Like “… jazz musicians collecting themes that sound good for a

work in progress”: Before the Big Bang, There Was . . . What? ‘…(L)ately, emboldened by progress in new theories that seek to unite Einstein’s

lordly realm with the unruly quantum rules that govern subatomic physics —

so-called quantum gravity — (cosmologists) have begun to edge

their speculations closer and closer to the ultimate moment and, in some cases,

beyond it.

Some theorists suggest that the Big Bang was not so much a birth as a transition,

a “quantum leap” from some formless era of imaginary time, or from nothing at

all. Still others are exploring models in which cosmic history begins with a collision

with a universe from another dimension.’ New York Times

To Err May Be Human, But to Forgive Is Good for You. A psychologist thinks about the crucial, and often overlooked, significance of the complex internal process of forgiveness. New York Times

Solomon Snyder, one of the founders of modern psychopharmacology, reviews Psychedelics, psychosis and dreaming by Allan Hobson, a preeminent and synthetic neuroscientist of consciousness. ” All in all, Hobson succeeds in providing a fresh

perspective on the mental alterations that are

common to dreaming, psychosis and psychedelic drug

actions. The book is written in a lively style with

complex neurophysiologic and pharmacologic analyses

made lucid enough for any intelligent lay reader. It is

one of those rare books that will be of importance to

the most sophisticated researchers and clinical

practitioners and yet an accessible and a fascinating

read for many non-specialists.” Nature Neuroscience

An objection to the memetic approach to culture by Dan Sperber, French anthropologist and cognitive scientist. Note the ‘strong’ definition of memes — cultural elements non-genetically transmitted and subject to a process of selection; selected for because transmission benefits themselves, not necessarily their human carriers. Sperber’s objection to a memetic notion of culture is the low fidelity of reproduction of memes when they are transmitted, i.e the ‘Lamarckian’ reproduction of characteristics acquired in each generation. If, cultural patterns have high stability despite this low copying fidelity, something other than the meme, ‘behind it’ in a sense, is being transmitted and shaping consistency. He concludes:

Memeticists have to give empirical evidence to support the claim that, in the micro-processes of cultural transmission, elements of culture inherit all

or nearly all their relevant properties from other elements of culture that they replicate (i.e. satisfy condition 3 above). If they succeeded in doing

so they would have shown that developmental psychologists, evolutionary psychologists and cognitive anthropologists who argue that acquisition

of cultural knowledge and know-how is made possible and partly shaped by evolved domain-specific competencies are missing a much simpler

explanation of cultural learning: imitation does it all (or nearly so)! If, as I believe, this is not even remotely the case, what remains of the memetic

programme? The idea of a meme is a theoretically interesting one. It may still have, or suggest, some empirical applications. The Darwinian

model of selection is illuminating, and in several ways, for thinking about culture. Imitation, even if not ubiquitous, is of course well worth

investigating. The grand project of memetics, on the other hand, is misguided.

More about Sperber here.

Brain Damage Case Reveals Mind’s Filing System — “A woman who could not tell you whether an

orange is orange has led to new insights into how the brain organizes its

thoughts. Researchers say her case illustrates how the brain files away

the different details of individual objects so that we can know them

inside and out.” The punchline is that it appears that the attributes of an object — its color, size, shape, function, etc. — are stored in distinctive places. Here’s the abstract. Nature Neuroscience

Evolutionary origins of stigmatization: the functions of social exclusion. From the abstract: “The authors propose that phenomena currently placed under the general rubric of stigma involve a set of distinct

psychological systems designed by natural selection to solve specific problems associated with sociality. In particular, the

authors suggest that human beings possess cognitive adaptations designed to cause them to avoid poor social exchange

partners, join cooperative groups (for purposes of between-group competition and exploitation), and avoid contact with

those who are differentially likely to carry communicable pathogens.” Psychological Bulletin

Taleban to mark Afghan Hindus — “Hindus will be required to wear an

identity label on their clothing in

Islamic Afghanistan to distinguish

them from Muslims, a Taleban

minister told Associated Press on

Tuesday.” CNN Shades of Nazi pogroms?

Tree Slackers. With Shrub’s intention that environmental quality be damned as clear as he makes it, why can’t the environmental left get its act together in opposition? The American Prospect

McVeigh’s Last Message: “If the FBI can “misplace” a cache of

documents in the most notorious death-penalty

case since the Rosenbergs, is it any wonder that

nearly 100 factually innocent people have ended

up on death row in recent years?” The American Prospect

Product Images to be Inserted in Law & Order Reruns: “Turner Broadcasting System has reached a deal to allow it to

insert virtual product images in reruns of

Law & Order when the hit show moves to

TNT in syndication next month. Virtual

product placement allows images of

products to be inserted into scenes to

appear as if they were originally part of

the setting.” Advertising Age

Escaped kangaroo lived for year in Dutch woods: “A kangaroo who has been on the run for a year after

escaping from its owner has been found living in a Dutch

wood.” Ananova

Never mind rogue states, how about rogue superpowers? asks Noam Chomsky. BBC

Blind mice see

There’s more to vision than meets the eye.

