Who Am I This Time?

Like an anthropologist or a method actor, (photographer Nikki S.) Lee “identifies a particular group in society and infiltrates it over a period of weeks or months. She will drastically alter her hair, her weight, her clothes… More subtly, she will take on the mannerisms, the gestures, the way of carrying oneself characteristic of the group she has chosen. After entering into her new identity, she will hand her point-and-shoot camera to someone and ask to have a snapshot taken of her in the chosen milieu.” Baltimore City Paper [via ghost rocket]

Shaken or stirred: “Stanley Zlotkin got his first look at the ravages of malnutrition as a young medical student visiting a remote hospital in northeastern Nigeria. Now, almost 30 years later, his innovative ideas could hold the key to eradicating childhood iron deficiency in the developing world.

Zlotkin, a professor of pediatrics and nutritional sciences at U of T and chief of gastroenterology and nutrition at the Hospital for Sick Children, is the creator of Supplefer Sprinkles, a powdered form of iron and other essential micronutrients that can be sprinkled on a child’s meal without altering its taste. That’s no small feat considering that other treatments – syrup or drops – have been around for 150 years without solving the problem on a global level.” [via David Brake… thanks!]

All on the menu for nobles of medieval England: “Chopped sparrow, roast swan, poached pike, conger eel, porpoise and lamprey: if it walked, swam or flew, the English medieval nobility ate it — usually with a dash of cinnamon, ginger or cloves — according to an ancient cookbook just released to the public.

Dating from 1500, A noble bok of festes ryalle and cokery, A bok for a Prynces housholde is the earliest copy of a printed cookbook in English, according to the British Library.” SF Chronicle

New 7 Wonders: “Much time has passed since the 7 Wonders of the World were last selected. Now on the threshold of the third millennium, our view of the world is characterised by a global consciousness. It is, therefore, an appropriate time to determine the new seven symbols of the most important human accomplishments of the last 2000 years. During the initial phase of the project we have received well over 5.5 million votes from over 200 countries. This global acceptance and the great success expressed in the number of votes received has been overwhelming and has strengthened our belief that we are on the verge of bringing about a meaningful dialogue between the citizens of the world.”

The Buddhas of Bamiyan – Reconstruction — The Afghanistan Institute & Museum, Bubendorf (Switzerland) and the New7Wonders Society & Foundation, Zurich (Switzerland) have launched a campaign to reconstruct the Buddhas at original shape, size and place with computer reconstructin, serving as the basis for the physical recreation, by ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Three data sets — low resolution images of the Great Buddha from the internet; a 1970 set of Austrian high resolution metric photographs; and some tourist images from the late ’60’s — are being used in parallel.

The reconstruction process for all data sets consists of:

• image calibration and orientation;
  

• image matching to extract the 3D points;
  

• point cloud editing and surface triangulation;
  

• texture mapping and visualization.

…

The computer model generated with the manual measurements on the metric images will be used for the physical reconstruction of the Great Buddha of Bamiyan. First a small statue will be constructed (scale 1:200) to reproduce the original figure. Then a 1/10 size model of the Buddha will be created and set in the museum of Bubendorf. This model is necessary to study (1)the materials to be used, (2)the construction methods to be applied and (3)the implementation of the necessary infrastuctures for the final rebuilding of the full size Buddha in Afghanistan.

Currently the fundraising efforts are underway to support the physical reconstruction of the Great Buddha of Bamiyan.

A number of you complained (but not more loudly than I did to myself!) that this page had stopped wrapping to pagewidth as of this morning. I don’t know how it happened but some text (the awful Scottish poem snippet below) which I had entered between “preformatted” tags, had alluvasudden lost its linefeeds somehow and was one long line whose width now had to be accommodated. Should be fixed now, please let me know if it isn’t.

In working on this I played around with my template a little. It works fine for me in Mozilla 1.0 and IE6, but let me know if it messes up in your browser. The experiment I tried several months ago with David Gagne’s CSS-based (table-less) redesign loaded much faster and worked fine for me in Mozilla and IE6 but had so many inexplicable layout problems for some readers that I gave up and went back to a table-based layout.

The other thing that happened in fixing the formatting was that I deleted this morning’s post about the Pledge of Allegiance ruling. No loss — I thought better of my “free speech” argument, in which I said something like, ‘What’s the fuss? If you don’t like “one nation under God”, you’ve always been free to omit the words or skip the Pledge entirely; I’ve boycotted it since the Vietnam war…’. The Court ruling, of course, was in the spirit of the Establishment clause (‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion…’) instead, since the First Amendment guarantee of free speech doesn’t really work in a coercive environment (as we are quickly to learn under the Ashcroft Regime). But I still wonder what’s different about our national currency subjecting us to “In God we trust” in that case. Was Bush giving the nod to this when he took time out of his busy day at the G8 summit to splutter that the country “values our relationship with the Almighty”? That’s the Almighty Dollar, right? And I was certainly entertained by the furious, defiant recitation of the (unredacted) Pledge by Our Elected Representatives® in response to the ruling. On the other hand, a friend of mine wrote, finding the Congressional rebellion more ominous:

And bipartisan disrespect for a federal court ruling? Am I wrong, or are the legislators and the executives ganging up on the judiciary (at least one of whom caved pretty readily). Though, I guess that this administration will find the Supreme Court handily in its pocket, if necessary. I don’t recall any bipartisan mockery of the court-sanctioned (Presidential) election…

Let’s WARCHALK! “Collaboratively creating a hobo-language for free wireless networking.” {A link on the page downloads a .pdf of the wallet card.)

