Episode at Trade Center Assumes Mythic Qualities: “(T)he artists have gone coy. Their

dealer, who witnesses say watched the

event from a hotel suite, now claims it never happened. Either the balcony

was an elaborate hoax meant to look real, or the inverse is true: it really

happened, and the closer it comes to being found out, the more those

involved would prefer for everyone to think it was a hoax.” New York Times via Abby [Thanks, Abby, watching for interesting links for me in my absence…]

Follow Me Here will be on vacation until Labor Day weekend as my family and I set off for parts unknown. Please frequent your favorite independent content provider in the meanwhile. Consider the sites in my sidebar to the left. Enjoy the rest of your summer and thanks for your continued support.

Men Cut Off Fingers in Protest

Twenty South Korean men chopped off their little fingers on Monday in a macabre public protest hours before Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited a Tokyo shrine to war dead.

Standing in pouring rain in front of the Independence Gate in Seoul, the men took it in turns to chop off their fingers with small guillotines laid on the ground after shouting slogans against Koizumi’s plan to visit the Yasukuni Shrine.

The burly men, wearing black tee-shirts and headbands declaring they were “prepared to die to save the country,” laid their severed digits in a South Korean flag which was wrapped and then tied in a knot.

Their maimed hands tended to and bandaged — each man cut off one finger — the men again shouted slogans without showing any sign of pain.

A reporter for South Korea’s YTN television said the men identified themselves as members of a martial arts group.

But Korean martial arts authorities said they had not heard of the group and local news photographers who witnessed the incident told Reuters the men appeared to be gangsters, identifiable by their short-cropped hair and language.

Cutting off a little finger is a method Japan’s “yakuza” mobsters use to atone for mistakes.

The protest, triggered by Japan’s war-time atrocities in occupied Korea, failed to stop Koizumi from paying homage at Yasukuni. The shrine honors Japanese war dead, including convicted war criminals from World War Two. excitenews

Maker Chose Not to Act to Reduce Abuse of OxyContin: “The maker of the widely abused

narcotic painkiller OxyContin knew

that other companies had used a chemical

safeguard to reduce misuse of their products but decided not to take

similar steps before marketing the drug, company officials said

yesterday.” New York Times

Quintessential cool: “In the world of music, here’s what it is, who’s got it and who needs it.” SF Chronicle

“Independents’ Day is a concept. ID is a goal. We plan to promote, support, and increase public awareness of independent content and design through live events, digital events, and crass, unashamed manipulation of the mainstream media.”

Mark Twain’s Covert War with His Maker — “When Mark Twain died in 1910, he was an international superstar and an American institution. He was cheered at home and abroad for his droll wit, frontier bluffness, and corn-pone wisdom. ..

Only a handful of intimates knew this revered creator of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Huck Finn had died a bilious adversary of the Almighty.” unquiet mind [via wood s lot]

Riot fears force IMF to cut meeting short — “Anti-globalisation campaigners have scored a considerable victory by forcing the World Bank and the IMF to shorten drastically their annual meeting in Washington next month.

In a joint statement, the organisations said they were cutting the meeting from a week to just two days to try to avoid the sort of chaos and disruption that erupted at the G8 summit in Genoa last month.” Independent UK

Medical journals hit back at the drug companies.

“Leading medical journals have formed an alliance to block publication of the results of drug trials that they believe have been distorted by pressure from pharmaceutical companies.

From next month, the Lancet, the British Medical Journal and 25 other specialist magazines will demand that authors give written guarantees that their scientific research was independent.

The editors of the journals are said to have evidence that drug manufacturers are using sponsorship to persuade scientists and doctors to write favourably about their products. The agreement follows several recent cases involving allegations that drug companies tried to withhold research results or present them in a biased manner.” Telegraph UK

Do unhappy mice give bad information? “Poor housing and extreme

inbreeding is taking a toll on the

value of mice in biomedical

research, say ethologists at this

week’s meeting of the

International Society of Applied

Ethology in Davis, California.

Most lab mice are housed in

shoebox-sized containers with

sawdust bedding and plenty of food and water. When they are

allowed companions, these are usually of the same sex.” BioMedNet

Great expectations: “Expectation can be an

effective drug. A placebo

stimulates the brain in the

same way as drug treatment

in Parkinson’s disease,

shows a Canadian study.

Both increase the release of

the brain chemical

dopamine, fuelling recent

controversy over whether the

placebo effect exists at all.

Thought to affect around

30% of patients, the placebo

effect, in which patients

benefit from treatment

because of expectation

alone, is a long-standing

medical conundrum. Drugs

are generally approved on

the basis of their

effectiveness over placebos.” Nature It is unclear to me what is so astounding about this paper, widely blinked as mindboggling. Of course the placebo effect must accomplish the same physiological and biochemical effects as the ‘real’ treatment, to the extent that it works. The mystery is how the mind’s belief mobilizes the physiological reactions, not that it does. Actually, given the intimate relationship between dopamine and cognition, I’m not surprised there is a robust placebo effect in Parkinson’s Disease. Perhaps the question should be turned on its head — how much of the effect of the active treatment too is mobilized by belief? Physicians have always known that the hopeful attitude they bring toward the treatments they propose to their afflicted patients makes a great deal of difference to the outcome.