Although unable to see, mice lacking rods

and cones in their retinas can tell day from

night. And their pupils still respond to

bright light.

These latest findings suggest that

mammals’ eyes contain another

light-sensitive pigment not found in rods

or cones. The pigment may regulate

circadian rhythms that govern sleep

patterns and other behaviours, such as

eating, that are related to general light

levels. Nature

Plan to clone Dracula ‘sucks’ says Dolly scientist: “The Scottish researchers who cloned Dolly the sheep say a

plan to clone Dracula is doomed to failure… A group of US businessmen came up with the plan to clone

Vlad the Impaler, who inspired Bram Stoker’s tale, after

hearing he was buried in Romania. ‘It is just a wonderful way of spending

a bit of money and getting a lot of publicity.’ ” Ananova

You only live twice: “A decade ago, Robert Brault survived a crash in his home-built airplane near Austin Straubel International Airport. A crash Wednesday — in

the same aircraft — killed him.” Green Bay Press Gazette

Shamans set up a code of ethics to fight shams— “For the first time, Amazonian medicine

men have drawn up a code of ethics and

established a union to police themselves,

complete with membership cards. The union of

Colombian shamans is trying to weed out

people who are exploiting traditional ways for

big profits and cheap thrills.” MSNBC

“General Motors Corp…will donate $10 million to restore

and protect an endangered tract of Atlantic Coast rain

forest in Brazil, an environmental group said

yesterday.” It would be likely GM would receive ‘pollution credits’, in any future Kyoto-like international agreement, for the role such a forest preserve can play in buffering against global climate change. Planet Ark And “Shell renewed a pledge Thursday to stay

away from Bangladeshi forests inhabited by the endangered Royal Bengal

tiger in the face of protests from environmentalists at the oil company’s

annual meeting.” CNN

Kicking the Hobbit: The December film release looms, and critical dispute about the merits of J.R.R. Tolkien’s creation flowers. “Still, Tolkienists have the staggering popularity of The Lord of the Rings on their side–a key

factor in the literary reputation of Charles Dickens, for example. Some Tolkienists observe

knowingly that the upcoming films will no doubt hook the Harry Potter generation on The

Lord of the Rings (though purists may secretly be a bit nervous about Hobbit Happy Meals).

Meanwhile, Tolkien criticism is already a substantial body of work, much of which cannot be

dismissed outright as fan pamphleteering. When it comes to Tolkien, says Jane Chance, “the

popular has become canonical”–or at any rate, it is becoming more and more so. Ultimately,

Tolkien’s literary stature may be assured by sheer momentum.” The American Prospect

Rules of TV Business Change as Network Race Tightens. The four networks end the season in a closer race than ever, and it will force them to abandon tried-and-true rules next year. The made-for-TV movie is all but dead; repeats are the latest breakthrough idea in programming; comedy is eclipsed by law-‘n’-order shows and reality TV. In short, there’s a whole lot more of nothing to watch. New York Times

Sad sad news, Susannah McCorkle, Pop-Jazz Singer, Dies at 55, apparent suicide.

Wake up and smell the genetically modified coffee. If the coffee berry ripening process could be more precisely controlled, berries wouldn’t ripen at different times and require handpicking. That’s what an American biotech company has figured out how to do, and it’ll take away absolutely essential jobs in the developing world and centralize coffee production even more firmly with large industrial plantations. And don’t you bet Starbuck’s will be one of their best customers?

Elvis Costello: ‘Let’s make some music, and see if anybody likes it’ Describes his recent ‘crossover’ activity (he hates the word, BTW) and particularly his collaboration with mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter. I have to say that Costello’s recent collaborations — the Brodsky String Quartet, Burt Bacharach, and now von Otter — have taken away the Costello whose music really moved me. I searched the article in vain for an indication that he’s going to go back to doing his own thing anytime soon. New York Times

Myth in Journalism: review of Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism by Jack Lule. “By analyzing case studies involving Black Panther Huey

Newton, Mother Teresa, baseball player Mark McGuire

and Hurricane Mitch, among others, Lule — a great

storyteller himself — demonstrates seven master myths

in the news that shape our thinking about foreign policy,

terrorism, race relations, political dissent and other

issues. He calls them The Victim, The Scapegoat, The

Hero, The Good Mother, The Trickster, The Other World

and The Flood.” The Media Channel

Polio Virus Targets, Kills Brain Tumors: Study. It turns out, fortunately, that malignant glioma cells abnormally express a certain protein, CD 155, to which the polio virus is specifically attracted in the CNS. So researchers have succeeded in using a genetically crippled polio virus (incapable of causing polio) to kill the glioma cells, leaving adjacent normal cells alone. Reuters

oneworld.net: guides “These guides aim to start you thinking about the key topics of human rights and sustainable development.