Puncturing Web Ads Before They Pop Up … and the burgeoning arms race between the popup-makers and the popup-blockers. NY Times

Hard-Boiled and Still Hot:

“Live authors promoting the work of dead authors is not exactly a new way of making a publisher’s backlist snap to attention yet again. But we are talking here about Philip Marlowe, private detective, one of the most astonishingly enduring characters in American fiction. So it’s not surprising that a group of authors are going out of their way to promote a new edition of the major works of Marlowe’s creator, Raymond Chandler. And doing it with gusto.” NY Times

Lifting Veil for Photo ID Goes Too Far, Driver Says: “A Muslim woman who says the state is violating her religious rights in demanding that she remove her veil for a driver’s license photograph will be in court this week to try to regain her driving privileges.” NY Times

The Age of Acquiescence: “The passionate activists from the Age of Aquarius have grown up to be the new Silent Majority.” NY Times Sorry, Maureen, I know what you’re trying to do. You usually make such eminent sense. But the convenient media appeal of the hypocrisy of ’60’s survivors turned middle aged petty bourgeois or nouveau riche is the only way they cover that generation, and it just isn’t so. The earnest members of the counterculture have not lost their cynical mistrust of the government, their commitment to subversion of the dominant paradigm, and their interest in finding new and better ways to be kind in the face of the advancing oligopoly. To argue that, because “the new boss” is “same as the old boss”, nothing was achieved only criticizes an immature caricature of ‘Movement ideology which thought it would be easy. And certainly admirable, principled people still believe after Sept. 11th, and live the belief, that there’s “nothing to kill or die for”, if by quoting Lennon she meant the principled thoughtful stance that the Bush henchmen’s WoT® has been misguided, deceptive, self-serving, immoral and fruitless.

US dismisses al-Qaida claim that network is ‘98% intact’ Guardian UK  [There’s a fine line to walk in this WoT®, between claiming sufficient success to maintain public confidence and projecting enough ongoing threat to maintain public fear. –FmH]

‘World’s Worst Poet’ Wins Immortality —

“A Scottish poet so bad he was often asked to perform just so the audience could laugh at him will have his verse etched in stone in the city where he worked. William Topaz McGonagall, who died in 1902, has gained posthumous recognition in the Scottish city of Dundee, which plans to mark the centenary of his death by engraving part of one his poems on a walkway by the river Tay.” Yahoo! News

An example:

“Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay !

With your numerous arches and pillars in so grand array

And your central girders, which seem to the eye

To be almost towering to the sky…”

“Satellites will shortly swing into action to track sheep grazing habits as part of a project to design farms that make animals happier. The Food Animal Initiative combines scientists from Oxford University and farmers funded by British food industry giants supermarket Tesco and burger chain McDonalds UK..” That tells you how little more than window-dressing the project is to be. I’d venture to say most of the animals destined to end up as a patty or slab at one of the food industry giants’ venues never roamed free in a pasture or had their choice of what to graze upon… Reuters

Why Reality is a Gray Area in Astronomy: more on the ‘color of the universe’ and why Hubble astronomers color their photos. space.com

WHO: Ebola Outbreak Spreads to Gabon Yahoo! News

Seeking love on the dotted line: “Epstein, a Harvard-trained psychologist who lives part time in Cambridge, insists this is no personal ad. He intends to test a possibility that is both novel and ancient: That love for an appropriate person can be systematically induced.” Boston Globe

When Navajos Fought Japanese for Ne-He-Mah: a delightful feature on the real ‘windtalkers’ and the fascinating, poetic, complexities of the Navajo language. NY Times

Pinpointing a Pivotal Processor:

“Every known drug of abuse, a wide variety of neurotransmitters and therapeutic agents, all channel into a single protein that “integrates information from all over the brain and provides a meaningful physiological readout,” according to Nobel Laureate Paul Greengard.

Greengard, professor of neuroscience at Rockefeller University in New York, has shown that a 32-kilodalton protein, dopamine- and cAMP-regulated phosphoprotein (DARPP-32), is a pivotal molecule in virtually all dopamine-related activities.” BioMedNet [free registration required] [thanks, Brian!]

Canada Preps for G8 Summit, which is being held at a remote mountain retreat in the Canadian Rockies. Canada is spenign half a billion dollars on the summit, mostly on security, but they’ve also bought off the local First Nations tribe to withdraw their permission to allow protesters to camp on their reservation land. A no-fly zone over the summit site will be enforced by fighter jets and surface-to-air missiles. Canada is adeptly using anti-terrorist sentiment to preempt the anti-globalisation movement’s making this its first muscle-flexing exercise in the post-Sept 11 world. Alternet

Danish Deep-Link Decision Due. Wired

President Bush Calls for New Palestinian Leadership: ‘President Bush Monday said the United States supports creation of a provisional Palestinian state but only if a “new and different Palestinian leadership” is found other than Yasser Arafat.’ Reuters

Court Rules That Only Juries Can Impose Death Sentences: The decision was based on the sixth amendment guarantee of a trial by one’s peers.

“Joining Justice (Ruth Bader) Ginsburg in the majority were Justices John Paul Stevens, Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Stephen G. Breyer and — somewhat surprisingly — the conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist dissented…

The decision in Ring v. Arizona, 01-488, invalidated the death-sentencing procedures in five states, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska, which have 168 people under death sentences and where a judge or panel of judges decides sentence. It could also affect the capital punishment statutes in four other states, Alabama, Delaware, Florida and Indiana, which have 529 people under death sentences. Those states have a hybrid system under which juries advise a judge on the sentence…

(I)t was not clear whether the condemned prisoners would automatically get life sentences or could be sentenced to death again under new procedures. Some previous landmark opinions on capital punishment have meant reprieves for whole death-row populations.”

This is the second monumental death sentence restriction handed down by the Suporeme Court this week, of course, after the ruling that mentally retarded prisoners cannot be executed. I worked as a psychiatric consultant on three death row cases, in two of which (in Alabama) the death sentence had been imposed by the presiding judge’s override of a jury’s “recommendation” of a lesser sentence; the third defendant was mentally retarded…

First honest-to-God software adaptation of D&D.” Wired

Britney Spears: Not Yet a Woman, Already a Restaurateur NY Times

A Deadly Disease Destroys Families as Well as Patients: “To those who love someone with Huntington’s disease, the despair of Carol Carr, who killed two of her sons suffering from the disease, is not incomprehensible.” NY Times

Several FmH’ers found my comments about the wildfires naive, suggesting that it would take turning back the clocks a century to a period of vast tracts of wilderness unpenetrated by human presence before we can let fires burn. Garret Vreeland, who knows whereof he speaks — and wherefrom, Santa Fe, unlike my effete, removed New England vantage point — points out that today’s forest fires are far more severe than they are supposed to be — in a sense, he says, not ‘natural’ at all, as I had asserted — because we have had a policy of preventing lesser fires and “preserving (the forests) to death.” Here’s the essence of Vreeland’s argument, which I don’t feel hesitant about making public because he’s just written essentially the same thing at dangerousmeta:

“there are no empty, pristine forests that are safe to let burn. that’s the old ‘wild west’ myth. if it’s not homes, it’s an ecosystem that feeds and cleans water supplies for hundreds of miles. or a precious ecosystem for wildlife and animals. ‘wilderness’ only exists in narrow swaths between human habitations.”