Cultural habits of chimps:

“Primate experts have found more evidence

that chimpanzees, like humans, show cultural

diversity.

They say chimps living

in different parts of

Africa have developed

distinct customs.

Habits such as

grooming, and the use

of stone and wooden

tools, vary among nine

populations in the wild.

Some chimps inspect

each other for parasites, flick the bugs on to

leaves, then inspect or kill them. However their

neighbours show quite different behaviour,

simply squashing the parasites on their

forearms.” BBC

Hunger Site Seeks Sustenance. While it wasn’t a very good business model, it was a boon for charities. A deal may be imminent with new, socially-conscious investors. Wired

Hunger Site Seeks Sustenance. While it wasn’t a very good business model, it was a boon for charities. A deal may be imminent with new, socially-conscious investors. Wired

Hunger Site Seeks Sustenance. While it wasn’t a very good business model, it was a boon for charities. A deal may be imminent with new, socially-conscious investors. Wired

Hunger Site Seeks Sustenance. While it wasn’t a very good business model, it was a boon for charities. A deal may be imminent with new, socially-conscious investors. Wired

Genehack is back and, if I never read another blink there I’ll die happy now that he’s pointed me to this explanation of cricket by an American, for Americans. Anglophile that I am, I’ve been searching for years for a way to understand this game so baffling to most of us [not that I’m ever likely to play it].

October 21, 2001 is Jam Echelon Day.

Follow Me Here, now appearing on ScreenShotStart.

“People with bone wasting conditions could do with a good shaking, according to US scientists. They found that sheep that spent time standing on a vibrating plate developed much stronger bones than those that did not.” New Scientist Addendum: Rebecca writes to remind me of a related story to which she linked a few months ago. “Wounded cats – wild and domestic – purr

because it helps their bones and organs to heal

and grow stronger, say researchers who have

analysed the purring of different feline species.

This, they say, explains why cats survive falls

from high buildings and why they are said to

have ‘nine lives’. Exposure to similar sound

frequencies is known to improve bone density in

humans.” Telegraph UK [If you have osteoporosis, sleep with your cat.]

Outbreak of new flesh-eating bacterial infection baffles health officials in Australia. The Age

Kitten survives 70C tumble wash “A kitten has survived being washed at 70C (158F) for 20 minutes after he jumped into the machine just before it was switched on. Owner Bianca Marten said 12-week-old Sylvester was dizzy, blue and screaming with fear when she got him out.

Sylvester was treated in Herning, Denmark, but has not learned his lesson. He climbed into the machine again on his return home.” Ananova While communicating with this cat was not very successful, communicating with your dog is about to become alot easier. CNN

Paint the Moon: “a collaborative work of celestial art. The goal: To unite millions of people in an effort to ‘paint’ a red spot on the dark portion of a first-quarter moon using common laser pointers during a five-minute period this autumn.” And: “An ambitious three-year mission to catch a piece of the sun and safely return that sample to Earth was successfully

hurled on its way into deep space Wednesday atop a Delta 2 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral.”

The next two stories are courtesy of Spike:

The nologo faction of the anti-corporate movement gains considerable steam as the Denver Post refuses to refer to the city’s new stadium by its whore-name. The Rocky Mountain News is disdainful of its competitor.

I crave your distinguished indulgence (and all your cash). When I got one of these hilarious “419” fraud scheme letters a few months ago, I posted it here in its entirety for its entertainment value. Some gullible Americans are not entertained; ‘the

U.S. State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for African affairs claimed that

“Americans lose $2 billion annually to white collar crime syndicates based in Nigeria.” ‘ And some people, like Salon essayist Douglas Cruikshank, get several of these missives per week, he says. Here he analyzes their literary merits.

Disputes Imperil U.N. Racism Forum: “In a statement to the preparatory committee in Geneva, U.N. High Commissioner Mary Robinson urged Arab and Jewish organizations to find common ground on the Palestinian issue, and African and European groups to come to a consensus on the issue of slavery and reparations.

…Days before the preparatory meetings began two weeks ago, President Bush said his administration would not attend the conference, which is scheduled to begin Aug. 31 in Durban, South Africa, if its agenda included language equating Zionism with racism and calling for reparations to African nations for colonialism and slavery.” Washington Post

Are the feds to blame for increased numbers of shark attacks?? ” In a curious juxtaposition of trends, shark attacks last year reached record levels in the world (79), in the U.S. (49), and in Florida (34 documented cases) ? even as scientists and government officials are claiming that the animals are being chased toward extinction by fishermen looking for thrill kills. And shark attacks in the U.S. have increased dramatically since 1993 ? which is when the federal government began mandating deep cuts in the number of sharks that could be caught for sport or profit.” National Review

BushBlog: George W. Bush’s weblog

An End to Self-Defeating Rhetoric: “It’s a myth that conservatives support free markets and progressives want government solutions.” Tompaine.com

Danny Schechter, “the news dissector,” says that ‘ “blogging” is the real worm threatening web “security” ‘: ‘Don’t tell anyone: There’s a virus you can help spread on the Web, a virus promising real information, free expression and political debate. You can get into the act by joining the “bloggertariat,” the growing number of people who want interaction instead of propaganda.’ mediachannel.org

‘Igniting Fear With Flying Metal’: “…(W)hat

has consistently gotten Pauline in trouble over his 23-year career is his penchant for creating large, potentially lethal

robots under the guise of modern performance art.” Wired

Bush Approves Limited Stem Cell Test Funding. Federal funding will only support experiments with the sixty or so existing cell lines derived from already-destroyed embryos; no new ones would be allowed to be grown and destroyed for the purpose of extracting further stem cell lines. New York Times [What does Jeremy Rifkin have to say, I wonder?]