You will find here a range of views from named writers around the globe. And you may find some of the views

surprising, unfashionable or unfamiliar, because OneWorld has a commitment to including points of view that are

ignored by the mass media. You won’t agree with them all, any more than we do. ” OneWorld

Danny Schechter: Where do you go when PBS says no?

Critical filmmakers like myself, who are shut out of

commercial TV for all intents and purposes, need robust

public television because it is often the only game in

town when you want a program you’ve made to be seen.

And when you do, you want it on their national program

service, what they call the “hard feed,” because that

guarantees it will be carried by all public stations

nationwide. If the keepers of the PBS gates turn you

down, you can still get your show on the air, but you

have to try to sell it, or more likely place it for free, on a

“soft feed” that gives stations the discretion to run it or

not. This can mean it’ll be on at different time periods,

making a national promotion campaign very difficult. You

have to lobby station by station across the nation like a

beggar selling his wares. The Media Channel

Finding News About China, a collection of sources assembled by James Miles, former BBC Beijing bureau chief.

“People become so obsessed by hating government that they forget it is meant to be their government and is the only powerful public force that have

purchase on.” — John Ralston Saul. Nedblog pointed me to this entry in At the Margin:

John Ralston Saul’s novels are not his most influential work. His nonfiction — Voltaire’s Bastards (1992), The Doubter’s

Companion (1994), and The Unconscious Civilization (1996) — constitute the most articulate and powerful indictment of modern global society ever

published. Voltaire’s Bastards is subtitled “The Dictatorship of Reason in the West,” and it is over 600 pages (including footnotes) that document how it

was possible for the promise of 18th century Enlightenment to culminate in a society so simultaneously undemocratic and ungovernable as ours. The

thinkers of the Enlightenment, according to Saul, used reason as their principal weapon in the struggle against medieval darkness. Once the revolution

was underway, however, instead of retiring reason to its normal place among the other human faculties (Saul lists common sense, creativity, ethics,

intuition, and memory), we enshrined it as our governing principle. By elevating it over other human faculties, we have succeeded in converting it to

unreason.

Basing our society on reason, Saul argues, has resulted in corporatist politics, the cult of expertise, and our highly structured lives. And it has produced

a number of interesting contradictions and anomalies. One of these is that the arms trade is the largest single industry in a world supposedly at peace.

Another is that our so-called democratic societies are governed by entrenched elites. Still another is that we elect people to grapple with our public issues

based on their personalities rather than their abilities.

Saul points out that we call ourselves a democracy but we have built no time into our lives for citizen participation: “The only way a citizen can

participate is voluntarily, which means giving up going to the bathroom, give up making love, give up sleep, give up eating dinner with your family. In

other words, we have structured citizen participation out of our society.” Note that I’m only giving you the highlights here. Saul takes 171 pages to

position himself and lay out the argument, then follows that with over 400 pages describing what might be considered the everyday atrocities of

modern “democratic” corporatist society.

Psychiatrist says Monkey Man mystery is like penis panic. Fred Lapides of Bush Wacker (which has moved here) pointed me to this update on the Monkey Man matter, to which many webloggers have blinked.

An Indian psychiatrist has compared the Monkey Man

mystery to a penis-related panic among Nigerian men 10

years ago.

Doctor Sandeep Vohra, president of Delhi Psychiatric

Society, explains the Monkey Man panic as mass delusion.

Ten years ago, groups of Nigerian men became convinced

their genitals would disappear if they touched a stranger. Ananova

A male patient’s desperate fear that his genitals will shrink and retract into his body, causing his death, is a long-recognized ‘culture-bound syndrome’ appearing in most psychiatric textbooks alongside such entities as amok, latah, piblokto, and wihtigo. Called koro, it is described as common in the Malay archipelago and southern Chinese folk belief but occasionally reported in other cultures. Often, the affected person has secured a strong physical hold on his penis by tying or clamping it. Usually, it affects a single person at a time but occasional epidemic outbreaks have been reported around the world. I used to give an entertaining talk about unusual psychiatric syndromes.

Dying Comet Gives Rare View of Space: “It was like watching an autopsy on a comet.

Comet Linear, falling toward the sun last summer, peeled off layer

after layer, revealing its structure and composition to astronomers

watching with some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Yahoo!

Dying Comet Gives Rare View of Space: “It was like watching an autopsy on a comet.

Comet Linear, falling toward the sun last summer, peeled off layer

after layer, revealing its structure and composition to astronomers

watching with some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Yahoo!

