War Against Cliché. An excerpt from Martin Amis’ foreword to his forthcoming collection of essays and reviews in which, among other things, he laments the passing of genuine criticism and heralds a kinder, gentler Amis:

“Readers of the present book are asked to keep an eye on the date lines which end these
pieces, for they span nearly thirty years. You hope to get more relaxed and confident over time;
and you should certainly get (or seem to get) kinder, simply by avoiding the stuff you are unlikely
to warm to. Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it
when you realise how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember. . .”

We’re all up to speed on the health hazards of fast “food”, especially after the exhaustive concerns raised in Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: the dark side of the all-American meal. Here’s a rundown on further dangers of the drive-through window. The National Post

Author suing ‘Harry Potter’ creator has book reissued. Nancy Stouffer claims J.K. Rowling plagiarized her because a series of her children’s books in the mid-’80’s used the term muggles, had a character named “Potter” and a “Keeper of the Gardens” (the Harry Potter books have a “Keeper of the Keys”). Now several of her out-of-print books will be re-released over the next year. Sounds like they might make enjoyable reading with my children, but it also sounds like there are no more than superficial similarities with Rowling’s work. Stouffer admittedly created her characters with a view toward licensing them and probably hoped to sell the film rights before her publisher went bankrupt. She seems to have waited for Rowlings’ movie deal to add Warner Bros.’ deeper pockets to her infringement suit. My biggest question: will the author’s photo on the back of the dustjacket show the dollar signs in her eyes? Nando Times

In other Harry Potter news, Rowling just put out two little $3.99 paperback “Hogwarts textbooks” — Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Quidditch Through the Ages — whose proceeds will benefit the British social charity Comic Relief. My son has his nose buried in the former this weekend, since we bought it.

Is Life Analog or Digital? Freeman Dyson: “I started thinking about the abstract definition of life twenty years ago,
when I published a paper in Reviews of Modern Physics about the
possibility that life could survive for ever in a cold expanding universe. I
proved to my own satisfaction that survival is possible for a community of
living creatures using only a finite store of matter and energy. Then, two
years ago, Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman, friends of mine at Case
Western Reserve University in Cleveland, sent me a paper with the title
“Life, the Universe, and Nothing”. They say flatly that survival of life for
ever is impossible. They say that everything I claimed to prove in my
Reviews of Modern Physics paper is wrong. I was happy when I read the
Krauss-Starkman paper. It is much more fun to be contradicted than to be
ignored.

In the two years since I read their paper, Krauss and Starkman and I have
been engaged in vigorous arguments, writing back and forth by E-mail,
trying to pokes holes in each others’ calculations.” It appears to Dyson, that the answer to his question depends on how you define life. Dyson uses Moravec’s transhuman condition and Fred Hoyle’s black cloud as contrasting paradigms of what might happen to life in an end-stage universe. The Edge

85 Ways to Tie a Necktie. Two mathematical physicists from Cambridge University invented a mathematical notation to describe the tying of necktie knots, then generated a list of all possible knots within the restrictions imposed (on the number of loops a knot can have) by the length of a tie. Exactly 85 possibilities exist, and it turns out that 10 of them are “good”, including six newly-discovered designs. Their paper about the issue made it into the scientific journal Nature and is now posted, with diagrams, on the Internet. Since I wear a tie every day to work, I’m game.

Romania builds Dracula Land: “The Romanian Government has announced
plans for a theme park in honour of the
controversial figure of Count Dracula.

Tourism Minister Matei Dan told journalists the
park – Dracula Land – would open in the
summer of 2002, at an as yet undisclosed
location, widely assumed to be in Transylvania.” BBC

Vintage Violence: “What does old-time music have in common with gangsta rap?

But old-time music and gangsta rap have more in common than their homicidal tendencies. Both
forms were born of poverty and cultural isolation. Both have a mercenary attitude towards tradition,
which the individual artist pillages, strips of its context, and reconfigures into something original. Both
are marketed to affluent whites via their gritty, “authentic” appeal. Both are racially charged, to say
the least. Both began as party music, but ended up meaning something more. The more you listen,
the more similarities emerge.” Feed

One of the weblogs I read (I’m sorry, I don’t remember whom to credit) linked to this page on the folklore of the sneeze. But it’s only one of 132 pages, each on a category of superstitions and folklore. Here’s the index.

“Men with chronic schizophrenia lose brain volume at a faster rate than the normal aging changes seen in men without the
mental illness, a study by a researcher at Yale shows.” Studies for a long time have shown lower volumes of brain tissue than matched controls in some schizophrenics, but I and others who study schizophrenia have thought this was a static finding representing the neurodevelopmental aberrations that underlie some schizophrenia. Instead, this study followed patients with progressive MRI scans over an average four-year interval, demonstrating tissue loss. And the extent of this progressive change correlated with the severity of their illness in the interim. This suggests ongoing neurodegeneration.