Some scientists consider the crow to be as intelligent, in some ways, as a primate. Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, referred to the magpie (a close relative) as “a bird whose thievish disposition suggested to some one that he might be taught to talk.” The intelligence of crows [thanks, Heron] has led to an uneasy relationship with humans. The crow is a shape-shifter, a trickster-god, and an omen of untimely and violent death. Consider: a flock of crows is known as a murder. Ian Frazier’s been working for them recently, and finds them to be the coming thing.

Continuing in the series of improbable interviews (see Fortean Times’ talk with Iain Sinclair to which I blinked below), The Onion interviews Samuel Delaney, another of my cultural heroes, on the occasion of the reissue of his 1974 masterpiece Dhalgren.

O: Should readers be trying to solve it?

SRD: No, no. I want people to… What do I want? I don’t really want people to do anything. People can read the book any

way they want. If they want to look for answers, fine. I have no idea whether they’ll find them. I assume they’ll find some,

and probably won’t find others. Dhalgren is the kind of book in which you can look for pretty much anything you want. I tried

to put as much into it as I could at the time.

Torture Is Breaking Falun Gong: “Expanding its use of torture and high-pressure indoctrination, China’s Communist Party has gained the upper hand in its protracted battle against the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, according to government sources and Falun Gong practitioners. As a result, they say, large numbers of people are abandoning the group that presented the party with its most serious challenge since the 1989 student-led protests in Tiananmen Square.” Washington Post

Is the addition of ReBlogger (discussion functionality) making FmH slower-to-load on a regular basis (I know I’ve gotten sporadic feedback to that effect)? Looking down at the last week of items, there’s a steady stream of ‘[0]’ comments. I’m of two minds. Take it out, and give up on commenting capacity, or simply leave it in no matter how little use it gets. The ‘[0]’s don’t clutter up the landscape very much, after all…

The Spike Report might just as well be doing an addiction-and-psychopathology special edition today, given these three items:

A physician and reformed righteous eater has coined the term Orthorexia Nervosa ‘as a label for those who push itnerest in normal healthy food to dangerous extremes.’ From a strict psychodiagnostic perspective, I’m not sure the term is necessary, since other psychopathological labels already exist to capture this obsessive compulsive condition well. But I’m glad someone is getting the word out!

And while we’re on the topic of addiction, oh man, I couldn’t believe this blink.

‘Mainline Lady, a new Dutch glossy magazine for female drug addicts, is

perhaps the ultimate in heroin chic.

Stuffed with tips on fashion, sex, beauty and health, the stockintrade of women’s journals the

world over, the new magazine bears a passing resemblance to its more staid sisters.

But Mainline Lady, financed by the Dutch Health Ministry, is no mainstream publication.

Its fashion model is Shauna, a tattooed recovering addict. The sex section recounts recollections of

a junkie prostitute. The beauty rubric counsels on countering druginduced dry skin, and “Dear

Doctor” deals with HIV hazards for syringe users.

Wijnie, a 38-year-old cocaine and heroin addict from Amsterdam, gets a hair and face

makeover. An HIV-positive former convict talks about her experiences in prison.

The magazine is the brainchild of the Mainline foundation, a 10-year-old, non-governmental

organisation that works to improve the health and quality of life of drug users. “Female users are

not just skinny hags. They have lots of interests, and that’s what we wanted to reflect in the

magazine,” says editor-in-chief, Jasperine Schupp.’ The Age

Finally, Spike pointed me toward this.

“Boomers’ Newest Fad: Self-Loathing.

At the Big Five-Oh, the Woodstock Generation Changes Its

Tune.” International Herald Tribune

Hidden Wheat Fields Spark Outrage: “Canadian farmers are upset that they have no way of knowing whether neighboring

fields are full of genetically-modified wheat that could potentially cross-pollinate with their conventional

crops.” Wired

New Yorker Annals of Medicine (link from David Brake): As Good As Dead:

“Confusion about the concept of brain death is not

unusual, even among the transplant professionals,

surgeons, neurologists, and bioethicists who grapple

with it regularly. Brain death is confusing because

it’s an artificial distinction constructed, more than

thirty years ago, on a conceptual foundation that is

unsound. Recently, some physicians have begun to

suggest that brain-dead patients aren’t really dead at

all—that the concept is just the medical profession’s

way of dodging ethical questions about a practice

that saves more than fifteen thousand lives a year.”