Dying Comet Gives Rare View of Space: “It was like watching an autopsy on a comet.

Comet Linear, falling toward the sun last summer, peeled off layer

after layer, revealing its structure and composition to astronomers

watching with some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Yahoo!

Going Out With a Mobster’s Son? Follow the Code of Silence. The New York Times gives us some real mob-watch details on the morning of the season finale of The Sopranos.

For Hindus and Vegetarians, Surprise in McDonald’s Fries. A lawsuit claims MacDonald’s deliberately misled consumers in boldly proclaiming a switch to cooking its fries in “100% vegetable oil”. It’s true, but the fries are apparently seasoned with beef fat before leaving the factory. New York Times IMHO, it serves anyone right for believing anything MacDonald’s tells them. By the way, if you haven’t read the book, Robot Wisdom points to this reasonable summary of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (from the London Review of Books via the Guardian).

Reno’s Hint at Florida Race Catches Some by Surprise: “Florida and

national Democratic Party officials

today were polite but skeptical that former

Attorney General Janet Reno could raise

their chances of unseating Gov. Jeb Bush,

the president’s brother, in next year’s election.” New York Times You have to believe that the Democrats are targeting this race with all the heavy artillery they can muster. Reno’s liabilities are considerable — think about how the South Florida Cuban exile community must think of her after the Elian Gonzalez case, to start with — and she could end up a ‘spoiler’ in such an important race. New York Times

Dying Comet Gives Rare View of Space: “It was like watching an autopsy on a comet.

Comet Linear, falling toward the sun last summer, peeled off layer

after layer, revealing its structure and composition to astronomers

watching with some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Yahoo!

Lean & Mean — codeine abuse is coming back, reportedly. Calling it “liquid crack”, however, is a simile based on basic drug ignorance. They couldn’t be more different. Houston Press

Utah polygamist found guilty: A Mormon, not surprisingly, he has five wives and 29 children. Convicted of failure to pay child support as well. This is the first big bigamy trial on more than half a century. One of his wives was a 13 year-old in 1986 when he allegedly had sex with her. He subsequently married her, and now faces a felony rape charge as well. CNN

Student minces no words with new sign language — “A college student’s thesis

examining sign languages from around the

world could provide autistic children or

stroke-impaired adults with a new method

to communicate.

The gestures are simple, mime-like and

require a minimal number of separate

movements. Those components, the thesis

adviser said, make signing easier for people

who might have finite motor skills or limited

memory.” CNN

A comprehensive listing of US secession movements — “Discover the fault-lines where political self-determination and the increasingly Corporate nation-state clash.” disinformation

Radical Ideology Points the Bushites Toward Avoidable Trouble —

“What is worrying is the combination of three factors that could

produce a perfect political storm.

First, the Bushies came into office with the attitude that

everything Bill Clinton did was wrong and needs to be

reversed.

Second, they bore Republican theological positions on tax cuts,

the environment and missile defense, positions that were

hatched in conservative think tanks and chanted with religious

devotion but were never tempered by the real world as it has

evolved in the last eight years. Yet early signs are that the

Bushies will say or do anything to get their radical tax cuts

made, their oil wells drilled and their missile shield built – no

matter what is going on in the world.

Finally, they control the Senate, the House, the White House and

the Supreme Court, so there are no brakes.” International Herald Tribune

Lego: No Tech Meets New Tech: “Although its trademark plastic building blocks are decidedly old school, Lego is

repositioning itself as a player in today’s technology toy market.

Founded in Denmark before World War II, Lego is emphasizing key product lines based on interactive

software, robotics and even Harry Potter, at this week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo.” Wired And: LUGNET™: ‘home to thousands of LEGO® fans of all

ages. We are a community which never sleeps — and has been called “the friendliest place on

the Internet.” ‘ A Webbies finalist.

Cytokine-Associated Emotional and Cognitive Disturbances in Humans. One element of the immune response is the secretion of infection-fighting circulating substances by lymphocytes (a class of white blood cells) activated by the presence of the infection. Many of us who look at the interface between behavioral disturbances and bodily physiology have suspected that these cytokines have direct — and deleterious — CNS effects and may account for some of the behavioral disturbance accompanying various physical illnesses. Here’s empirical evidence. Archives of General Psychiatry

“The drive by HMOs to “medicalize” psychotherapy – insisting that practitioners look for a

medical disorder such as clinical depression and then dispense a prescribed treatment – will ultimately suffocate psychotherapy through

ignorance of how it works.

That’s the contention of Bruce Wampold, professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a new,

controversial book, The Great Psychotherapy Debate.

