Effects of Ethnicity on Psychiatric Diagnosis: do different rates at which various psychiatric illnesses are diagnosed in different ethnic groups represent real ethnic differences in the rates of various mental illnesses? ethnic differences in how the same mental illnesses present? or biases by diagnosticians? Psychiatric Times

Ant base is the first, online continuously-updated database of all 11,000 known ant species in the world. Social Insects Web (SIWeb) And a Wired article about Antbase.

Terrorism as Pretext:

“Terrorism, however, is more than violence. It is also the ultimate publicity stunt, and it did not take long before advertising and PR executives began to look for ways to use it as the ultimate news hook. Advertisers are using flags and patriotic imagery to sell everything from women’s fashions to cigarettes and fast food. Think tanks, lobbyists and Bush administration are using the terrorism as a pretext to justify their long-standing shopping list of bad ideas and corporate welfare measures…” PR Watch

Good (or Unwitting) Neighbors Make for Good Internet Access

“Many of the free rides these days are the result of bandwidth bleeding from private networks that are intended to let their owners connect to the Internet without being tethered to a fixed spot in a home or office.

Because the great majority of these wireless networks have not been secured, it is easy for neighbors and passers-by to use them undetected — although if enough freeloaders download large enough files, legitimate users will notice their own connections are been degraded.

The popularity of 802.11 has also begun to inspire the construction of networks that are intended to be shared, either free or for a fee.

” NY Times

What the heck is emo anyway?

Swiss Vote to Join UN, but EU Still Long Way Off: “Switzerland basked in a rare moment of international solidarity on Monday after voters abandoned centuries of political isolationism and narrowly agreed their neutral country should join the United Nations.” Reuters

Researcher: Hormone to blame for ‘irritable male syndrome’: “A sex expert reckons a condition in sheep known as irritable male syndrome may also occur in humans.

He says men who see their testosterone levels drop change their behaviour, becoming more grumpy and depressed.

It was first found in male Soay sheep whose behaviour changes when their male hormone level drops each winter.

Gerald Lincoln, of the Medical Research Council’s Human Reproductive Sciences Unit in Edinburgh, says the symptoms most resemble the so-called male menopause.” Ananova

The Random Insanity of Letters of Recommendation: “If tables of random numbers became fashionable for deciding on hires, tenurings, promotions, I suppose you, as a serious scholar, would object. And at least a table of random numbers is what it says: random. Why haven’t you objected to the system of letters, which has notably less integrity than a table of random numbers?” The Chronicle of Higher Education

David Gelernter: Paradoxes of painting: “The perceived possibilities of photography and postmodern art have killed painting. Still, it’s a great time to be a painter…” Prospect

Maureen Dowd: 60 Feet Under:

‘In a banner headline on Friday, The Washington Post blared: “Shadow Government Is at Work in Secret.” The article said President Bush had assembled a cadre of officials to operate under the radar, out of the sunlight.

This is news?

The president did that on Jan. 20, 2001.

But it turns out that after Sept. 11, wanting to make sure that everything wouldn’t collapse if there was a nuclear attack on Washington, he did it again. He formed a secret government within a secret government. A shadow of a shadow.

It suits this administration to a T- ball, reflecting its twin obsessions with secrecy and self-perpetuation.

‘ NY Times

“A brief history of Amherst, Massachusetts as selected from the police beat of the Amherst Bulletin”

Poetry Daily

“A brief history of Amherst, Massachusetts as selected from the police beat of the Amherst Bulletin”

Poetry Daily

“How many microbiologists does it take to change a light bulb?

Whatever you think the answer may be, change that light bulb soon. Microbiologists are dropping like flies. A career in microbiology can be harmful to your health — especially since 9-11.” [via Abuddhas Memes]

The Chocolate Messiah is coming, spreading his message about the best way to attain world peace.

The privatization of our culture: “The discoveries, eureka-moments, fables, characters, songs and jokes that form the only common ground we share as citizens — the set of ideas collectively known as “The West” — are now the property of a few multinational corporations. Our entire culture has fallen into private hands, taking with it our right to tell our stories, our right to keep our personal lives personal, even our right to heal our sick….

It need not be the end, however. Not if we as citizens, as Westerners, as participants in our own culture, can find the will and the resolve to reclaim what is ours.” Shift

Far Right Watch: Authorities Probe Assassination Plot: ‘A Montana militia organization was planning to assassinate as many judges, prosecutors and police officers as possible, amassing a weapons cache that included 30,000 rounds of ammunition, a targeted sheriff said.’ Washington Post Let’s not lull ourselves into a false sense of security reflecting on how halfbaked this plot sounds…

Prolific Sperm Donor’s Bad Gene: “A Dutch sperm donor who fathered 18 children is suffering from a rare hereditary degenerative brain disorder, a hospital said on Wednesday.

The man, whose sperm was used between 1989 and 1995, was not definitively diagnosed with cerebellar ataxia — which causes gradual shriveling of the cerebellum — until late 1998.The children conceived from his sperm, now aged between seven and 13, have a 50 percent chance of inheriting the disease, according to the hospital, which agonized for three years before deciding to tell the parents involved.” Wired [via Spike]

Stolen Restaurant Napkins Are Just a Start

As chefs have achieved celebrity status, dining out has become a theatrical event, with the setting and the props as thrilled over as the tuna tartare. Restaurants have become temples of design, filled with beautiful objects. And diners are helping themselves to more than just the bread. A lot more.