In essence, the paradox is this. Most people think it would be unethical to kill a person for their organs, even if they are irreversibly moribund. So they have to die of some other cause before their organs can be harvested. Yet, it is physiologically ideal that the organs still be perfused and oxygenated right up to the time of harvest and transplant, i.e. come from a living body. The solution? The concept of brain death, when it is asserted that, no matter what other functions remain, the neocortex or seat of consciousness is irreversibly defunct.

Critics say this is “conceptual gerrymandering”, in reality a quality-of-life judgment and places us on an ethical slippery slope — would some profound degree of impaired self-awareness, e.g. in extremely brain-injured patients or the senile elderly, qualify? Can someone become “so

devastated that they had lost their claim on

existence”? Persuading the family of a dying person that ‘brain death’ is ‘death’, to obtain their consent for organ donation, is a matter of semantic niceties. But if, as extreme critics insist, someone ‘brain dead’ is not ‘dead’, where does that leave us? Are they ‘alive’? Are they, philosophically, a ‘body’ or a ‘person’?

Even proponents of the ‘brain death’ concept are known to express anxiety that “the public” not know what doctors have come to know about the practice. Critics suggest that, in the interest of ethical explicitness and scientific rigor, we begin to say we are harvesting organs from patients who are “as good as dead.” Then we can start to discuss the overwhelming ethical dilemmas that would bring up.

[I have always carried an organ donor card. Now my head is spinning with degrees of the complexity of my decision I had not even considered, and I am a physician! For the sake of the position my wife or children might have to be in to carry out this wish of mine, I will have to rethink my preferences carefully in light of this article.]

Team plans to clone up to 200 humans: “A

team of reproductive specialists is

expected to announce plans Tuesday

to clone up to 200 human beings.

The announcement will be made at a

cloning conference held by the National

Academy of Sciences in Washington,

Panos Zavos told CNN Monday. Zavos

is a retired professor and head of a

Lexington-based private corporation that

markets infertility products and

technologies.

He said his team is working with 200

couples who are infertile and the aim of

the ‘attempt’ is to help them have a

baby.” Meanwhile, critics warn of cloning risks. CNN Several months ago, scientists reported in Human Genetics that early gene processing in cloned embryos frequently goes haywire, resulting in out-of-control growth or premature death.

London novelist and psychohistorian Iain Sinclair interviewed: “After Lights out for The Territory, a man sent me an X ray of his brain tumour. He’d superimposed it over a map of London and was trying to heal himself by walking out its routes through the city.” Fortean Times And: The long birth of psychohistory: “Welcome to the discipline

of psychohistory, a discipline

that concerns itself with

collective psychology, a field

that, surprisingly, has never

garnered much interest in

both popular culture and the

academic world.” Spark The web presence of The Institute for Psychohistory (“the science of historical motivation combines the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences

to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present”) is here.

Pills gave Plath suicidal feelings, says an AP wire story describing the contents of some of Ted Hughes’ letters recently made public after their acquisition by the British Library.

According to the published extracts, Hughes (said) “the key factor” in Plath’s death was that she mistakenly swallowed the wrong kind of pills, which gave her suicidal feelings.

Hughes did not name the drug, but wrote that Plath had taken it once before while living in America and had suffered an adverse reaction, the newspaper said.

Don’t get me started again on the vilification of antidepressants as the cause of suicide among the severely and, unfortunately sometimes fatally, depressed, about which I wrote most recently when the manufacturer of paroxetine (Paxil) was successfully sued by the family of a depressed murderer taking that medication. As you know, it is usually more accurate to point the finger at the way in which these medications are prescribed and monitored. In fact, in this case “the anti-depressant was sold under a different brand name in Britain and prescribed for Plath by her doctor, who did not know the effect they would have on her, the Sunday Telegraph said.” More to the point, could Hughes be rationalizing about the fact that Plath ended her life within months of his leaving her? Salon

“If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, you are undeniably a left wing wacko, completely out of touch with mainstream thought in this country. The rest of you are normal Americans. Congratulations. And God help us all.” Salon

“George W. Bush Isn’t Stupid…” “To call Bush stupid is to imply that his harsh conservative policy initiatives are being carried out in ignorance. Whereas in truth, Bush is an ideologue. He knows exactly what he is doing.

To call Bush stupid is to engender sympathy for a man whose policies threaten the safety, the prosperity, and the future of the United States of America. The man doesn’t need our sympathy, he needs our opposition.

To call Bush stupid is to create in Bush a Forrest Gump presidency. Many Americans loved Forrest Gump the movie and they loved its false saccharine message that it didn’t matter how smart or stupid one was as long as one had a good heart. Bush is no Forrest Gump.” Liberal Arts Mafia Juicy Bits

Ten People Who Decide What America Reads: a rogue’s gallery? Book [via wood s lot]

Thanks to Higgy for this blink: Overdue book’s return priceless; we’ re talking here about an 1859 first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species borrowed from the Boston Public Library at least 80 years ago. The woman who returned it had found in her great-aunt’s attic. On examination, the book bore signs of efforts to erase evidence of its ownership by the Library. But, as the BPL’s rare books curator lovingly put it, “Paper has such a long memory. It doesn’t forget.” The maximum late fee for overdue books, as of a campaign last year to encourage their return, is $1.25. Boston Mayor Menino offered to waive the fee in this instance. Boston Globe

An Unrepentant Nader Unveils a New Grass-Roots Project Some of the placards outside read: “Right-wing freaks coalition for Nader.” “Back-alley abortionists for Nader.” “Defense contractors for Nader.” “Citizens against tundra.” “Unelectable at any speed.” New York Times

Boston Globe editorial: Bad choice for Peace Corps. Another contemptible Shrub appointment.