Methadone increases infectivity and stimulates viral replication of HIV, according to new research. Bad news for patients who contracted HIV through IV drug abuse which they are now attempting to stabilize through methadone maintenance. BioMedNet And: Study: Heroin Moving to Suburbs, Rural Areas. ” A New

Jersey study suggests that heroin, a

longtime scourge of America’s

inner cities, is becoming a suburban

and rural problem.” CNN

The Accidental Curist — “Doctors who were trying to grow new blood vessels with gene therapy found a welcome side effect:

The therapy repaired what they thought was permanent nerve damage.” Not clear if the improvement was due to revascularization or direct nerve growth; further studies are planned. Wired

Breaking the Hickory Stick: The proposed Teacher Liability Protection Act,

supported by President Bush, will likely increase corporal punishment of schoolchildren in

states where paddling is still legal. New York Times

This Time, It’s Personal. Democrats (finally) begin opposing Bush’s judicial nominees. The American Prospect

“Suddenly some of the most unlikely people are losing sleep over what windmills might be doing to birds.” TomPaine.com

New disorder, cyberchondria, sweeps the internet, says the New Zealand Herald article. But it’s really just run-of-the-mill hypochondria (or, to be more precise, somatization) fueled by the ease of obtaining information on the ‘net.

Living dead. “Ants and infertile humans are not alive, but parasitic DNA is.

That’s the view of a Polish researcher who has proposed a

new, universal definition of life.

He claims it will lay to

rest arguments about

what is and isn’t

alive, and might offer

insights into when life

on Earth got started.

And if we ever find

something that looks

like life on another

planet, his definition

could help us settle

whether it’s alive or

not.” New Scientist

Study: Oscar Winners Live Longer , nearly four years longer on average than their colleagues who were never nominated or those nominated who did not win. Katherine Hepburn, four-time Academy Award winner, should live forever! I knew the Oscars were good for something… Washington Post

Find A Grave “… of thousands

of famous people from

around the world.”

Childhood’s end? Early puberty is more common in children who have immigrated from the third world, researchers suggest. Could pesticide residues be to blame? New Scientist

The Abolition of Man? ‘…(T)he reader who trudges through Kass must eventually wonder whether the

ethicist is confusing the map with the territory. Conservatives have long been known, in William F.

Buckley’s famous phrase, for standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” But when did they start insisting

that history which does not go their way isn’t actually history at all?

On closer examination, what worries these writers isn’t that human nature might change in the future. It’s

that human nature might not be what they think it is right now.’ Reason

Content Sites of the World, Unite! The Salons and Slates of the world ought to band together for their survival. “Right now there appears to be a race among Web publishers to

garner the most revenue in the short term by making the

experience of visiting its site intolerable, like the intrusive ads

spearheaded by CNET or the Slate format in which text ads

sneak into spaces readers expect to find unpaid-for material.

The ads will get so overpowering it’s no surprise that Salon

thinks it might take in some money by eliminating them for its

best customers.” The Standard

Puckered Out: People don’t whistle like they used to before the advent of mass entertainment. It’s a ‘loner art”, and loners today are highly suspicious. Washington Post

The wrd of Gd — the world’s first text-message church service. New Scientist

Researchers at Yale and NYU pinpoint the part of the brain that allows emotional significance to heighten perception. EurekAlert!

Monkeys Who Think… and the neuroscientist who loves them. Portrait of Marc Hauser (Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think). “To its advocates, the rise of cognitive ethology reflects a regaining of

consciousness after a dark half century of behaviorist orthodoxy, which

held that all behavior, animal or human, was the result not of mental events

but of conditioned responses to external stimuli. Cognitive ethologists trace

their assumptions back to Charles Darwin, who insisted that animals and

humans exhibit no less evolutionary continuity in their minds than in their

kidneys, hearts, and toes. The field’s critics, however, suspect that talk of

animal thinking and intention may owe less to Darwin than to the

embarrassing and dubiously anecdotal mentalism of his protégé Georges

Romanes, a popular lecturer who saw logisticating dogs and conniving

felines under every Victorian armchair.” Lingua Franca

Big Split Over Gene Theory: “If you eat a genetically modified strain of cauliflower, you won’t inherit its gene for frost resistance. That’s the position taken by researchers who are refuting an earlier claim published by the Human Genome Project international consortium that genes from other species could indeed “jump” into the human gene family tree. The dissenting view will appear in the May 25 issue of Science.” Wired

Short guide to a happy marriage: “The secret of a long and faithful marriage is to marry

a short man, according to research.