From $3 water glasses to $1,200 silver ice buckets, from vintage photographs hanging on the walls to scented candles burning in the bathrooms — if it isn’t nailed down, diners have walked off with it. Over the course of a year, restaurants around the country lose as much as 3 percent of their earnings to theft by customers who seem to be getting more brazen by the minute. Demitasse spoons, Peugeot pepper mills, imported wineglasses, Frette linens, framed artwork, serving platters, Champagne buckets. The list of stolen goods boggles the imagination. And the ways restaurateurs are coping with the phenomenon is changing the dining experience for everyone. NY Times

Koppel Is the Odd Man Out as ABC Woos Letterman, NightLine just isn’t relevant anymore; older, more literate, more informed viewers aren’t enough of a cash cow. If Letterman doesn’t emigrate, ABC might still move its latenight programming in the braindead direction of the other networks. A subsequent article makes it clear that ABC’s news division, blindsided by the plan, is quite fretful. NY Times Wake up and smell the coffee! Infotainment long ago supplanted sophisticated news coverage in the major media…

James Ridgeway: More on the claims by Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ working group on biological weapons, that the <a

href=”http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0209/ridgeway.php”>FBI has a prime suspect in the anthrax cases, has already interviewed him, etc. The FBI continues to stonewall on the claims, probably both because the case that follows would reveal the failure of security measures at US biological weapons facilities where the culprit worked, and because there might have to be discussion of secret bioweapons projects of whose existence the government would prefer the public not be aware. says Ridgeway in his Village Voice column. Is this plausible, however? Ashcroft is such a Machiavellian information gatekeeper, with such a disregard for the niceties of a free society or open inquiry, that I find it hard to believe the Justice Dept’s Good Fight against Terrorism would be stopped by free speech concerns.

Cassandra Wilson and Dee Dee Bridgewater Enter the Pantheon: “Can it be that little more than a decade ago, jazz singing was widely written off as a dead art? No one had come along to take the stages abandoned by Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Carmen McRae, though Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln had survived the wilderness years to reassert their own claims as supreme individualists in an uncrowded field.” Village Voice

A Boy Genius? Mother Admits Faking Tests, raising questions not only about the boy’s mother (he has been hospitalized with psychiatric problems and placed out of her care) but about the credulity of the psychological experts who pronounced him so gifted. NY Times

The F Scale: “an instrument that (yields) an estimate of fascist receptivity at the personality level.” Relieved to find my score wasn’t “…within normal limits; an appropriate score for an American.” Via Leslie Turek, with whose weblog I’ve become acquainted via my referrer log. She is a fellow Bostonian and appears to have been a campus contemporary of mine as an undergraduate. Leslie also points to this New York Times reminiscence on the 40th anniversary of Spacewar’s advent at MIT. Turek seems to have been there (“When I was a member of the MIT Science Fiction Society in the 60’s, I knew a bunch of people who used to hang out in the M.I.T. computer lab playing Spacewar, and a number of the names in the article are familiar to me. Many of them felt at the time that games were the true calling of computers”); I enjoyed it vicariously from afar, a decade later, via Stewart Brand’s “Fanatic Life & Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.”

University of Chicago students offer definitive answer to the change-a-lightbulb question. SF Chronicle

US, Afghan and coalition forces are being beaten back, with casualties, in a battle with at least 5000 al Qaeda and Taliban forces near Gardez on Saturday. Reuters

Tugboat: thanks to Phil Agre for this delightful blink. As the saying goes, don’t try this at home. [Have patience; lots of pictures, slow-loading, and you may have to click refresh and start over several times if it chokes on you…]

Have a Heart. We’ll Send the Bill: “Last weekend American moviegoers shelled out $23.6 million to watch John Q. Archibald, played by Denzel Washington, hold an emergency room hostage because his HMO wouldn’t spend $250,000 for his dying son’s heart transplant. One wonders how many hearts could have been purchased for that $23.6 million if the supply of organs for transplant were expanded through monetary incentives.

Sound ghoulish? Bear with me. The standing American policy of the distribution of transplant organs can be summarized in one proposition: It is divine to give, but evil to sell. Altruism is chic; individuals are encouraged to give their organs at death and even during life. And they do, chiefly to close family members. But trade is verboten: It is a criminal offense to sell organs, either during life or after death, to strangers.”Wall Street Journal Not that I support this, but unfortunately the WSJ is probably perfectly in tune with the sentiment of the times — that altruism is dead and that people will only do something for a stranger from pecuniary interest.

Dear Ann Coulter…

“I must confess that my heart sank when I read your latest column, “Mineta’s Bataan death march,” in which you criticize Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta for opposing the racial profiling of Arabs in U.S. airports.

It’s not so much that I have problems with your argument (though I do personally disagree with it). What I don’t get is why you tiptoed, quite un-Coulterlike, around your most striking point: That you’d like to see Mineta dead…” –Chris Mooney The American Prospect

“It took all of seven days to shut down the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence — roughly the same amount of time that anyone actually knew it existed.

Controversy over OSI originally heated up following a New York Times story suggesting the office might spread false reports to the foreign press or run “black” propaganda campaigns. After taking a beating over this — as critics barked that the U.S. shouldn’t lie to the rest of the world — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pulled the plug. Indeed, it was all over so quickly, the debate over OSI didn’t really progress far enough for anyone to bother asking whether office would actually have been very good at duping anyone.