Lamb with ‘human face’ perishes after birth. Ananova

Enjoyed this succinct and pointed observation from Metaforage/Metaphorage: what’s a meta for?: “The methodical re-engineering of the United States by conservatives
continues, as I predicted. This puts the lie to both the Naderites,
who said it does not matter who is elected, and the Republicans,
who pitched Bush as a moderate.” And, I’d add, to the Democrats, so bumblingly overconfident that they could save us from this outcome.

Welcome to From Hunger, “the web’s most taciturn cyberzine”, from HungerSoft Technologies, “where quality is an illusion.” This includes a link to their hilarious Ulysses for Dummies, of which many have taken notice.

How to make a thought screen helmet: “The thought screen helmet blocks telepathic communication between aliens and humans. Aliens
cannot immobilize people wearing thought screens nor can they control their minds or communicate
with them.

Results of the thought screen helmet are preliminary. As of June, 2000, aliens have not taken any
abductees while they were wearing thought screen helmets using Velostat shielding.” [via boing boing]

Click Here for Earthquake

Annals of the Age of Ignorance (cont’d.): Arkansas considers banning evolution from textbooks. Here we go again. But this time state-sanctioned textbooks can’t even mention radio-carbon dating data on plants or animals! CNN

Brain image database benefits research and education worldwide. “Brain scans are an important tool for medical science, basic research and education, but this expensive technology is often out of reach for many
institutions. Now a team at Dartmouth College has developed a repository for images of human brain scans that is available free to researchers
and educators worldwide.

The National Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Data Center was established with a grant of $4.7 million over five years from the
National Science Foundation (NSF). The scientific research and education community recently gained access to the first data sets, which are made
available by Dartmouth on CDROMs.” EurekAlert! If you’ve been reading FmH for awhile, you’ll know that I’ve been blinking to the — literally — illuminating findings of fMRI studies whenever I can find them. Here’s a primer about how MRI and fMRI work. Here’s a Google search to take it further.

An interview with Kari Stefansson, who founded deCODE genetics in Iceland and thinks he knows the secret of how to find disease-causing genes. The controversial project, which faces Icelandic court challenges but has completed a successful $244 million IPO, is creating a “phenotype database” of the Icelandic population by correlating a
collection of the health records of all 280,000 Icelanders with Iceland’s extensive public genealogy records to “find
disease-causing genes, aided by the relatively homogenous genetics of Iceland’s population”. Discovered genes would be turned into drug targets. Stefansson:

“The database has been controversial mostly for the wrong reasons. There are
all kinds of reasons to be skeptical of collection of personal information, and I think that we can
never be too careful when we do that. But most of the controversy was focused on
misinformation, the insistence that we were working on biological samples without informed
consent and things of that sort.”

He feels that majority approval, rather than unanimous informed consent, is sufficient to proceed with the project. Public sentiment in Iceland ran around 3:1 in favor when polled, and the endeavor was authorized by an act of the Icelandic parliament. Here’s further coverage of the controversy about this and similar projects that are being done in other populations. Harvard’s geneticist and resident gadfly Richard Lewontin typifies these endeavors as conversions of “the health
and genetic status of the entire population into a tool for the profit of a single enterprise.” MIT Technology Review [thanks, higgy]

Signs of Life: Vote to Reverse Abortion Rule. Democrats may be turning the tables on the Blank Stare. Earlier this month, Republicans used a rarely invoked Senate rule — that can force a vote to rescind executive branch regulations — to reverse Clinton administration workplace safety protections. Now Senate Democrats, with the reported support of at least five Republicans (Olympia Snowe [ME], Jim Jeffords
[VT], Susan Collins [ME], Arlen Specter [PA] and Lincoln Chafee [RI] ), will use this maneuver to reverse Bush’s ban on US aid to advocates of abortion abroad. Recall that this was Bush’s first significant — and malignant — executive action after his inauguration, and that his responses to subsequent questions about the decision demonstrated his lack of understanding of its implications. Reuters

“Why would kids from a place like that do it? Because they can, because it’s been done.” From Classrooms to Chat Rooms, All Threats Turn Serious. One of the tragedies of modern life is the pitiful unoriginality of even violent pathological attention-seeking. ‘ “I think that we have reached a point where
this has become part of the repertoire of
acting out,” said Charles Patrick Ewing,
professor of law and psychology at the
State University of New York at Buffalo and
author of Kids Who Kill.’ And I’m amazed to hear about the modern equivalent of the ludicrous duck-and-cover exercises which in my grade school years were supposed to protect us in the event of a nuclear blast — drills in which students prepare for an imaginary terrorist attack by finding safe havens and escape routes from their schools. Is this preparedness or absurd hypervigilance which gives troubled kids a built-in avenue to act out? New York Times