He goes on to mention the health effects of smoke over populated areas if we “let it burn.” And he reminds me that the abandoned mines and mine tailings put toxic heavy metals into the ecosystem when volatilized (does this happen in a forest fire?). Dramatic case in point: the Cerro Grande fire at Los Alamos several years ago,. At the time I wrote here about the fears that this fire would release substantial radioactivity from all that the National Laboratory had been dumping in surrounding areas.

My friend Abby also wrote that humans are part of the ecosystem and that it is too impossible for us to get out of the way of nature.

The thrust of my comments was not intended to be the suggestion that we simply let the fires burn and get out of their way, although on rereading it is obvious why it came across that way. Both Garret and Abby seem in fact to reinforce the point I was trying to make — that we are in the fix we are because of a mindset of not seeing ourselves as embedded in the ecosystem but ranged against it. This is where the hubris of viewing the fires solely from the p.o.v. of their threatening and dangerous impact on humans, my peevishness about which was the precipitant for my post, arises from.

The unfortunate people who found their worldly possessions in the path of these wildfires, I meant to say, are not at fault; they are tragic victims of an inadequate worldview in the policy sphere. Garret suggests we read Era of the Big Fire is Kindled at West’s Doors from today’s New York Times. “Ten times as many homes are now in areas prone to wildfire as there were 25 years ago…” Snuffing out all fires only delays the super-devastating, inevitable big ones, it seems. Without a change in forest and fire management policy, allowing controlled burning and aggressive thinning, we’re in for much more of this, it seems. But if the government were interested in changing policy, it has severely hampered itself with some missteps in the last decade. And fires have become — forgive me — a hot topic, highly politicized. Net effect — the Bush administration appears to have no plans for a change.

And, finally, falling water tables and drought conditions, which set the west up for megafires, may be a consequence of global warming, calling for more pervasive policy change. But the Bush administration is philosophically averse to even considering the reality of the greenhouse effect.

So, for the moment at least,  it would seem prudent for people to be more attentive to whether they’re situating their ‘dream house’ in a fire zone…

Hum Haunts Indiana City; Its Source Is a Mystery NY Times [via dangerousmeta]

Al Qaeda Says Bin Laden Is Well, and It Was Behind Tunis Blast NY Times

Urgent Call is a new initiative to engage and educate a broad public about the growing danger that nuclear weapons will be used, and about practical steps to reduce that danger.

Sign the petition.

Make a donation.

Please.

(Via the Betty Fnord Clinic, where you can also buy the teeshirt):

The Skeptic’s Dictionary: “A Critical Survey of Questionable Therapies, Eccentric Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions and Dangerous Delusions” by Robert T. Carroll, Professor of Philosophy, Sacramento City College. [via vampagan]

“Four disruptive technologies are emerging that promise to render not only the next wave of so-called 3G wireless networks irrelevant, but possibly even their 4G successors.”

: “…(T)he parlous state of the wireless-telecoms industry, and the difficulties surrounding the deployment of “third generation” (3G) networks in particular, could be taken as evidence that existing ways of doing things are reaching their limits, and that some radical new ideas are needed.

Here, then, are four emerging technologies that show much promise: smart antennas, mesh networks, ad hoc architectures, and ultra-wideband transmission. Smart antennas are already in use and mesh networks are starting to appear, while ad hoc architectures and ultra-wideband are still largely restricted to the laboratory. But each challenges existing ways of doing things; each, on its own, or in combination with others, could shake up the wireless world. The Economist

Tooth phone provides covert chat:

A prototype radio device designed to fit inside a human tooth and provide covert mobile phone communications has been created by two UK students. The device currently consists of a digital radio receiver that converts radio signals into sound and a tiny vibrating component, which conveys sound to the wearer’s inner ear through bone vibrations. New Scientist

Psychiatric reactions: this will not sit well with a number of paranoid schizophrenic patients. For decades, it has been a fairly common delusion, on the transmitter side, that their dental fillings are bugs. On the receiver side, some explain the auditory hallucinations that are a prominent part of the illness by invoking the small receivers that have been implanted in their heads, and sometimes their teeth. And I have heard tales of people being able to hear actual radio broadcasts, supposedly because their dental fillings are resonating with the broadcast frequency. This Google search on ‘ “dental fillings” and “radio” ‘ will take you further, you hear?

Solving the Case of the Missing Comets. Comets that get kicked into the inner solar system from the Oort Cloud and loop around the sun ought to enter elongated elliptical orbits that will bring them back, yet in the five decades that astronomers have figured this out, they have wondered why far too few ever make a return pass. Now, a new computer model suggests that 99% of them simply disintegrate. space.com

First picture of secretive carnivore: “An African carnivore that has not been spotted for 70 years has been captured on film for the first time, in the Udzungwa Mountains National Park in Tanzania. Known as Lowe’s servaline genet, the three-foot long animal is a relative of the mongoose. It was previously known only from descriptions and a single skin collected by hunters in 1932.” New Scientist

“Manual” — ‘An anthology of new work from seventeen writers with websites. It is available as a downloadable PDF…’

Re-engineering the Drug Business:

Sept. 11 and its new world of heightened border controls has made decentralization doubly important for international smuggling networks, be they Chinese, Colombian, Turkish or Nigerian. Ever since the big Cali and Medellin cartels were wiped out nearly a decade ago, virtually the entire narcotics trade has radically slimmed down. With the added pressure of 9/11 security measures, drug kingpins have adopted the mantra of their more enlightened corporate cousins, that size does not necessarily create efficiency, and that to survive you have to stay nimble.