A look back at some of the low points of U.S. psychological warfare, however, suggests that this might have been by far the more salient criticism.” The American Prospect

The American Prospect

shares with us a frustrated 12-year veteran EPA official’s letter of resignation to Christie Todd Whitman, which provides an insider’s confirmation of what is already abundantly clear to outside observers — that delays, budget cuts and the coddling of industry by the Bush dysAdministration have hobbled US environmental protection, perhaps irrevocably.

Our Man Musharraf

Few people did not feel outrage and sadness at news of the death of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Indeed, according to Colin Powell, Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s dictator, “took it pretty hard because he was trying to do everything he could to keep [the murder] from happening.” Echoing Powell, State Department flack Richard Boucher characterized Musharraf’s efforts at finding the missing journalist as “full-edged and full-bore.”

Diplomacy certainly requires a degree of circumspection and linguistic sleight of hand. However, that the aforementioned comments appeared in a February 23 Washington Post story — under the headline “U.S. Praises Musharraf’s Battle Against Terrorism; Powell, Others Applaud Pakistani Leader’s Efforts on Behalf of Slain American Reporter” — leaves us wondering if the Post isn’t aspiring to the status of “semiofficial newspaper,” happily serving as handmaiden to U.S. government policy. Because not only is the story bereft of any sentiment remotely critical of Musharraf — whom numerous scholars, diplomats, and intelligence agents see as yet another Pakistani strongman playing both sides against the middle in the “War on Terrorism” — but it doesn’t mention Musharraf’s derogatory and deranged remarks on the Pearl case, which were quoted in the Post a few weeks earlier. The American Prospect

KaZaA to Sen. Biden: the RIAA is lying to you PoliTech

Nearest Galaxy Ripped from Another, Study Suggests

The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, our closest neighbor at just 75,000 light-years away, was only found in 1994. The density of stars in our Milky Way can obscure astronomers’ views of the satellite galaxies, making it harder to study some regions the local universe than to examine much more distant groups of stars that exist along clear lines of sight.

Since the discovery of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, researchers have noticed that some of its younger stars are strikingly similar to stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, another satellite galaxy that sits just a bit further out in space.

Now a study led by Patrick Cseresnjes of the Paris Observatory shows strong similarities in a certain class of old stars seen in both of these satellite galaxies. Cseresnjes thinks the evidence may point to a common ancestor, a larger galaxy that was ripped apart to form both the Large Magellanic Cloud and the nearer Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, or Sgr as astronomers call it. space.com via Yahoo!

Hubble’s Hands-on Overhaul: “NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is getting a midlife makeover.

Shuttle Columbia’s crew are ready to set sail on a fourth service call to the Earth circling observatory since it was placed in orbit in April 1990. It’s tool time for teams of spacewalkers trained to carry out a $172 million modernization job on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This latest renovation effort includes: Installing a more powerful picture-taking camera; outfitting the telescope with new solar arrays; plugging in a fresh power control unit; and attaching experimental cooling gear to rejuvenate HST’s infrared vision.” space.com [via Yahoo!]

Study: Most Had Radioactive Exposure: “Radioactive fallout from Cold War nuclear testing exposed virtually everyone in the United States, and contributed to about 11,000 cancer deaths, an unpublished study by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concludes.

The radioactive exposure also contributed to a minimum of 22,000 U.S. cancer cases overall, according to a progress report the CDC provided Congress last year. The report first came to light in USA Today on Thursday. Reuters Health

Mother Said to Smuggle Saw Blades to Jailed Son. Watching too many movies?

A woman was arrested in Oklahoma on Thursday for trying to smuggle hacksaw blades inside a Bible to her jailed son who was only recently recaptured after escaping from prison, authorities said.

Tawana Cherese Smith, 54, was arrested in southern Oklahoma near the town of Waurika after authorities said they found the blades in the spine of a Bible she brought to her son, Joshua Bagwell.

Smith, an attorney who has been representing her son, was also found to be carrying two assault rifles in her pickup truck, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said.

Shadow Government Activated for U.S.: ‘A “shadow government” consisting of 75 or more senior officials has been living and working secretly outside Washington since Sept. 11 in case the nation’s capital is crippled by terrorist attack. “This is serious business,” President Bush said of plans to ensure the continuity of government.’ AP As usual, profound comment from the Buffoon-Elect.

Good Doobies in the War-on-Terrorism®: Gun Owners Rally Around Man Denied A Computer By Dell Newsbytes

Meet the Marquis de Sade of the puzzle world (who “says he dreams of being a former crossword constructor, but it’s not clear what else he would do.”)

He lives and works in Brooklyn now, not far from Prospect Park, in a small wooden house so barricaded to guests that he barely lets the cable man in. “I’m the guy that inspired the phrase ‘Doesn’t play well with others,’ ” he says. On most days, he wakes up by seven, does a word search to get his eyes focussed, and then spends the day shuttling between his crossword grids, his reference books, and the television. More and more crossword constructors are relying on computer programs and data bases of common clues. Hook uses only a pencil (“A computer looks really stupid tucked behind your ear”), yet he has been known to come up with twenty-four crosswords and write more than fifteen hundred clues in three days.