Darkest Hour May Be Just Before the Dawn: I.R.A. Agrees to Arms Pact in Move Hailed as Significant. ‘The Irish Republican Army has agreed to a method of destroying its arsenal of weapons that is provable and permanent, the commission responsible for the disarming of paramilitary forces in Northern Ireland said today.

Britain and Ireland termed the statement “significant” and “historic” and said it represented the long-sought breakthrough needed to push forward with the stalled peace accord for the embattled province.’ New York Times

In the Airport Fast Lane, With Your Eyes as a Passport Trial of iris-scanning technology may allow some arriving Heathrow passengers to bypass passport control as soon as this fall. New York Times

He shoulda just let it go and ordered a replacement from FmH…

Japanese Woman Has Baby at 60: “A 60-year-old Japanese woman became the nation’s oldest new mother last month when she gave birth to a healthy baby after undergoing in-vitro fertilization in the United States.” Washington Post

New Look Gore Back From Exile. “You disappear for months, avoiding more cameras than Gary Condit.

And you resurface with a scruffy beard?

No wonder some Democrats don’t want the guy to run again.” Washington Post

Braddock Gaskill: How to anonymously get root access on a quarter million machines overnight: “This analysis describes a means through which a complete list of the estimated 250,000 CodeRed II infected and backdoor compromised hosts can be easily obtained by any individual who has been keeping a web server log of attempts on his machine, by using the backdoors on the machines that have attacked him to obtain the the web logs of the infected attacking IIS web servers to learn of new infected hosts.”

How to Tell a Bad Movie From a Truly Bad Movie: “Bad films wear their ingredients the way soup labels do. To be really bad, a film should be pretentious and sententious. It should seek to change your life. (Anti- genius is 1 percent perspiration and 99 percent aspiration.) It should be, above all, humorless.” A Warner Bros. executive who wishes to remain nameless adds:

Locate the exit nearest you, she says, before screening any film directed by big-name male actors or Brian De Palma, any film that features Robin Williams in a beard, any film scored by John Williams, any film starring Juliette Binoche or Kevin Costner, any film that features Robin Williams clean-shaven, any film directed by a woman and proud of it, any film that features Robin Williams in a yarmulke and any film positively reviewed by anyone associated with National Public Radio.

New York Times

President is taking the month off Some worry about impact on his image. Only on the job six months and he already gets a month off? A month?? Of course, some would say, he’s not really ‘off’; he’ll be briefed daily on what those really in charge are doing in his absence. A Presidential spokesperson says he’ll be making some brief outings “to celebrate some of the values that strengthen America,” making him sound more like a ceremonial chief of state than he is. USA Today and Washington Post While we’re on the issue of executive branch compensations, the White House staff is not a bad palce to work. However, it doesn’t match what an ex-President can make by just signing his name to a piece of paper and hiring a ghostwriter. More Washington Post

It’s OK to get angry. “Prank callers call someone up to bother them. But these people are calling me because they don’t know to dial a ‘1’ before they call outside of their own area code. These people are harassing me with their stupidity.” Profile of New York comedian Matt Besser, who “has built his show aound the idea of irrational anger in our society.” Several years ago, he began getting middle-of-the-night phone calls from people seeking customer support for software they’d been given for free Internet connections. He figured out they were all Manhattanites who had failed to dial a ‘1’ before the area code for the tech support line in Houston and refused to believe him when he told them they had gotten a wrong number. The Internet company refused to insert the ‘1’ in their printed material. “So Besser did what any self-respecting comedian would do: He began fucking with people” … and recording the results. Salon

It’s OK to get angry. “Prank callers call someone up to bother them. But these people are calling me because they don’t know to dial a ‘1’ before they call outside of their own area code. These people are harassing me with their stupidity.” Profile of New York comedian Matt Besser, who “has built his show aound the idea of irrational anger in our society.” Several years ago, he began getting middle-of-the-night phone calls from people seeking customer support for software they’d been given for free Internet connections. He figured out they were all Manhattanites who had failed to dial a ‘1’ before the area code for the tech support line in Houston and refused to believe him when he told them they had gotten a wrong number. The Internet company refused to insert the ‘1’ in their printed material. “So Besser did what any self-respecting comedian would do: He began fucking with people” … and recording the results. Salon

It’s OK to get angry. “Prank callers call someone up to bother them. But these people are calling me because they don’t know to dial a ‘1’ before they call outside of their own area code. These people are harassing me with their stupidity.” Profile of New York comedian Matt Besser, who “has built his show aound the idea of irrational anger in our society.” Several years ago, he began getting middle-of-the-night phone calls from people seeking customer support for software they’d been given for free Internet connections. He figured out they were all Manhattanites who had failed to dial a ‘1’ before the area code for the tech support line in Houston and refused to believe him when he told them they had gotten a wrong number. The Internet company refused to insert the ‘1’ in their printed material. “So Besser did what any self-respecting comedian would do: He began fucking with people” … and recording the results. Salon

“This might be the strongest explosive ever discovered… An accidental explosion in a German physics lab has led to the identification of a superpowerful explosive. The substance – an exotic form of silicon – releases seven times as much energy as TNT, and explodes a million times faster.” New Scientist

“Teachers are more likely to die from an autoimune disease than other professionals, according to US research.” High exposure to large numbers of school children’s viral infections could be the explanation. New Scientist

Taking pictures with your PDA. PDAs and digital cameras were ‘made to be merged.’ The Nando Times

Storm experts make cloud vanish: “Storm experts in the US have made a cloud vanish from the sky for the first time.