Heroin is the perfect drug for the new age of small-batch manufacturing and decentralization, a high-value-added commodity where a little goes a very long way. In fact, it’s so well suited to the changing times that many cocaine traffickers are retooling their production lines to include heroin and joining the global trend toward leaner, meaner, terrorist-style operations. NY Times Magazine

Maureen Dowd: Hans, Franz & W.: “Does it ever occur to Mr. Bush and his aides to vacate the gym and nail down a Middle East policy?” NY Times op-ed

The Doctor Won’t See You Now: “Can you save the life of a patient you’ve never met?” NY Times Magazine

With GPS, World Is Your Canvas: “Jeremy Wood and Hugh Pryor are part of a new breed of artists crisscrossing the planet, creating artwork on a par with the ancient Nazca line drawings of Peru. With the help of GPS, these artists have discovered a fish in Wallingford, an elephant in Brighton, not to mention a huge spider lurking in Oxford…” (left). Wired

Even thoughts can turn genes “on” and “off”. San Francisco Chronicle

Within Pilobolus, Working Together and Pulling Away: about the creative tension in my longstanding favorite dance troupe, if you can call them that. NY Times

Within Pilobolus, Working Together and Pulling Away: about the creative tension in my longstanding favorite dance troupe, if you can call them that. NY Times

Within Pilobolus, Working Together and Pulling Away: about the creative tension in my longstanding favorite dance troupe, if you can call them that. NY Times

Starbucks yanks ads mocking 9/11: Could we be overreading this? I think not, especially recalling (as does Brooke Biggs of Bittershack, from whom I cribbed this link) that the Starbucks near the WTC site took it upon itself to charge relief workers for their water in the first days after the attack. This (right) was a window poster appearing at 3000 Starbucks storefronts (including the ones in lower Manhattan near the WTC), depicting twin towering cups of their iced fruit tea drinks being dive bombed by a dragon fly, with the legend “Collapse into Cool.” The posters have been pulled after numerous consumer complaints. NY Post [Awaiting a public response from Starbucks corporate headquarters. On the one hand, it is hard to understand such depraved indifference on the part even of an ad agency, but on the other hand look at how much added press Starbucks gets out of this, even if bad. Just one more reason to refrain from patronizing them, if you needed another reason…  –FmH]

Nat Perry: Bush’s Grim Vision:

“In the nine months since Sept. 11, George W. Bush has put the United States on a course that is so bleak that few analysts have – as the saying goes – connected the dots. If they had, they would see an outline of a future that mixes constant war overseas with abridgment of constitutional freedoms at home, a picture drawn by a politician who once joked, “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier – so long as I’m the dictator.” The Consortium

While I certainly agree with the sentiment, how well-established is the egregious — stupid even for George W. — quote? Should snopes.com look into it?

Anthrax in Mail Was Newly Made, Investigators Say: “The new finding has concerned investigators, who say it indicates that whoever sent the anthrax could make more and strike again.” NY Times

Within Pilobolus, Working Together and Pulling Away: about the creative tension in my longstanding favorite dance troupe, if you can call them that. NY Times

After an exchange of email, I want to make a public correction. I had previously been appreciative of self-professed ‘neoconservative’ weblogger Joe Katzman for taking notice of a ‘liberal’ blog like FmH in his Winds of Change. In this post, I mischaracterized Katzman as ” believing his brand of weblog is the only counter to the ‘dominant media culture’ ” . Actually, I was deriding Eric Raymond at the time, but I lumped Katzman in with him. However, it was an unfair caricature of his position, for while he finds it indisputable that the weblog world is a hedge against media bias it would be ridiculous to assert that it is the only one. So I hereby retract my use of the word “only” in that context. In our correspondence, we agreed to disagree about some of my other arguments, but the operative word is “agreed”. I still stand by my gratitude and admiration that here is a member of the ‘warblogging’ community who is willing to talk between sometimes warring camps.

Now you know the hole story: “Calls have come from around the country. UFO enthusiasts have visited the hole on 164th Avenue Northeast and come up with their own suspicions. Kaare and other neighborhood children have lined up outside the caution tape, peering over the edge.

And almost everyone has a theory as to how the hole appeared here in the first place.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer [via spike report]

RoboCup: “By the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team.” RoboCup 2002 taking place now in Fukuoka, Japan.

“After four months of entertaining humans, Gaak the predator robot yesterday did what all the best robots do in science fiction: he copied his masters’ most basic instinct and made a dash for freedom.

Programmed to sink a metal fang into smaller but more nimble prey robots, to “eat” their electric power, at a science adventure centre, Gaak showed that a two year experiment in maturing robot “thinking” may be proving alarmingly successful.

Left unattended for 15 minutes, the 2ft metal machine crept along a barrier until it found a gap, squeezed through, navigated across a car park and reached the Magna science centre’s exit by the M1 motorway in Rotherham, South Yorkshire.” Guardian UK

Stop Him Before He Lies Again: “Would somebody please notice that Bush is being grossly dishonest about his most important piece of domestic policy? ” The New Republic

Hollywood Wants to Plug the “Analog Hole”:

The people who tried to take away your VCR are at it again. Hollywood has always dreamed of a “well-mannered marketplace” where the only technologies that you can buy are those that do not disrupt its business. Acting through legislators who dance to Hollywood’s tune, the movie studios are racing to lock away the flexible, general-purpose technology that has given us a century of unparalelled prosperity and innovation.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed the “Content Protection Status Report” with the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, laying out its plan to remake the technology world to suit its own ends. The report calls for regulation of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), generic computing components found in scientific, medical and entertainment devices. Under its proposal, every ADC will be controlled by a “cop-chip” that will shut it down if it is asked to assist in converting copyrighted material — your cellphone would refuse to transmit your voice if you wandered too close to the copyrighted music coming from your stereo. –Cory Doctorow [via Joe Katzman]

Each year, media coverage of the wildfire season seems more and more fervent about the desperate necessity of controlling the fires and the tragedy of destruction of human property they cause. What is lost is a perspective on the fact that both forest and prairie fires are part of a vast and perennial natural cycle. Without derogating the heroism of the smokejumpers who risk their lives to fight these fires, it strikes me that humans are the interlopers in this ecological interplay. Perhaps the confrontation with such majestic natural forces should strengthen our deermination not to fight them in our hubris, but to get out of their way with humility? Is it worth the cost — in lives, in money, and to our souls — to fight as we do? I react the same way when I hear about the California mudslides each rainy season, flood damage, disastrous hurricanes… Here’s a Google search on wildfire ecology as a starting point.