[…] Crosswords aren’t so different from life, one constructor told me. You start out floundering in a void, plagued by questions. And then, little by little, you begin to find answers. You build gradually on your knowledge, or make mistakes and double back, and pretty soon you find that everything is connected to everything else. But if crosswords can be addictive—if some people love them nearly to the point of folly—it may be because real life hardly enters into them. Here every problem has a solution, and pain, disease, violence, and despair never make it to the grid. “When you solve a crossword, you don’t want death or Nazis thrown in your face,” Will Shortz says. “If there is a seventy-year-old woman who is filling out the grid and she’s got ‘__uck,’ I can’t imagine making her add an ‘F.’ ”

[I’m grateful for David’s feeding me blinks like this from The New Yorker!]

“An analysis of suspected radioactive substances seized in Afghanistan has found nothing to prove that Osama bin Laden reached his decade-long goal of acquiring nuclear materials for a bomb, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing administration officials.

The government’s analysis of suspicious canisters, computer discs and documents suggests that bin Laden and al Qaeda may have been duped by black-market weapons swindlers selling crude containers hand-painted with skulls and crossbones and perhaps dipped in medical waste, the Times reported.” Reuters We all chuckled over the report several months ago that the bomb-making plans al Qaeda had obtained turned out to be spoofs from a scientific humor magazine too. It’s appealing to think of these people as easily fooled buffoons, but they only get swindled until they wise up, and it only takes once…

U.S. Broadens Terror Fight, Readying Troops for Yemen

Yemen is just the latest partner in an increasingly broad campaign that has expanded well beyond Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf, the Philippines and potentially to Georgia and Indonesia as well.

It comes as Democrats have become increasingly restless about the military moves, complaining that the administration has demanded virtually unlimited funds without providing a clear road map of the worldwide military effort. NY Times

Radical New Views of Islam and the Origins of the Koran

The reverberations have affected non-Muslim scholars in Western countries. “Between fear and political correctness, it’s not possible to say anything other than sugary nonsense about Islam,” said one scholar at an American university who asked not to be named, referring to the threatened violence as well as the widespread reluctance on United States college campuses to criticize other cultures. NY Times

Spacecraft Sees Possible Frozen Water on Surface of Mars: “Pictures of Mars released today by NASA show areas of hydrogen, in blue, which could indicate the presence of ice on the planet.” NY Times

“A long-awaited computer program that can circumvent government censorship of the internet has debuted at a computer conference in the US.

The program – Peekabooty – promises to give people in countries such as China and Saudi Arabia safe access to the whole of the internet. In these countries, internet access is controlled by government-operated ISPs, which blacklist certain web sites. This may include news sites that are deemed unsympathetic to government policy.” New Scientist

Brainstorming next year’s PC: “A year and a half from now, desktops and notebooks should be noticeably different.

Intel, in conjunction with PC and component makers, is trying to usher in design standards for computers that, ideally, would result in more stylish and versatile machines, according to executives at the Intel Developer Forum here. Wireless networking, for instance, will likely be a standard feature in mainstream computers by the second half of 2003, and both notebooks and desktops will be smaller and lighter by then.” CNET

G. Pascal Zachary (former staff correspondent for the Wall Street Journal for 12 years and currently a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism):

The Lesson of Daniel Pearl’s Death: “Instead of asking journalists to toe the Pentagon’s line, our

government must allow reporters to keep their impartial

distance — or more men like Daniel Pearl may end up dead.” AlterNet

And, from Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, The Death of Daniel Pearl: “…(I)t was without rancor that I noted the platitudinous manner in which Daniel Pearl’s superiors at The Wall Street Journal, Peter Kann and Paul Steiger, responded to the shocking news of his murder. They reached for what the emotional folkways of America could give them. Their statement of February 22 strived for dignity. It surpassed its objective: what Kann and Steiger said was excessively dignified, in a way that might be harmful to a proper analysis of the outrage in Karachi.”

Have iPod, Will Secretly Bootleg: ‘When Apple introduced the iPod, the company was aware that people might use it to rip off music from the Net or friends’ machines… But it is unlikely that Apple imagined people would walk into computer stores, plug their iPod into display computers and use it to copy software off the hard drives.’ Wired

Doomsday clock moved closer

The hands of the Doomsday Clock, for 55 years a symbol of nuclear danger, were moved two minutes closer to midnight Wednesday, reflecting the possibility of terrorism, relations between India and Pakistan, and other threats.

The symbolic clock, kept by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, had been set at 11:51 since 1998. It was moved to 11:53 p.m.

George A. Lopez, the publication’s chairman of the board, said it has never been moved in response to a single event.

Still, he said, the attacks of Sept. 11 combined with evidence that terrorists were attempting to obtain the materials for a crude nuclear weapon should have served as a wake-up call to the world. He said the world has focused on short-term security rather than solving long-term problems. Salon

Many thanks to randomWalks for pointing me to this essay about Wasabi, the prized Japanese condiment. Once tasted, you will never be content with the inferior horseradish-based imitation used in American sushi restaurants. It appears that it offers not only a transcendent culinary experience but may have transcendent medicinal properties as well.

A Sober Documentary About an Intoxicating Life: New York Times review of a new film biography of Ram Dass (Richard Alpert). I haven’t seen the film yet but, from the review, it’s hard to understand if it’s the filmmaker or the reviewer who hasn’t understood Ram Dass’ life. As would be the temptation in a film about him, it appears that it gives in to three sorts of superficial spectacle — that of the “vanished time” of “long- haired youths cavorting on the family golf course while the beaming, bearded guru strolls shirtless among his initiates, gingerly adjusting the ankles of those standing on their heads”; of Alpert’s current post-stroke (diminished? one would really want to know, from a reliable source…) presence; and of his grief-counseling work .