Tall men are more likely to divorce and remarry,

usually replacing their first wife with a woman who is

at least two years younger and better educated,

according to a study by American and German

scientists.” The Telegraph

The secret of life – it could be an uncrackable code

Robert Matthews laments that Claude Shannon’s passing was not noted more widely. The mathematician’s work, especially the classic 1948 paper “The Mathematical Theory of Communication”, was a foundation of information theory. What attention his death has received has generally focused on the technological implications of his work — “unsung father of the internet” kind of stuff. But Matthews suggests that

scientists involved with the Human

Genome Project would benefit from the

application of Shannon’s theorem. The argument may overreach. The Telegraph

Aboriginal rock paintings oldest depictions of mystics says researcher. But critics say that seeing shamans everywhere is a fad that will pass. The Age

‘Mere presence’ of a black face can lead people to mistake objects for weapons more often,

study says

Some Straights Can Go Gay, Study Says SF Gate

High Cost for Low Grades

“Kansas City is a very, very sad story,” said Gary Orfield, a Harvard

University sociologist who has studied the district for years. “They really

can’t show much of anything, though they spent $2 billion.”

To Orfield, the lesson from Kansas City is clear: Money can’t buy

good schools. Not, at least, in shattered urban districts where poverty

leaves many children ill-equipped to learn.

When students come to class hungry, exhausted or afraid, when they

bounce from school to school as their families face eviction, when they

have no one at home to wake them up for the bus, much less look over

their homework, not even the snazziest facilities, the strongest curricula

and the best-paid teachers can ensure success, he argues. LA Times

David Anderson, on his always stimulating Metaforage/Metaphorage: what’s a meta for? points to President Carter’s commentary on comparisons between the current energy shortage and the one Carter faced. David says, “Nice to hear from an honest man who brings an engineer’s mind to bear on a problem, rather than hearsay,

propaganda and superstition. In particular I like the fact he nails the administration on its bullshit labeling

of conservation as just ‘private virtue.’ ” I was struck by the quote he pulls out from Carter; certainly the understatement of the week: “Exaggerated claims seem designed to promote some long-frustrated ambitions of the oil industry at the expense of environmental quality.”

Crack comes from Colombia, and Colombian cracks come from Letterman Yahoo!

Dan Hartung’s excellent lake effect is going on a reduced posting schedule for at least a couple of weeks, he says. “I’ve never wanted to make updating lake effect a crisis,” he says, but reassuringly adds, “No fear, I am coming back.” Good thing, too, or I’d be going after him…

Update on the Bremerton, Wash. keyless remote dysfunction about which I first blogged several months ago. “A federal investigation into two mass

outages of keyless remote entry

devices in the Bremerton area could

be complete in about 30 days, officials

said.

But the Federal Communications

Commission, which is conducting the

probe, is staying tight-lipped about

what it has found so far.

At the same time, other information

has come to light — some of it

contradictory — pointing to a number

of possible causes. One of those is a

section of radio frequency that the

military shares with many keyless

devices.” [via Robot Wisdom]

Douglas Adams continues to be revisited since he migrated over. Here’s a piece he wrote about the ‘net several years ago. How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet: “…We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody

and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and

disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But

that is changing.

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our

lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.”

Theories that drive one to

abstraction: an erudite condemnation of modernism in art. Telegraph UK And a portrait of American modernism.

At Home With Andrew Solomon: Showing the Demons the Door. Child of a pharmaceutical fortune, Andrew Solomon turned his struggle with depression — he’s now on five medications daily — into what he describes as his big career break by authoring the forthcoming The Noonday Demon: an atlas of depression; the New York Times describes him as “the only serious historian of a sickness that disables more people in the United States than any other.” One FmH reader wrote me several months ago to ask if I knew how many people take Prozac and other related SSRI antidepressants; this article, in passing, provides the answer, a figure of 28 million.

A Debate Over Loved Ones in the E.R.. A pilot project allowing family presence during gruesome resuscitation efforts in the ER is uniformly positive for the families even if their loved one dies; hospital inches toward acceptance. New York Times

Positively 4th Street: the lives and times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina. “With this lovely madeleine of a book,

a hauntingly evocative blend of

biography, musicology and pop cultural

history, it is as if David Hajdu has struck a

tuning fork and summoned the spirit of the

folk-singing 1960’s all over again. It is also

as if Mr. Hajdu has discovered that within

every movement, however pure, there is a

healthy whiff of soap opera to be found.” New York Times

Let the culture battle begin. French culture minister seeks to enlist the other G7 nations to join it in battling homogenization of national cultures; proposes extension of the strict rules it has already adopted protecting film, television and publishing industries against dominance by U.S. material. The Globe and Mail By the way, France imposes a $100-per-television-set tax on all viewers to pay for public programming. Imagine such a proposal to fund PBS in the U.S.!

Fuelled by a willing media, America’s thirst for

paranoiac conjecture is reaching new heights of

lunacy. The Guardian

The rush to the death chamber: “Like Timothy McVeigh, more condemned prisoners are in a hurry to die. Does the trend undermine

justice?” Opponents say that it is the oppressive and prolonged conditions on death rows that “torture to death” many inmates convicted of capital crimes, leading them to give up their rights to appeals. Christian Science Monitor

Time twister. A Connecticut theoretical physicist with a lifelong passion for reading everything he could get his hands on about time travel thinks that “closed time-like loops” to take us back in time are achievable. A circulating beam of laser light can twist time into a loop; prohibitive amounts of energy are required unless you slow the light down, which we’ve just figured out how to do. New Scientist Time travel experimenters ought to make a pact that, when they figure out how to implement this scheme, they travel back in time to the present to tell us how to do it (grin).