Ruling Barring Execution of Retarded May Not Lead to Further Restrictions: “Despite the clarity of the Supreme Court’s decision to abolish the death penalty for mentally retarded offenders, the court’s next move is uncertain and the impact of the ruling on the overall death penalty debate is far from clear.” NY Times news analysis

Porn provocateur: “Lizzy Borden, whose ultraviolent films feature women being beaten, raped and doused in vomit, insists that she is a gender pioneer whose repellent movies are morality tales.” Salon

The Trouble With Frida Kahlo: “…(L)ike a game of telephone, the more Kahlo’s story has been told, the more it has been distorted, omitting uncomfortable details that show her to be a far more complex and flawed figure than the movies and cookbooks suggest. This elevation of the artist over the art diminishes the public understanding of Kahlo’s place in history and overshadows the deeper and more disturbing truths in her work. Even more troubling, though, is that by airbrushing her biography, Kahlo’s promoters have set her up for the inevitable fall so typical of women artists, that time when the contrarians will band together and take sport in shooting down her inflated image, and with it, her art.” Washington Monthly

Supreme Court Bars Executing the Mentally Retarded:

“In one of the most important capital punishment cases in years, the United States Supreme Court ruled today that executing killers who are mentally retarded is unconstitutional.

The 6-to-3 ruling not only spared the life of Daryl R. Atkins, a Virginia inmate, at least for now, but could save scores of other death-row prisoners in the 20 states that still allow the execution of mentally retarded murderers. Thirty-eight states have capital punishment.” NY Times

Although this ruling opens a Pandora’s Box of complications — some of them akin to the ongoing controversy over the ‘insanity defense’ for the mentally ill — the humanity of not executing someone whose developmental level prevents them from appreciating the nature of their crime or the meaning of their death sentence seems manifest. Judging a society by how it treats its least able may still have some currency after all…

Why is this big news? And why is it in the Hindustan Times??

Any longtime net users among you will understand why mentioning the Internet Scout Report invokes a compulsion to precede it with the word ‘venerable.’ Now it has reinvented itself as an honest-to-God Weblog. [thanks, Rebecca]

James Ridgeway: Alleged Dirty Bomber Dead Ringer for Oklahoma City’s John Doe 2: I hadn’t noticed this story until Dan Hartung pointed out in Lake Effect that Ridgeway caught on from the weblogging world, as he says here:

The strange saga of Abdullah al Muhajir, a/k/a Jose Padilla, took yet another turn this morning, when Internet gumshoes Fuckedworld and Junkyardblog spotted his look-a-like . . . guess where?

In the police drawing of a still-missing Oklahoma City bombing suspect, that’s where. Al Muhajir, held since May 8 on accusations that he intended to build and detonate a dirty bomb, is the spitting image of the mysterious John Doe 2, featured in police sketches and long touted by cops as a principal along with Tim McVeigh. Some law enforcement officials have insisted no such suspect ever existed, though witnesses described the second figure getting out of the rental truck with McVeigh seconds before the explosion.

However speculative, this clicks in more ways than one, since McVeigh’s lawyer tried to argue in Federal District Court in Denver that the 1995 plot may have had roots in the Philippines among men known to have been Al Qaeda operatives with direct ties to Osama bin laden. Though the judge rebuffed his argument, attorney Stephen Jones said he found people in the Philippines who claimed accomplice Terry Nichols met with terrorists there in the years before the 1995 attack. Village Voice

Here’s Fuckedworld’s summary of the evidence connecting the dots. Jumping to the punchline, its author John Berger concludes:

We still don’t know that McVeigh and Padilla ever even met. But Padilla worked just minutes from the home of Timothy McVeigh’s sister, during McVeigh’s 1993 visit. At that time, Padilla was actively seeking connections with the world of Islam, possibly including a relationship with the local sponsor of the Benevolent International Foundation, which has been linked to terror operations in the Philippines, specifically to an Abu Sayyef cell which some sources (of uncertain merit)

Unfortunately, the investigation to date still falls far short of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The Nichols-BIF connection rests almost solely on the word of a very shady character who is now too dead to answer questions or provide leads. And connecting Padilla to BIF still falls short of connecting him directly to Yousef or Wali Khan. The McVeigh-Padilla connection is intriguing but as yet unresolved. The investigation continues. Keep reading.

Berger notes: “Bryan Preston at the Junkyard Blog made one of the earliest observations of the connection, although there is some friendly competition among various sites and message boards that claim to have called it first. My Web site didn’t originate this theory, but I was among the earliest to push it out before the public, and the subsequent research in this story is mine.” I like him better than Preston already, who is falling all over himself about having broken the story. BTW, the photos don’t really look that much alike, methinks.

Enter the Globocourt: William Safire reaches more than abit when he argues against the international criminal court — the Clinton administration’s support for which of course the Bush administration has already rescinded — on the grounds that it will jeopardize journalistic free expression, and endanger the lives of international war reporters, by asserting its authority to summon journalist witnesses to international war crimes to give testimony. Quite a stretch, to suggest that “if dictators see reporters as potential witnesses in prosecutions, tyrants in trouble will be likely to kill those witnesses”; under the modern rules of warfare, they’re already in grave danger just for being there to bear witness bravely. C’mon, Bill, if you want to be behind Rumsfeld on this one, just say so…

A Scholar Recants on His ‘Shakespeare’ Discovery

In 1995 Donald Foster, a professor of English at Vassar College, made a startling case for Shakespeare’s being the author of an obscure 578-line poem called “A Funeral Elegy.” After a front-page article about his methods of computer analysis in The New York Times — and after his reputation was further burnished by unmasking Joe Klein as the author of “Primary Colors” — the poem was added to three major editions of Shakespeare’s works.