Remarkably, the film appears not to touch upon the significance of Be Here Now at all. The reviewer appears to use this point as an excuse for a tangential reflection on how

…”BE HERE NOW” is, in essence, a simple description of what movies do, 24 frames a second. What other medium gives you access to such rapturous nowness — the quality of sustained immediacy, an immersion in the moment, reality revealed as a weave of subjective sensation? Being here now is the primary miracle drawing us to the most exciting documentary films…

which leads him to a misguided comparison with a film on “another quixotic, modern-day near- saint, the Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist”. That’s what you get, I suppose, when you let a filmmaker rather than a cultural historian or a philosopher do such a review.

Ram Dass’ life deserves to be viewed through the lens of spiritual quest and both the psychological and sociological tensions that develop between an attempt at wholesale devotion and the late-20th century American social context that both nurtured and devalued that quest. For example, thinking about him as someone who had “one guru” instead of a succession of influences might have led to the film’s apparent failure to grapple with one of the most important episodes in Ram Dass’ public life — his complicated prostration at the feet of a spiritual leader named Joya who had been a Queens, NY housewife and whom he ultimately repudiated as a sham — which would have yielded documentary riches about yearning, credulity, and humility, about the dialectic between ego and transcendence.

Speaking of humility, it is not even clear if the film understands the arc from a quest to find a way to be here now to the radical devotion to the alleviation of suffering Ram Dass has practiced, the Ram Dass of later books like How Can I Help? (which I searched for on the net but does not appear to be in print any longer). What is the significance of such compassion? How possible is it? How genuine? How selfless? How much does it matter? (As an aside, did Ram Dass manage to survive the American spiritual epidemic of pseudo-humble but ego-ridden spiritual leaders falling in disgrace to scandal when the discrepancy betwen their deeds and their words became clear?)

And finally, given his dedication to grief counseling and preparing people for their mortality, how does Ram Dass face the end of his own life after a near-fatal stroke? Does the film, or the reviewer (as it appears from reading this essay), irresponsibly suggest that Ram Dass’ hallucinogen use contributed to his stroke? And, by the way, what in hindsight is the relationship between psychedelic exploration and Eastern spirituality?

Perhaps I’m expecting too much from a film. Grappling with these themes might only be done justice in a print biography. But, of course, I’m totally offbase commenting without having seen the film. If, despite the review, it shows a sophisticated, interwoven and reverent grasp of Ram Dass, I’d be pleased and surprised.

The USA Register: “Today we officially launch a North American version of The Register for our 850,000 readers in the US and Canada. It’s at a different URL – http://www.theregus.com in partnership with Tom’s Hardware Guide…

It’s just like The Register UK in style and (mostly) content – only without so many stories about BT and UK broadband. We will also be running stories that Americans may find more interesting than their European counterparts.”

TiVO-ize your PC: “…time shifting capabilities have come to the PC…(The) CEO of thirteen-man SnapStream, took his PVS software through its paces for The Register’s pleasure.

It does two clever things. First it does the job of a DVR (digital video recorder) like a ReplayTV or a TiVO, complete with the electronic program guide. Secondly it streams live or recorded streams to a portable device across an 802.11 network.”

Scan yourself to see if you are infected with any of a number of potent memetic viruses.

Plep blinks to Raven’s Bread: A Newsletter for Hermits, tweaking my curiosity: does a web-connected hermit feel any less in line with her/his intention to live at a remove from others?

Coming One Day Near You — a Mega-Tsunami: “One day, a giant wave traveling at 125 mph across open water could crash into Sydney harbor, wipe out the beaches of California or plough across the golf courses of northeast Scotland.

Mega-tsunamis have happened with greater frequency than modern science would like to believe, and no coastline in the world is safe, says Canadian geologist-geographer Edward Bryant.” Yahoo!

Report: Cheney security plan lost; Secret Service agents souvenir shopping left it in a skateboard shop. The store owner called to alert the Secret Service but no one came to pick it up as promised, so he called again and offered to take it to them, requesting an autographed pic of the vice president for his trouble. They refused, so he gave the document to the press. USA Today [I’m indebted to Ray for pointing me to this bauble of the day!]

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse: “A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and University of San Francisco law school clinics.

Do you know your online rights? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, this site is for you.

These pages will help you understand the protections intellectual property laws and the First Amendment give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we’ve noticed that not everyone feels the same. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence online users. Certainly intellectual property rights should be respected — and we hope this site will aid you in doing so — but they shouldn’t be misused to impede legitimate activity…”

The Libertarian Party’s powerful anti-WoD* ad is a rejoinder to the disgusting ads the US aired during the Superbowl drawing the equation between teenage drug use and World Trade Center deaths. (.pdf download, requires Adobe Acrobat Reader) David Farber, on his IP mailing list, has an amusing anecdote about the Libertarians contacting him for a photo of ‘drug czar’ John Walters for the ad, as the White House had refused to provide them with a publicity shot.
*War-on-Drugs

“How’s Your News? is a documentary film which features a team of five news reporters with mental and physical disabilities. We all met at a summer camp in Massachusetts. To make How’s Your News? we drove across America in a hand-painted RV, interviewing the people we met along the way.” The link is to the project’s homepage and includes a FAQ (e.g. “Is this project exploitation?”). Here’s a Village Voice review from October 2001.