They achieved the feat by sprinkling a water-absorbing powder over the cloud, making it disappear from sight and weather station radar screens. They hope the powder will one day dry up deadly hurricanes and tropical storms.” New Scientist

Survivors mark anniversary of Hiroshima bombing: ‘Sunday was just another day for most of the world. But for Fumiko Amano, the 56th anniversary of the day an atomic bomb destroyed her home in Hiroshima rekindled memories of “a kind of hell.” ‘

“The Hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) are very concerned that the world is going to forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Nando Times

Low Cholesterol Linked To High Death Rate In Elderly ?Our data accord with previous findings of increased mortality in elderly people with low serum cholesterol, and show, for the first time,that long-term persistence of low cholesterol concentration actually increases risk of death.

“These data cast doubt on the scientific justification for lowering cholesterol to very low concentrations (less than 4.65 mmol/L) in elderly people.? UniSci

Film is a veiled look at Scientology

It’s a movie about cults based on fictional characters, says the director. But it’s hard to miss the inspiration behind The Profit.

The main character is a science-fiction writer who founds a religion. Get it?

The leader starts the Church of Scientific Spiritualism. His name: L. Conrad Powers.

The full-length feature film was written and directed by Peter Alexander, a 20-year Scientologist who broke from the church in 1997 and now calls it an elaborate fraud. It was funded in part by Bob Minton, the Church of Scientology’s most vocal critic.

And in three weeks, it will be shown to the public for the first time at an independent theater in none other than Clearwater, the mecca for Scientologists who come there from around the world for church counseling. St. Petersburg Times

It’s OK to get angry. “Prank callers call someone up to bother them. But these people are calling me because they don’t know to dial a ‘1’ before they call outside of their own area code. These people are harassing me with their stupidity.” Profile of New York comedian Matt Besser, who “has built his show aound the idea of irrational anger in our society.” Several years ago, he began getting middle-of-the-night phone calls from people seeking customer support for software they’d been given for free Internet connections. He figured out they were all Manhattanites who had failed to dial a ‘1’ before the area code for the tech support line in Houston and refused to believe him when he told them they had gotten a wrong number. The Internet company refused to insert the ‘1’ in their printed material. “So Besser did what any self-respecting comedian would do: He began fucking with people” … and recording the results. Salon

How to fool the customer service reps into really helping you. Social engineering tip from WOIFM?.

Google’s directory of weblog tools

Talking Heads: “The desire to create talking human heads stems back

at least several hundred years. This

quest presently combines approaches that are

computational, cognitive, and biological, and cuts

across a wide variety of domains and interests. This

Talking Heads website provides a brief overview of

some of these areas and attempts to convey some of

the excitement that has spurred a considerable

amount of international research collaboration.”

SlySearch says it can find your lost property. Looks like they lost some themselves.

The War On Drug Wars – Ashkan Sahihi Gets Normal People High “If the

American government was really concerned about stopping drug abuse,

things like legalization and free needle programs would at least enter

the discussion. In the absence of that, all we have is a silly political tool

to please the Christian right.”

“Look at what we ate!”

Meet the Neanderthals — “Reconstructions of Neanderthal skulls add to

growing evidence that the creatures were not

close relatives of modern humans.” BBC

Tracking Bloggers With Blogdex: “MIT’s Media Lab is experimenting with a tool for indexing the most popular hypertext links across thousands of weblogs

and has ambitious plans to turn it into a resource for the mass media.

Launched last week, Blogdex is like a search-engine spider that visits about 9,000 weblogs a day looking for hypertext

links.” Wired

It extracts the links and ranks them by popularity. The top 10 are published daily on the Blogdex site.

Gallery of ”Misused” Quotation Marks

Lincoln Center Gets New Jazz Director. Another nail in the coffin of Great American Music, in line with Ken Burns’ and Wynton Marsalis’ treatment of the genre as a museum piece. What in the world would an ex-dean of Juilliard and the Boston University School of the Arts (where no jazz programming exists), a classical composer, a former v.p. of G. Schirmer the music publisher, want with the position? Should we worry that he wants to “propel jazz into the center of the culture” and thinks putting up a new building for Lincoln Center in Columbus Circle will do it? New York Times