Now, in a stunning development that has set the world of Shakespeare scholarship abuzz, Professor Foster has admitted he was wrong. In a message dated June 12 and quietly left last Thursday on the Internet discussion group Shaksper (www.shaksper.net), he said that another poet and dramatist was the more likely author of the poem. He was joined in his recantation by Richard Abrams, a professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, who has been his close associate in the Shakespeare attribution. NY Times

US Heard ‘Tomorrow Is Zero Hour’ on Eve of Attacks: “U.S. intelligence intercepted two messages the day before the Sept. 11 attacks that indicated an event was planned the following day, but the communications were not translated until Sept. 12, government sources said on Wednesday.” Reuters

David Brake writes, “It’s been a nervous week for patients.” On the heels of the Annals of Internal Medicine series examining medical mistakes in U.S. practice, which I pointed to below, comes this BBC report. Junior doctors ‘lack knowledge’

Many junior doctors do not know the signs that a patient is critically ill, according to a report…. Its authors recommend an urgent overhaul of the training provided by medical schools…

The researchers found almost a third of doctors failed to answer a question on how to deal with someone who was unconscious.

None of the trainees identified all of the steps involved in using an oxygen mask, and a fifth did not understand how it worked….

I just learned of the death of Leo Marks in January; he was the screenwriter for one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. This New York Press obituary is worth reading, to start with for more about the furor around Peeping Tom. Marks was an original:

In 1958, English film director Michael Powell was casting about for a new collaborator, having split two years earlier with his longtime partner, Emeric Pressburger… Powell ran into producer Danny Angel, whose recent World War II espionage picture Carve Her Name with Pride had been well-received. As Powell recounts…, Angel asked him, “Are you still looking for a writer to work with you, like Pressburger did? Because, if you are, you ought to see Leo Marks. He’s as crazy as you are. He’s been working with me [on Carve Her Name]. Apparently, he was a codebreaker during the war, and he tells the tallest stories about it that I’ve ever heard… He can write poetry. He’s weird, I tell you. He lives double or triple lives, he’s difficult to get ahold of, and he’s full of mystery and conundrums.”

All true. Freshly turned 38, Leo Marks–World War II codebreaker (and codemaker), poet, raconteur, mufti of the mysterioso with high-voltage connections in the British Intelligence Service–had enjoyed a smidgen of success in London’s West End as a playwright with The Girl Who Couldn’t Quite! (1947) and The Best Damn Lie (1957), and as a screenwriter with Cloudburst (1951) and Carve Her Name.

“National Public Radio’s linking policy at npr.org has caused a fuss within the blog community that’s hot and getting hotter. The policy’s simply stated in two sentences: ‘Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited. If you would like to link to NPR from your Web site, please fill out the link permission request form.’ This is buried, of course, in a page linked to the site’s footer, but somebody noticed and mentioned it to Howard Rheingold, who passed it on to Cory Doctorow of boingboing.net. Cory wrote scathing commentary, calling the policy ‘brutally stupid,’ even ‘fatally stupid.’ The outrage is spreading; this has to be a rough day for the NPR ombudsman who’s deluged with email by now… ~24 hours after Cory’s report.” Slashdot [thanks, Walker]

Segway gets okay for sidewalks: “The high-tech Segway scooter is still months away from being available to the public, and already half the states have speedily cleared a path by changing their laws to allow the electric-powered vehicle on sidewalks.” MSNBC [“Scooter”?!?! –FmH]

Does Poverty Cause Terrorism?

An understanding of the causes of terrorism is essential if an effective strategy is to be crafted to combat it. Drawing a false and unjustified connection between poverty and terrorism is potentially quite dangerous, as the international aid community may lose interest in providing support to developing nations when the imminent threat of terrorism recedes, much as support for development waned in the aftermath of the Cold War; and connecting foreign aid with terrorism risks the possibility of humiliating many people in less developed countries, who are implicitly told that they receive aid only to prevent them from committing acts of terror. Moreover, premising foreign aid on the threat of terrorism could create perverse incentives in which some groups are induced to engage in terrorism to increase their prospects of receiving aid. In our view, alleviating poverty is reason enough to pressure economically advanced countries to provide more aid than they are currently giving. Falsely connecting terrorism to poverty serves only to deflect attention from the real roots of terrorism. ( — Alan B. Krueger, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University; and Jitka Malecková, associate professor at the Institute for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Charles University in Prague) The New Republic

Fast Search claims Google’s size crown, says its allltheweb.com searches an index that’s 20 million links larger than Google. The Register

[via Walker, thanks]: Telemarketing Tidbit —

I just got off the phone with a telemarketer in record time. I used a new technique – it just occurred to me on the fly – and it not only gets them off really quickly (so to speak) but it also screws up their computer files.

My old technique was a bit more interpersonally brutal. As soon as I could tell it was a telemarketer, I’d simply shout “I’m bleeding!” and then hang up the phone. It guaranteed they would free up the line.

This new one, well, I don’t know why I did it, exactly. The guy called said he was from Verizon online, and congratulated me on the fact that my phone now qualified for broadband/DSL. So I told him I already have verizon dsl. He said, “really?” I said ‘yeah. For a year, now. Great stuff!” He got off right away, and – I assume – entered me in the computer (incorrectly) as someone who already has Verizon DSL.

This should work for everyone. Worst case, tell them that you just signed up for whatever it is ten minutes ago. Then they’ll mark you in the books as someone who already has whatever it is, and not call you again.

Of course the whole thing may backfire. I’ll keep you posted.

And I’ll post something of greater value to the world, here, later today or tomorrow.

[I like the ‘bleeding’ line… -FmH]

There’s a revolution afoot in understanding how antidepressant medications work. Since the brain is largely a black box and an important source of evidence for what’s going on inside the box is what we know about how medications work when they’re fixing dysfunctions, this new and fundamentally different understanding may largely invalidate the “monoamine theory” of depression that has held sway for a half decade and which you certainly learned in school if you took any courses on the biological basis of psychopathology. This paper reviews the new emerging consensus “that depression maybe associated with a disruption of mechanisms that govern cell survival and neural plasticity in the brain. Antidepressants could mediate their effects by increasing neurogenesis and modulating the signaling pathways involved in plasticity and survival.”