Is Weblog Technology Here to Stay or Just Another Fad? “…perhaps undermining the hegemony of global media giants.” I like that… New York Times [thanks, Abby] Kottke’s answer: to wonder if the universe of weblogs is an emergent system:

One possible answer is that the collective act of weblogging is producing a basic form of journalism, which you might call “bottom-up journalism” or “peer-to-peer journalism”.

It works like this: individual webloggers, each acting in their own self-interest (the “simple-minded component parts” Johnson refers to), post bits of information to their weblogs.

Then the feedback loop starts. Readers and other webloggers take those initial bits of information, rework them, and feed them back into the system in the form of weblog posts, email feedback, or comments on individual weblog posts. Rinse. Repeat.

At the end of the line, in some instances, you eventually get a story that has been collectively edited by the system. Repeat this process millions of times a month with hundreds of thousands of participants, and you’ll get a few such stories a month. [thanks, David]

Report: Americans Would Be Outraged If They Understood Enron Collapse. David sent this to me, wondering quite rightly if The Onion has gone somewhere else beyond satire.

Tim Wise: The Invisible Whiteness of the Olympic Beer Riot: ‘When white folks rioted over beer at the Olympics, it was

laughed off in a “gee, don’t they have anything better to do”

way. What if blacks or latinos had done the same?’ AlterNet

Resisting Bush’s War: Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D.-OH) becomes the first member of Congress to openly repudiate Bush’s war, the “axis of evil”, etc:

“We licensed a response to those who helped bring the terror of September the Eleventh. But we the people and our elected representatives must reserve the right to measure the response, to proportion the response, to challenge the response, and to correct the response.

Because we did not authorize the invasion of Iraq.

We did not authorize the invasion of Iran.

We did not authorize the invasion of North Korea.

We did not authorize the bombing of civilians in Afghanistan.

We did not authorize permanent detainees in Guantanamo Bay.

We did not authorize the withdrawal from the Geneva Convention.

We did not authorize military tribunals suspending due process and habeas corpus.

We did not authorize assassination squads.

We did not authorize the resurrection of COINTELPRO.

We did not authorize the repeal of the Bill of Rights.

We did not authorize the revocation of the Constitution.

We did not authorize national identity cards.

We did not authorize the eye of Big Brother to peer from cameras throughout our cities.

We did not authorize an eye for an eye. Nor did we ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan.

We did not authorize the administration to wage war anytime, anywhere, anyhow it pleases.

We did not authorize war without end.

We did not authorize a permanent war economy…”

AlterNet

NPR’s The Connection hosted Bruce Cockburn on Feb. 11th; the page includes a link to listen to the hour-long show in Real Audio.

‘Rumsfeld’s new press corps has been cooking up headlines for

foriegn papers, such as “Loud Explosion Heard Last Night Was Not

American Bomb; dead civilians later found to just be real sleepy.” ‘ AlterNet But, alas:

Rumsfeld Says He May Drop New Office of Influence: “Mr. Rumsfeld today reiterated comments he made last week after The New York Times reported the office’s existence and proposed activities: he said the military would not be permitted to tell lies to promote American policies or views. But he said today that the disclosures about the office’s potential activities may have doomed its credibility.” NY Times

US faces European ban over death penalty: “The United States faces possible exclusion from the Council of Europe, where it enjoys observer status, over its continued use of the death penalty, a council spokeswoman said Friday.

The comments follow a decision of the council’s Committee of Ministers on Thursday to ban the death penalty in all circumstances, including for crimes committed during war and the imminent threat of war.” United Press International

“I’ll be ever’where–wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’–I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build–why, I’ll be there. See?” –Tom Joad, in Grapes of Wrath

Wednesday is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Steinbeck (Feb. 27, 1902 — Dec. 20, 1968).

In Forest Debris, the Odor of Dead Monarchs: “Walking up the steep path through what remains of the montane forest at the Rosario sanctuary, it is hard at first to notice the monarch butterflies everywhere. Then the wind shifts and the smell of rotting insect corpses hits the steady stream of tourists going by. What had seemed at first to be fallen leaves and forest debris reveals itself as a lumpy carpet of millions of butterflies that perished in the largest known die-off ever of these insects.” NY Times

Operation on Fetus’s Heart Valve Called a ‘Science Fiction’ Success. His heart was a ‘moving target the size of a grape…’ NY Times

Bin Laden Alive? Top General Thinks So: ‘Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden may be alive despite U.S. efforts to kill or capture the al Qaeda leader, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday.

“It’s possible that he is no longer alive, but I think the odds are he probably is alive,” Myers said on Fox News Sunday…

The New York Times reported on Sunday that unidentified U.S. administration officials said they have new indications that bin Laden is living along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.’ Reuters via Yahoo! News

Also: The Telegraph UK

reports that US and British special forces are “hunting for Osama bin Laden in the Indian state of Kashmir after intelligence reports stated that he had sought the protection of an extremist Islamic group…” The paper’s anonymous source said, ‘He knows we are not going to start bombing the area or sending in the marines, but there are lots of other things we can do and if he is alive he is definitely not safe.’

Angola Displays Body of Slain Rebel Leader Jonas Savimbi; they finally got him. What will be the next stage of this bizarre on-again-off-again 25-year civil war involving, among others, a Cuban expeditionary force fighting South Africans as Cold War proxies?

“It’s not that consumers won’t tell you what’s on their minds. It’s that they can’t.”

