prosecutor’s office.

Petrenko gave no futher details on the complaint. The Interfax news agency reported that the woman who sought the investigation believes the second volume in the series contains occult propaganda.” Associated Press

Or Has It?

Inspiration for the series struck in 1999 when Ms. Carton, a sculptor, was surfing through online pornography and found her eye drawn not to the bodies in one particular image, but to two background objects: a model Corvette and a copy of “The Grapes of Wrath.”

“I can understand the car, but I’d never seen any literary reference in porn before,” she said. “It grabbed my eye. At that moment, I started saying, ‘What does this have to do with desire?’ I started looking at the details in a different way.” NY Times

Accidents happen. In fact, they have always happened, from the asteroid that presumably wiped out the dinosaurs to the great fire that razed central London in 1666. But there are accidents and there are accidents. A good many, like earthquakes and tornadoes, are unavoidable acts of nature. But many more are human accidents provoked by the very technology that we celebrate: they represent the dark face of progress.

Paul Virilio, 70, a French urbanist, philosopher and prolific writer, began developing this thesis after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in the United States in 1979. Now, he believes, we are more accident-prone or rather, technology and communications have made accidents more global in their impact. In his view, if an accident was long defined as chance, today only its timing and consequences are hard to predict; the accident itself is already bound to occur.

To underline the importance of this unwelcome variable to modern society, Mr. Virilio is promoting the creation of a Museum of Accidents. NY Times

Farewell beloved CDs: “Having all your music collection in your pocket – it’s an idea thousands of Christmas shoppers will have fallen for. But is it all it’s cracked up to be?” BBC dot life

i.e. video weblogging: “Welcome to a new age of blogging: video blogging. I’ve created two video weblogs — one about the new World Trade Center designs and one about my Christmas tree — because (a) there’s new software that makes it easy [more on that below] and (b) I’m becoming convinced that video is the next frontier for blogging. It’s a simple equation: We bloggers do not compete with newspapers, because we do not have news operations. Instead, bloggers compete with pundits because what we do have is opinions. And where do you find the most pundits? On TV.” BuzzMachine by Jeff Jarvis I don’t think I’d have the stomach for video content as insipid as some of what is to be seen in the weblogging world. I mean, come on, his Christmas tree??? I’m reminded of the quip about how opinions are like a certain part of your anatomy, you know the one, everybody’s got at least one of them. I don’t think “vlogging” will catch on, at least not with me. Unlike text weblogs, I wouldn’t have the patience to waste as much time as it would take to sift through content without quality control in a realtime streaming medium. A wannabe talking head could be painful to watch in a way a would-be commentator can never be, no matter how badly they write, in a text medium. Just take a look at Jarvis’ posed profundity if you need convincing. He is clearly a man who wants to be a seminal trendsetter. After all, he created “THE Vlog”. I should know; I write THE FmH. [Hmmm, maybe I’m just jealous…}

Kroger Lets Shoppers Pay Via Fingerprint: “Suppose you endured the checkout line at the grocery store only to find that you were short on cash, or you’d forgotten your wallet. What if you could settle the bill with just the touch of your finger?

Kroger Co., the largest U.S. supermarket chain, is offering some customers just that opportunity, testing finger imaging as a method of payment in three of its Texas stores.” Reuters Technology

Oh, for some reason, I thought this Washington Post headline was talking about Trent Lott’s Christmas wishlist.

You can expect to continue to have to take off your shoes to pass through airline security and, for whatever idiotic reason, stand on one foot imitating a sobriety test, to help stem the terrorist tide. AP

…on eBay The Nando Times