I Will Survive — How do ex-presidents continue to thrive and exert political influence? First, they are survivors:

Eliminating presidents who died in office, the first 28 ex-presidents — from George Washington through Lyndon Johnson — lived an average of just 11.6 years after leaving the White House. As of July, however, the Nixon-to-Clinton cohort already averages 15.2 years, a figure growing daily because only Nixon is dead. With Clinton’s brief post-presidency excluded, the mean increases to 17.9 years, and the 54-year-old Clinton may eventually raise the group’s mean post-presidential tenure to twice that of its 28 predecessors. Ford and Carter already rank second and fourth, respectively, in post-presidential longevity. Ford will soon pass legendary ex-president John Adams into third place, and both Ford and Carter may pass Herbert Hoover’s 31-year standard.

Then there’s money, the bully pulpit, bipartisanship, institutional memory… The American Prospect

Microsoft to reinstate Java in Windows:

“In an about-face, Microsoft said Tuesday that it will reinstate the ability to run Java programs in Windows XP.

Microsoft said it would include its own Java software in the Service Pack 1 update to Windows XP due late this summer. In the long term, though, the company plans to remove Java from Windows altogether.

The reinstatement is a partial victory for Java inventor and Microsoft rival Sun Microsystems, which in the 1990s had hoped people would use the cross-platform language to write programs capable of running on any computer, regardless of the operating system used by the machine.” CNET

The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death:

“At first it sounds like a high-concept movie, one of those supernatural heart-tuggers like Ghost or The Sixth Sense: the story of a teenage girl’s rape and murder, and the fallout those events have on her family, as narrated from heaven by the dead girl herself.

As it turns out, however, Alice Sebold’s first novel, The Lovely Bones, is anything but a hokey, Ouija-board mystery. What might play as a sentimental melodrama in the hands of a lesser writer becomes in this volume a keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time. The novel is an elegy, much like Alice McDermott’s That Night, about a vanished place and time and the loss of childhood innocence. And it is also a deeply affecting meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can be redeemed — slowly, grudgingly and in fragments — through love and acceptance.” NY Times book review

Journal Takes on Medical Mistakes: the first of a projected series of eight articles in which grave medical errors are reviewed and analyzed, with the doctors who committed them protected by anonymity, appears in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The series was inspired in part by a 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine, which found that mistakes in hospitals killed 44,000 to 98,000 patients a year. Departments within hospitals try to analyze their own errors, at regular “morbidity and mortality” conferences, but those sessions are private and are not written up in medical journals. Generally, the conferences are not discussed with patients. In an editorial about the new series, Dr. Wachter and his colleagues wrote that the medical profession — “for reasons that include liability issues and a medical culture that has discouraged open discussion of mistakes” — was not harnessing the full power of errors to teach. NY Times

Conflict of Interest?
However, is the concept of an independent, scholarly analysis of an aspect of medical practice, inspired simply by the lofty ideal of learning as much as we can from it for the betterment of patient care, an endangered species? Consider: Medical Journal Changes Independent Policy:

Is it a case of, ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em?’ The New England Journal of Medicine will announce Thursday that it has given up finding truly independent doctors to write and review articles and editorials for it, as a result of the financial ties physicians have with so many drug companies in the United States The Journal says the drug companies’ reach is just too deep. ABC News

This is truly bad news for the integrity of medical literature. Over the past two decades, as federal funding for medical research has dwindled dramatically, research has been increasingly ‘bought’ by pharmaceutical industry backing. Now the review and commentary end is getting bought too, it’s little stretch to say.

Americans Seized at Afghan Border, Pakistan Asserts: More U.S. passport bearers allied with al Qaeda? “The detentions of Americans would raise troubling questions for the Bush administration, which has already drawn criticism for not granting prisoner-of-war status to suspected Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan.” NY Times

Silently Shifting Personnel in Sex Abuse Cases: why should we be shocked to learn that school systems do it just like the Church?

Court Strikes Down Curb on Visits by Jehovah’s Witnesses: Nothing surprising about this 8-1 verdict against an idiotic ordinance by an Ohio town requiring a permit to go door-to-door. Oh yes, one surprising thing — that Clarence Thomas didn’t join William Rehnquist in an idiotic dissent to the majority opinion in which he found the law a valid approach to crime prevention.

Woman’s Murder Conviction in Mauling Case Is Overturned: “In a stunning reversal, a judge today threw out the murder conviction of a woman whose dog mauled a neighbor to death, letting stand the lesser convictions of involuntary manslaughter against the woman and her husband.” NY Times

Nicholas Kristof: Women’s Rights: Why Not? “We now have a window into what President Bush and America’s senators think of the world’s women: Not much.” NY Times op-ed

This Guy Still Finds the World Baffling. Blame the World. “Life doesn’t seem to be getting any less baffling for the monotonal comedian Steven Wright.” NY Times

The Soviet Smallpox Accident: “New information about an apparent accident in the former Soviet biological weapons testing program three decades ago has raised some troubling questions about our own nation’s ability to protect its citizens against a potential terrorist attack. The open-air test of a Soviet smallpox weapon in 1971 caused a small outbreak of the disease in a port on the Aral Sea, in what is now Kazakhstan, even among people who had been vaccinated.” NY Times editorial

We have Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution, writing in The Weekly Standard: The Elephant in the Sacristy:

The real problem facing the American Catholic church is that a great many boys have been seduced or forced into homosexual acts by certain priests; that these offenders appear to have been disproportionately represented in certain seminaries; and that their case histories open questions about sexuality that–verboten though they may have become–demand to be reexamined.

Then [thanks to Walker for the link] there’s Eric Raymond, armed & dangerous, with a powerfully worded self-professed determination to go ‘further than Ms. Eberstadt’:

I think this scandal is grounded in the essentials of Catholic doctrines about sex, sin, guilt, and authority. This is not an accidental corruption of the church, any more than Stalin was an accidental corruption of Communism. Bad moral ideas have consequences, and those consequences can be seen most clearly in the human monsters who are both created by those ideas and exploiters of them. There is a causal chain that connects loathsome creatures like the “Reverend” Paul Shanley directly back to the authoritarianism and anti-sexuality of St. Augustine; a chain well-analyzed by psychologists such as Stanley Milgram and Wilhelm Reich. I suggest that any religion that makes obedience to authority a primary virtue and pathologizes sex will produce abuses like these as surely as rot breeds maggots.