Penetrating the Mind by Metaphor. This market researcher well-versed in neuroscience holds the rights to the first patented market research technology. He makes an insightful, if insidious point, that there is an inherent contradiction between conventional market research — in which subjects are supposed to tell you how a consumer would respond to a pitch or a product — and the fact that most marketing and advertising tactics work on an unconscious level, so that the consumer does not know what s/he thinks, and most product reaction is imagery not easily verbally conveyed. Hence, better manipulation of your buying habits is forthcoming.

U.S. drops pledge on nukes: “The Bush administration is no longer standing by a 24-year-old U.S. pledge not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, a senior administration official said yesterday.” Washington Times There is nothing to say with more than four letters to capture my indignation at this latest from this illegitimate, monumentally incompetent dysadministration which represents one of the greatest threats to the survival of the human race we’ve ever had in office.

E-mails detail Indiana Guard ‘ghosts’: “Evidence continues to grow that National Guard units across the country are undermanned and have faked their troop level reports to Washington for years in order to protect their flow of federal money and to hide their inability to retain troops.: USA Today [via Red Rock Eaters]

“It’s not that consumers won’t tell you what’s on their minds. It’s that they can’t.”

Penetrating the Mind by Metaphor. This market researcher well-versed in neuroscience holds the rights to the first patented market research technology. He makes an insightful, if insidious point, that there is an inherent contradiction between conventional market research — in which subjects are supposed to tell you how a consumer would respond to a pitch or a product — and the fact that most marketing and advertising tactics work on an unconscious level, so that the consumer does not know what s/he thinks, and most product reaction is imagery not easily verbally conveyed. Hence, better manipulation of your buying habits is forthcoming.

Paul Krugman: “Celebrating victory well in advance seems to be the style lately. And that includes the economic front. Both the administration and many business leaders have taken a modest improvement in economic indicators as proof that the economy is poised for full recovery. They could be right — but don’t count on it.” NY Times

The Zen TV Experiment: “I want you to watch TV with acute awareness, mindfulness and precision. This experiment is about observing television scientifically, with Beginner’s Mind, rather than watching television passively with programmed mind. Ordinarily, if you are watching TV you can’t also observe and experience the experience of watching TV. When we watch TV we rarely pay attention to the details of the event. In fact, we rarely pay attention.” Adbusters

Dennis Mahoney: How to Write a Better Weblog : “After posting my own short list of things that ought to be banned from weblogs, I realized that a list of things to be encouraged would be more useful. ” A List Apart

Microsoft Admits XP Media Player Spies on Users: “Microsoft has confirmed that the Windows XP version of its Windows Media Player is programmed to track which CDs users listen to and which DVDs they watch. The company also has altered its privacy statement to admit that its player software tracks DVD content, which was not previously mentioned.

However, the company downplayed privacy concerns. For example, Microsoft disputed claims by snooping software watchdog Richard Smith that Windows Media Player 8, which comes bundled with Windows XP, cannot be turned off and poses a threat to privacy because of its tracking capabilities.

Privacy advocates said the media player’s capabilities fly in the face of Microsoft’s “trustworthy computing” initiative, a new dedication to security and privacy that the company announced last month.” NewsFactor

Privacy Watch: Rental agency hit for spying on speeders: “A Connecticut car rental company that used satellites to track customers and then charge them for speeding was ordered Wednesday to pay back the $10,000 total to the drivers it fined.

The Connecticut Consumer Protection Commission said that Acme Rent-a-Car’s practice of assessing customers $150 each time they crossed the speed limit violated the law.

The company tracked the customers’ driving habits through global positioning devices that many rental agencies use to locate their vehicles in case they are stolen or taken across state or national borders.” C/net

Professor touts plan to train agents on campus: “A former CIA director is encouraging a Kansas University professor to move forward with a plan the professor says will help prevent future terrorist attacks on the United States.

Felix Moos, a KU anthropology professor, is promoting a plan to create ROTC-like programs on university campuses to train future national security and intelligence officers.” Lawrence (KS) Journal-World

Star trek criteria: ‘Interstellar travellers should be “motivated, tolerant and nice”.’ Nature

Ripping yarn: How did From Hell play in Whitechapel, scene of the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders the film depicts? sp!ked

Post-radical depression: “We all know about ‘Chick Lit’ – the phenomenon of young female writers getting big advances for novels based on the singleton lives of themselves and their friends.

What’s next, it seems, is ‘Guilt-trip Lit’, where the menopausal mothers of the women’s fiction world turn their attention to the fucked-up lives of their grown-up children’s generation.” sp!ked

Myths of immunity: Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, the medical columnist for sp!ked, continues with important reflections on the sociocultural context of healthcare. I wrote last month about his concerns, which echo my own, about the meaning of unquestioning acceptance of the validity and extent of ‘chronic fatigue syndrome.’ Now he considers the metaphorical significance of widespread fears about side effects of MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccination.

The term ‘immune system’ is now so familiar that it has the aura of a medical or scientific concept that has been around since the seventeenth century. In fact, the term is scarcely 30 years old. It was first used, by the immunologist Niels Jerne, at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology in 1967 (2). As Anne Marie Moulin, a historian of immunology explains, the term was introduced as a pragmatic device to hold together two contending factions within the discipline

.

Study Finds Utah Leads Nation in Antidepressant Use: “Some point to the pressures of Mormonism, especially for women, to explain the surprising findings.” LA Times

CD-rom of key Nato secrets feared sold: “The United States military’s European Command last night appealed for the return of a CD-rom said to be packed with a wealth of secret military information on the Balkans.