MTV: Rewinding 20 years of music revolution. Today is the twentieth anniversary of the advent of “the only television phenomenon that had a generation named after it.” CNN It’ll be no surprise to FmH readers that there’s no love lost between me and MTV. In addition to the usual criticism that its three-minute quantization of entertainment doses has driven a generation to attention deficit, critics worry that the indelible grafting of visual imagery onto music has done something profound to our aural senses. It’s true, music as a performance art has always had an element of spectacle, but the violent, debased, usually misogynistic imagery of a TV commercial director has a deeply different effect than watching the performers performing, to which aficionados of live music have for ages been devoted. Finally, in some irrational way, I blame MTV every time I see anyone who isn’t a catcher wearing a backwards baseball cap (only acceptable if it’s an FmH cap…) In related news, MTV was forced to create a new finale for its anniversary gala when keynote singer Mariah Carey cancelled after a psychiatric admission. (BBC) (The oft-cited “emotional exhaustion”, by the way, does not correspond with any psychiatric malady and should be considered an uninformative euphemism at best. Denials from her spokesperson that she attempted to cut her wrists smack of the lady who doth protest too much… )

The annual human rights and violence thematic issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association is out, with a Longitudinal Study of Psychiatric Symptoms, Disability, Mortality, and Emigration Among Bosnian Refugees by Boston physician and human rights activist Dr. Richard Mollica (who long steered the Indochinese Refugee Clinic at the Brighton Marine Hospital in my backyard) and associates. Interesting finding of this study is that repatriation of refugees back to their countries of origin, even after horrendous resettlement camp experiences, does not appear to help alleviate their psychiatric symptomatology. As Mollica comments, the economic rehabilitation of wartorn regions is pouring good money after bad in the face of such an unmet need for society-wide mental health intervention. Links to other JAMA theme issues, including previous annual violence/human rights volumes, are here.

Chuck Taggart at Looka! pointed to this unspeakably tragic instance of medical carelessness. A 6 year-old boy was killed at Westchester Medical Center while undergoing an MRI scan to assess his progress in recovering from a brain tumor, because someone left a metal oxygen tank in the room during the scan! Recall that an MRI scanner is based around a 10-ton electromagnet, and imagine the rest. For God’s sake, the referral form I have to fill out when I refer a patient for an MRI scan goes to prodigious lengths to rule out the presence of even the smallest fragment of metal in the body of the scan subject because of the dangers of such a powerful magnetic field! Nice to know the entire medical center is grieving, and that the state health department wonders “if there were any violations”. I can’t imagine the responsible party having to live with the knowledge that s/he had committed such an outrageous mistake any more than the family can metabolize the senselessness of their little boy’s loss. My heart goes out to all of them. This is not the first instance of gross malfeasance at Westchester Medical Center either. Time for the head honchos to step down, if not be prosecuted for criminally negligent homicide along with the directly guilty party? There are some societies where the head of the institution might offer to take his own life over this… Nando Times

The URL for Follow Me Here is changing, to http://gelwan.com/followme.html. Thank you in advance for changing your bookmarks and spreading the word. The old ones,

http://gelwan.com/blogger.html,

http://world.std.com/~emg/blogger.html, and (most ungainly of all)

http://world.std.com/home/dacha/WWW/emg/public_html/blogger.html,

should still work, but will redirect you to the actual page.

Annals of the Invasion of Privacy (cont’d.): Face Scanners Turn Lens on Selves: ‘A leading maker of facial recognition software is calling for federal regulation of the controversial technology

to avoid misuse.

The technology, which converts facial images into an easily compiled and searched numerical code, has

been criticized by privacy advocates who say the scans amount to facial frisking… The technology first gained public notoriety in January, when Tampa, Florida, police used it to scan the

faces of unsuspecting football fans at the Super Bowl and compare their mugs with terrorists and other

criminals.” Wired

Fightin’ word: “It’s time for the left to reclaim the

term ‘anarchy’… It isn’t violence

that makes the anarchist; it’s the philosophy… A nuanced debate about anarchism would lend

credence to a set of ideas that challenge the status quo.” Mother Jones via wood s lot

Jeremy Rifkin makes an extraordinary observation, and an extraordinary prediction, in The Guardian. This is the age of biology, he says, and it will realign politics around shared goals that could not have been imagined a few years ago. He notes that right-to-life conservatives and left activists are finding common ground in their different, but converging, notions of reverence for life in contrast to a merely utilitarian view driven by the biotech industry and “market libertarians” who make the processes of life “amenable to design, customisation and mass production” and “available to customers as products and services.” He observes- — and I agree — that both groups share an oppositon to the granting of patents on “genes, cells, tissues, organs and organisms”; to GM foods; and to “designer babies”. However, I’m not as confident as he is that progressives are as united, and thus convergent with the right-to-lifers, as he claims they are in opposition to the cloning of embryos for research or even for clinical supply of stem cells, although of course they abhor commercialisation and corporate control of the process. The US does appear to be on the brink of a total ban on human cloning(BBC) for any purpose, as of this writing. But — more fundamentally — will positions with regard to these issues, as he proclaims, totally supplant classical political divisions organized around the industrial-age issues of control of the means of production and distribution of the fruits of labor and profit?

President Bush’s World is Turning. “The Bush administration’s alarming penchant for going it alone in world affairs could have

one unintended and salutary effect: Europe, however reluctantly, is learning how to lead.