Brain researchers discover role of key protein in converting short-term memories into lifelong ones EurekAlert!

One of Australia’s foremost tourist attractions to close for weeks. Uluru, formerly known

as Ayers Rock, will be closed for

a twenty-day mourning period as a show of

respect for an Aboriginal leader, unnamed for cultural reasons, who

died. Tour operators plead with the national government to overrule park managers’ decision, fearing the longterm consequences of even a brief closure to their business. Aboriginal authorities, to whom the Australian government returned the former Ayer’s Rock in 1985 and who have leased it back to the government in perpetuity for park use, consider it sacred and have always discouraged tourists from climbing Uluru. Ironically, the elder whose death is the occasion for the ban, was a leading proponent of the pragmatic value of opening the site to tourist access. CNN

“…(T)hings are messier, more beautiful and more dynamic than originally thought…” Astronomers find ‘spaghetti’ twirling around in galaxy: ‘Circulating the Milky Way is a stream of stars that has wound itself around the galaxy like a strand of spaghetti.

A consortium of researchers from three continents — called the “Spaghetti Collaboration” — found new evidence suggesting the existence of

three more star streams in the outer galaxy.’ Yes, a picture would be nice. EurekAlert!

Vatican comes out against pro-masturbation priest: “A Vatican Cardinal has advised Catholics not to

masturbate, after a lengthy study of a pro-masturbation

priest’s arguments.

Spanish reformist priest Marciano Vidal has criticised the

church, saying no one has proved masturbation is immoral.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger described the act as very bad

indeed after the church conducted a three-year

investigation.” The Cardinal also got in his digs about homosexuality, concluding that only heterosexual relationships and chastity are sanctioned by the Church. Ananova

“The liberal obsession with installing hate crimes in every statute book is one of the saddest spectacles of our age.” CounterPunch

Mob phreakers rule Vegas phone network The Register

The Zero Year Curse: ‘Many Christians believe the election victory of George W. Bush was a direct answer to fervent prayer. But several

well-known prayer and intercessory groups are urging Americans not to stop praying, especially for the President and his safety.

They are citing what’s known as the “Zero Year Curse” and have issued “code red” prayer alerts. The groups are urging Christians

to pray especially for the physical safety of President Bush to combat the supposed curse, which is also known as the Tecumseh

curse,” about which I wrote during the election campaign. I had not ben aware that Reagan, the only ‘zero-year’ President since 1840 who did not die in office, is considered the “exception that proves the rule” by Christians; they attribute his survival to their prayer. Bizarrely, Christian fears in Y2K are aroused by predictions from New Age astrology groups. Superstition begets superstition, I guess… Christian Broadcasting Network While we’re at it, look here or here or here for discussion of that turn of phrase, “the exception that proves the rule.”

Review of God, Faith and Health by Jeff Levin. In bad faith: “A researcher offers evidence

that religion is good for your

health. Too bad so much of it is

bunk… Levin does a good job summarizing much of what we know

about the connection between spirituality and health.

Readers new to the field will probably find themselves

willing to believe that religious affiliation and activity are

probably a good marker for improved health, and may even

promote it. But they should be leery of those who try to take

the evidence much further than that, and be conscious of the

bad effects religion can sometimes have. Read a history of

the crusades for even more evidence on the negative effects

of religion on the public’s health.” Salon

“A sentimental view of the Marx Brothers misses the

point about them even more than it does about Chaplin.

They were nervous and resourceful fighters who rose from

the bottom and never forgot it, and they deployed the

slapstick aggressions of everyday life as a coarse stimulant

and a way of gaining private ends. ” The London Review of Books casts a serious eye on Groucho, loaded with anecdotes and quotes.

One of the earliest sketches to lodge in the memory of

lifelong fans was a skit about the Emperor Napoleon called

I’ll Say She Is! Its mode is runaway farce, a pastiche

without a prayer for logic, and any sample suggests about

as much as any other: ‘Our just is cause. We cannot lose. I

am fighting for France, Liberty, and those three snakes

hiding behind the curtain. Farewell, vis-à-vis Fifi D’Orsay.

If my laundry comes, send it general delivery, care of

Russia, and count it – I was a sock short last week.’