In a report to be published today, the German magazine Stern said the disk had turned up in a laptop computer auctioned on the internet.” Guardian UK

Lioness adopts another antelope: “A Kenyan lioness which perplexed wildlife experts last month by adopting a newborn antelope astonished them again on Valentine’s Day by taking on another.

Game wardens at Samburu National Park say the lioness spent yesterday lying down with the delicate oryx calf in the shade of an acacia tree, grooming it and warding off predators.” Guardian UK

If you hate to receive snail mail, you can arrange to redirect your mail deliveries to this new service which will scan them in and send them to you as email. Optionally, they’ll filter out your junkmail before sending.

Boarding Games: “…I decided to spend an entire day at the airport — or as long as I could bear — ambling from gate to gate and recording exactly how many people were searched, how the ethnic composition of the searchees compared to that of the flight overall. The good folks at Los Angeles International Airport have apparently observed a dangerous pro-terrorism bias in the press, for they will not let even credentialed journalists past the security checkpoints. Unless, of course, they have tickets. So I was forced to buy the cheapest one I could find and go undercover as a ticketed passenger, a guise that I figured I’d have little trouble pulling off. Who notices a white man with a laptop in an airport?” LA Weekly [via Spike Report]

Wendy Kaminer: On the Contrary… “As the Bush administration is learning… attempts by presidents to keep public information private are likely to attract press attention and lawsuits. Lesser officials keep secrets with less public scrutiny.” The American Prospect

Michael Kinsley: The absurd controversy over mammograms Slate

A reader pointed me to Snopes’ coverage of the Dr Pepper controversy about which I wrote yesterday. [thanks, Kareem] Snopes points out that the words “under God” were not part of the Pledge of Allegiance as originally written, but added by an act of Congress in 1954. I seem to recall earlier controversies about the phrase, perhaps from militant atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair? I stopped reciting the Pledge of Allegiance decades ago — not, as you might imagine, because of finishing school but in response to my opposition to the Vietnam War. [Up on stage as the valedictorian at my high school graduation ceremony, I shocked the 1200 graduating seniors’ families (and my own family…) by conspicuously remaining seated as the Pledge was recited. Part of my fifteen minutes of fame, I suppose. I also spurned Gen. William Westmoreland’s offered handshake on nationwide TV…] But if the Pledge were a part of community life these days, it’d be important to antagonize the God-fearing fundamentalist Shrub-types by conspicuously omitting the phrase. Why not write a letter to Dr Pepper telling them you know it was disingenuous of them to say they left out the offending phrase out of space considerations, when clearly they were trying to be ecumenical and avoid controversy, but that you applaud their action and that, even if the boycott doesn’t amount to anything, you’re going to drink more of their product to show your support? [Only half-serious, of course, but only half-joking… -FmH]

What can animals teach us about staying healthy? “A great deal, argues Cindy Engel. Animals, she says, are constantly self-medicating, eating anything from charcoal to leaves to ward off illness and to treat sickness. An animal behaviourist at the Open University, Engel came upon the new science of animal health while searching for a cure for her own illness. Now she has brought together all the knowledge of the field in a book. She tells Maggie McDonald a few secrets from the animal world–such as what leads sheep in the Shetlands to bite the heads off live Arctic tern chicks.” New Scientist

Bill Gates Could Save Buenos Aires: “The hoodlums running Argentina have devalued the peso and, in the bargain, seized dollars on deposit in that country. …(T)he authorities have discredited not only money but banking. In a wink they have bombed their economy back to the Stone Age. How can an economy work without a medium of exchange? For a money supply Argentineans might as well use large round boulders of the sort formerly in circulation on the island of Yap.

Nothing that government can say or do about money will have any credibility, so salvation must come from outside. It could come in the form of software. I envision Microsoft as savior of the dispossessed in Latin America.” Forbes [requires free registration or use login:fmhreader, password: fmhreader]

“A biological weapons control expert yesterday refused to back down from her claim that the FBI has a prime suspect in last autumn’s deadly anthrax letters episode, despite strenuous denials by the bureau. She speculated that FBI agents might still be building their case against the suspect and possible accomplices.” New Jersey Online

Two PAC missiles fail to hit target in US land-based missile defense test

Enlisting Ice as an Ally of Skiers and Aircraft

Victor F. Petrenko, a professor at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College, proposes using the electrical principle that makes ice so difficult to remove from sidewalks to create electronic brakes to slow skiers or snowboarders automatically before they get into trouble. The technology can also be used to improve the grip of snow tires or, when applied in reverse, cause ice to burst off windshields, road surfaces or airplane wings at the push of a button.

… “Ice is very much misunderstood,” he said. “We don’t know much about its properties.”

Ice is one of the unusual semiconductors in which electrical charges are conducted by moving protons instead of electrons. It was that property of ice that particularly intrigued Dr. Petrenko.

“I thought that if you exchange very light particles such as electrons with protons, it must have some significant consequences,” he said. “It seemed that if we could somehow change the electrical properties of ice, we should be able to change its mechanical properties — and vice versa.” NY Times

Is US creating another ObL?: ‘With the cementing of a new US-Uzbek alliance as part of the “war against terror”, America is bolstering one of the former Soviet Union’s least-known, but most repressive, dictatorships.’ Red Pepper