Raymond approaches his topic with the same misguided zeal I referred to in the comments I made several days ago about Joe Katzman’s Winds of Change, not only grappling with his topic but believing his brand of weblog is the only counter to the ‘dominant media culture’ (he uses this term repeatedly) which keeps homosexuality a ‘journalistically protected class.’ This, he thinks, allows him to get away with trotting out the same old tired homophobic stereotyping about the supposed ‘homosexuality/pederasty/pedophilia connection in gay culture.’ Pity, it seemed for a moment he might have kept to some useful angles on the Church scandal and the media. Instead, there is ridiculous rhetoric about things like (to take one phrase admittedly out of context) ‘the sort of university-educated gay men who wind up determining what’s on the front page of the New York Times.’

Study finds notable difference in musicians’ brains: “Musical experience was strongly related to larger amounts of grey matter in the region called the Heschl’s gyrus, which is part of the auditory cortex. The structure contained 536 to 983 cubic millimetres of grey matter in professionals, 189 to 798 cubic millimetres in amateurs, and 172 to 450 cubic millimetres in non-musicians.” Ananova

The Baby Boy Payoff:

More evidence that men are squealing little chauvinist piggies: It seems daddies not only shower their sons with more attention but also work harder and earn more money after the birth of a boy than they do after the birth of a girl.

At the same time, the sex of a child has no impact on the hours that women work outside the home or the wages they earn, reported economists Shelly Lundberg and Elaina Rose of the University of Washington. Washington Post

Next in the floodtide of books on weblogging, from O’Reilly Press, is Essential Blogging: Selecting and Using Weblog Tools by Cory Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Mena G. Trott, Benjamin Trott. Cory, of course, is boing boing, and Rael Domfest does raelity bytes.

With weblogs-or “blogs”-exploding all over the Web, the only thing lacking for power users and developers is detailed advice on how choose, install, and run blogging software. Written by leading bloggers, Essential Blogging includes practical advice and insider tips on the features, requirements, and limitations of applications such as Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Blosxom. This book will get you up and blogging in no time.

Bush’s Police state shifts into gear: “The treatment of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla is turning into a

Kafkaesque spectacle that should make all Americans nervous.” And:

A Watcher for the watchers: “Sen. Maria Cantwell makes a bold proposal to create a director

of privacy and civil liberties accountability, in the wake of new

FBI domestic spying guidelines.” AlterNet

Israel Has Sub-Based Atomic Arms Capability

Israel has acquired three diesel submarines that it is arming with newly designed cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, according to former Pentagon and State Department officials, potentially giving Israel a triad of land-, sea- and air-based nuclear weapons for the first time. Washington Post

Cheer for bush or get arrested, at OSU

West’s pollution ‘led to African droughts’ BBC

Nuclear Waste Route Atlas: how close to your home will the trucks be coming?  Environmental Working Group

“We won’t deny our consciences”: Prominent Americans have issued this statement on the war on terror. Guardian UK

Can a PC think for itself?

Day after day since 1984, teams of programmers, linguists, theologians, mathematicians and philosophers have plugged away at a $60 million project they hope will transform human existence: teaching a computer common sense.

They have been feeding a database named Cyc 1.4 million truths and generalities about daily life so it can automatically make assumptions humans make: Creatures that die stay dead. Dogs have spines. Scaling a cliff requires intense physical effort. CNN

Declan McCullagh writes a Farewell to a Net Freedom Fighter – Ironically, in this column about Stanton McCandlish’s retirement from the Electronic Frontier Foundation , he bids farewell himself to his Wired readers:

This is my last weekly notebook for Wired News.

It’s been a long run: I started writing for Wired News in 1998, and began this Saturday update from the nation’s capital soon afterward.

During that time, I’ve chronicled the growing intersection between politics and technology, writing about how the law has struggled to keep abreast of developments — often with disappointing results…

He’s going to CNET News as chief political correspondent, he explains in his Politech mailing list:

Besides our own network, News.com articles also appear on the New York Times, MSNBC, and Yahoo News sites. We have an agreement with the Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle to run our articles on their websites and in print — all of which means you’ll be able to find my articles in more places than before.

How to fight the terror networks:

‘John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt codified the strategy that helped the United States overthrow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. They believe that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida could still prevail if they got hold of weapons of mass destruction, and the US and its allies must prevent that acquisition. To do so, the US will have to change the nature of warfare.

(…)

That prompts the question of whether the US won the wrong war in Afghanistan, crushing the Taliban nation state, but allowing the al-Qaida network to slip through its grasp. It would be all the more serious for Washington if it turned out that by destroying one of al-Qaida’s main sanctuaries, it had in fact created more problems for itself. “When I think of an all-channel network operating in a sanctuary I want to leave it right there,” says Arquilla. “If I take the sanctuary, then it is going to hide in places I may never find. Simply, we must be looking around the world.” ‘ Le Monde Diplomatique

‘Modern art made me blue’. ‘Modern art has often been accused of being meaningless but could this mean it can bring on mental illness? A man who studied art theory and postmodernism at university says feelings of disengagement and alienation as a result of his studies caused him to suffer serious depression after graduation’:

“I felt that no activity had any more meaning than any other. I became seriously depressed. What was the point of concentrating on any activity if it had no real point? If you believed what we had been taught at university, everything had equal meaning. If you took this to its logical conclusion, everything meant nothing.”

BBC

[I would say that the disengaged, postmodern anomie of living in contemporary society may play a part in provoking existential depression, and of course that modern art reflects those conditions of living. However, it strikes me as unlikely that explicitly studying that art was as important a factor as the conditions of modern consciousness under which this man labored … as well as the likely biological vulnerability that also contributed to there being ‘an accident waiting to happen’. -FmH]

The Future of “History”: It is no longer possible to find it as controversial as when it appeared several short years ago, many argue, and it even appears self-evident at the moment, but is Samuel Huntington’s “culture clash” formulation unquestionably the more likely future than Francis Fukuyama’s incompatible notion of “pax democratia” ? Policy Review