And Europe could lead the way to a more balanced global order.” Boston Globe via Common Dreams

Shrub Declares War on Public Information: “…while the Shrub shreds international treaties

which have been in the works for over 30 years, he is also isolating the

U.S. government from his own people.” The Spleen [via Red Rock Eaters]

U.S. rigged highly-publicized ‘successful’ trial of anti-missile defense last week! “A U.S. anti-missile weapon was able to destroy a test warhead in space on July 14 partly because a beacon on the target

signaled its location during much of the flight, defense officials said on Friday.

The officials confirmed a report by Defense Week that the ”hit-to-kill” weapon was guided to the vicinity of the speeding warhead high over the Pacific

Ocean by signals from the electronic beacon in a successful, highly publicized test.” Reuters

U.S. Looking at Spacecraft as Bomber: “The Pentagon is exploring

development of a futuristic “space bomber” that

could destroy targets on the other side of the

world in 30 minutes but could also intensify the

growing international debate over the

militarization of space.” LA Times

Will ‘takeover ads’ take off? New trend in net-advertising even more obtrusive and intrusive.

Hopes for prion disease cure: ‘Antibodies which “cured” mouse cells of scrapie have raised hopes that the human form of mad-cow disease will one day be treatable.’ New Scientist

Widely noted on the net already, here is a blink to The Economist editorial calling for the legalisation of drugs.

A tech-savvy Italian fashion house has shown a prototype shirt with fibers of the shape-memory alloy nitinol interspersed in its fabric. Since nitinol returns to its previous shape when heated slightly, the shirt can be pressed with a hair dryer or even the body heat of wearing it. Even more extraordinarily, the fibers in the sleeves can be programmed to shorten when the temperature crosses a certain threshold, i.e. the shirt can roll its own sleeves up! Don’t expect to buy it any time soon; ‘the prototype shirt cost around £2500 to make, and is available in any colour you like – provided you have a tendency to wear metallic grey, that is. “But it looks distinctly bronze-coloured in some lights,” says (a company spokesperson).’ New Scientist

Childhood antisocial behavior is a weighty social burden, but parenting interventions can make a difference. British Medical Journal

Don’t look now, but is that dog laughing? Science News

Mnemonic Plague: ‘You are microwaving dinner, listening to the radio, finishing a crossword; you are Web-surfing

and talking on the phone. In short, you are “multitasking,” as we so often do these days. It’s a way

of keeping the mind constantly, if fitfully, employed–and in our society, it is becoming the norm.

At the same time, many of us are afflicted with worries about memory loss, as if some mnemonic

plague, including but not limited to Alzheimer’s, were at large. In light of the vast amount of

multitasking that we do, it’s worth asking if multitasking and memory are inversely related. Does

rapid attention switching interfere with the formation of memory in some way? In other words,

does a technique that was refined in computer science play havoc with the human mind?’ The American Prospect

Weapons-grade uranium seized. As Also Not Found in Nature, an exceedingly intelligent weblog (thanks for the link), commented, this may be the first known case of a sufficient amount to make an atomic weapon found available for sale on the black market. One of the world’s waking nightmares. Guardian UK

Requiem for the classical record. In an article that starts out about how the five classical music labels that control more than 80% of world sales have “lost the will to produce”, their output down to a trickle, the last nail in the coffin may be as follows:

Tower Records, the Sacramento-based retail chain, is in

trouble. With 229 stores in 17 countries, a Tower crash would endanger

the entire classical species. Corporate record labels would survive, but

dozens of independents, especially classical and jazz, would be wiped

out.

Tower was founded in 1960 as an alternative outlet, a store that stocked

the kind of discs that were too quaint or quirky for big chains to handle –

the kind that every self-respecting music-lover would pay twice as much to

own. Over time, Tower went global and dressed up in wall-to-wall Britney

Spears. Then it overstretched.

Early this year, Tower demanded deep discounts and 360 days’ credit

from suppliers. Corporate labels agreed, but the minnows refused. Small

labels need cash flow. They cannot wait a year to be paid, any more than

Tower could let customers borrow discs for 12 months before paying up.

So Tower, whose parent group took a $34.4 million (£24.5 million) loss in

the last quarter, dropped the indies. Telegraph UK

Drug users turn to embalming fluid, says the BBC: “…even though it

is highly dangerous and can make them violent

and psychotic.

Research has found that the use of embalming

fluid is becoming increasingly popular among

young people who are searching for new drug

experiences…

‘This is a violent drug, and it will turn into a big

fire if it’s not watched very closely.’

The most common method is to dip a tobacco

or marijuana cigarette in the embalming fluid,

then dry it before smoking it. The cigarettes are sold for about $20 a piece.

They are known by a variety of names,

including ‘wet’, ‘fry’ and ‘illy’.” [Users of this are hereby nominated for the Darwin awards…]

“A South African chemical warfare expert claims the US

used hallucinogenic weapons against Iraq in the Gulf War.

Dr Wouter Basson made the allegation as he testified

about drugs bought by South African defence forces for

possible use in crowd control during the Apartheid era.” Ananova

He claimed film footage showed Iraqi elite troops affected

en masse from the weapons during the Gulf War.