A

memory of the three brothers all playing Napoleon in their

tricorn hats would find its way into Finnegans Wake,

according to Thornton Wilder, a formidable scholar of

Joyce. ‘This is the three lipoleum Coyne Grouching down

in the living detch.’ When told of the homage in later years,

Groucho was well pleased and only a little sceptical. ‘Did a

New York policeman, on his way back to Ireland to see his

dear old Mother Machree, encounter Joyce in some peat

bog and patiently explain to him that, at the Casino Theater

at 39th and Broadway, there were three young Jewish

fellows running around the stage shouting to an indifferent

world that they were all Napoleon?’

Woodworking can be hazardous to health; both commercial and DIY. Environmental News Network On a related topic, concerns are mounting that pressure-treated lumber used in climbing structures in children’s playgrounds may expose them to considerable arsenic levels. Wooden climbing structures are being dismantled in several states.

Clichés – avoid these like the plague. “Corrupt men with dead souls simply repeat

stale phrases. Like Senator Trent Lott, they use the word suck without bothering

to let a picture form in their minds.

Since all language is “fossil

poetry,” almost every phrase is a cliché. We cannot write every phrase entirely

new or we’ll end up as incomprehensible as Gertrude Stein. But that is no excuse

for wallowing in the worst of the cesspool. We can strain against fate and fight

against habit and, who knows? maybe even create some new phrases in the

process. To leave a new phrase or word behind is to have expanded the

collective consciousness and to have more than justified one’s existence. Good

writers are the heroes who free us from the tyrannies of clichés and open up the

future. Vocabula Review

“A new class of music writers is on the rise — call them the rock

curmudgeons. Call them dangerous.” Is Rock ‘n’ Roll Dead? Only if You Aren’t Listening The author, chairman of the English Dept. at SIU, finds rock music criticism to be part of a larger critical problem:

The decision to stop listening, for a music critic — or stop watching,

for a film critic, or stop reading, for a literary critic — is a

perfectly legitimate one; to delimit, however arbitrarily, the

boundaries of one’s expertise and interests creates a field of

manageable size within which one might hope to make a

significant contribution. But surely there’s a world of difference

between admitting “I don’t find time to read a lot of

contemporary poetry,” on the one hand, and pronouncing that

“no significant poetry has been written since Robert Lowell,” on

the other. Chronicle of Higher Education

Ted Olson’s Arkansas problem: “Despite his evasive disavowals, Salon investigations showed the right-wing consigliere was deeply involved in a sordid plot to bring down

President Clinton.” Salon

Studies Conflict on Whether Homosexuals Can Change. Robert Spitzer’s controversial study, reported last week, is widely criticized. [via Fred Lapides]

Psychiatrists analyze Harry Potter in a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in New Orleans, concluding he’s a good model of psychological health in the face of adversity. Salon And The analysts continue their discussion of The Sopranos‘ penultimate episode of the season:

‘When I was training to become an analyst, I had a supervisor with

impeccable Viennese credentials who taught me a very important

concept. And the fact that he put it in German made it that much

more authoritative. At a crucial point in a treatment, he told me, the

patient gains Krankheitseinsicht–which roughly means “insight

into one’s illness.” At that moment a person really becomes a patient,

an ally who has joined you in trying to understand the nature of that

“illness.”

Until then, people often try to explain their troubles in terms of such

factors as ill luck, their stupid boss, their nagging spouse, the

capitalist system, an unjust world–in short, on some aspect of

external reality. While many of these complaints aren’t often true,

it’s only after a person has realized that there is something in their

inner world that causes them to continuously recreate unhappy

situations that therapeutic transformation can begin. The task then

for therapist and patient is to understand the psychological template

inside of the patient that he or she repeatedly imposes on external

reality.’ Slate

Indian caste shows link to Europeans. “A study has shown that people in higher ranks of the Indian

caste system are more closely related to Europeans than

Asians.

Experts now believe Europeans moved into India about

5,000 years ago, helped put the caste system in place and

put themselves at the top.

The genetic differences between social levels are still clear

because inter-caste marriages are frowned upon in Indian

culture.” Ananova

First Cells, Then Species, Now the Web: “As the Internet continues to proliferate, it

has become natural to think of it

biologically — as a flourishing ecosystem of

computers or a sprawling brain of

Pentium-powered neurons. However you mix

and match metaphors, it is hard to escape

the eerie feeling that an alien presence has fallen to earth, confronting

scientists with something new to prod and understand.” New York Times

Have goat, will travel. “A goat seems to have been the

must-have accessory for any prehistoric

farmer with wanderlust. Patterns of

genetic variation in modern goats reveal

that, although they were domesticated in

several places, the descendents of these

pioneers have since intermingled,

interbred and spread far and wide, to a

far greater extent than other livestock

species.

Goats are the ideal travelling

companions: they laugh in the face of

harsh environments and will eat just

about anything. Plus, their small size

provides greater commercial flexibility…” Nature

Contrasts between male and female orgasm