To the Moon, Alice Cooper. Digital satellite radio from space for $9.95/month: will anyone listen? Wired

Bushonics speakers strike back; “We’re mad as hell and we won’t be
misunderestimated anymore!” Salon

Several interesting blinks arise from catching up with wood s lot:

PR to improve the freemason’s image: “Tired of being ‘mugged’ by the media, the
United Grand Lodge of England has appointed
a PR agency to improve the image of
freemasonry. But can the spin doctors allay
suspicions that the secretive organisation is
pulling strings in the police and judiciary?” The Guardian

The gospel according to Luke (Skywalker): “If 8,000 New Zealanders have heeded an
e-mail asking them to declare Jedi as their
faith on this week’s census forms, then Star
Wars will have spawned an officially
recognised religion.” BBC

Will Bush Kill Us? “Though it is only a few short months into the Bush administration, it is hard to
imagine how he could have moved any more quickly to make the world a far more
dangerous place than it already was. ” Daily Brew

R.I.P. David McTaggart, 69, Canadian co-founder of Greenpeace and pioneer of direct action for the environment.

Jorn Barger at <a href=”http://robotwisdom.com/
“>Robot Wisdom will link prominently to your website if you’ll support UC Berkeley students’ Israel divestment campaign. ‘ “The people who run our universities are not just tacitly supporting but are actually benefiting from the exploitation of Palestinians,” said Snehal Shigavi, a UC Berkeley graduate student.

What UC Berkeley students demand is that the school system pull shares from companies that either have branches or subsidiaries in Israel or do $5 million per year or more in business there. So far 13 such companies have been identified.’

“Thelonious Monk was — is — the most fascinating figure in the history of jazz. Yet few Monk
biographies have been written, and they tend to rehash the same material. That’s partly
because Monk was a hard man to pin down. He rarely spoke to writers – or anyone else, for
that matter – and when he did, he responded to most questions curtly, if at all. It was partially a
game and it was partially a mental-health issue, but it prevented people from seeing Monk
beyond his music. Of course, that’s how he wanted it.

Biographies of the pianist and composer have tended to disappoint; Laurent de Wilde’s Monk’
(1996) is remarkably unrewarding. But now we have an intriguing idea, and a rich reading
experience, in The Thelonious Monk Reader. Here, Monk comes alive, through old magazine
stories, newspaper profiles, interviews, liner notes, record reviews, concert critiques,
remembrances, and essays. Not only do we get reminiscences on Monk’s music and life, but we
get to read what people were writing about him before and while he was at his peak.” Boston Globe

Please don’t call me Theo

Modes of address are thus not so much being lost from our culture as
being deliberately expunged.

This familiarity is a sign of the ever greater vulgarity and shallowness of
British life, of an unwillingness to exercise judgment in making distinctions.
Not all relationships are those of friendship, but they are now all those of
familiarity. This naturally results in a world in which false bonhomie is
tempered by outbursts of insensate rage. The Spectator

Mir‘s Last Gift. “Great sites crop up to track Mir‘s demise.” Byte

Catastrophe or cure? Are fetal grafts safe? New Scientist

Division is rife over schizophrenia gene
claim, about which I posted below. BioMedNet

Shouting at your kids can damage their brains, as well
as hurting their ears, according to US child
psychiatrists. The Guardian On the other hand, ‘Preschoolers who are “in touch with their feelings”‘ may be less
likely to have serious learning or behavior problems in later years, results of a study suggest.

“…(P)reschool children’s abilities to recognize and interpret emotion cues in
facial expressions have long-term effects on social behavior and academic competence,”
according to lead study author Dr. Carroll E. Izard of the University of Delaware and his
colleagues.

In a study of 72 children from low-income families, Izard and colleagues found that the ability to
read others’ emotions at age 5 predicted the youngsters’ social behavior and learning skills 4
years later. ‘

Judge Sentences Supremacist Pastor in Abduction of Grandchildren. “A white
supremacist pastor was sentenced to 30
years in prison for abducting six of his
grandchildren and keeping them at his farm to
indoctrinate them.” The children, now 9 through 16, had been held for five years until found in a police raid in May. It took four days to persuade them to come out of a small basement roon where they were barricaded, authorities say because of the depth of their indoctrination. They have since undergone mental health treatment in North Dakota.

Unusual Competency Debate Surfaces in White House Shooting Case. “The man accused of firing shots outside the White
House last month pressed a judge to let him stand trial. A federal
prosecutor argued the accused, Robert W. Pickett, should be sent to a
prison hospital.” He finds a finite prison sentence — he faces 25 years — preferable to an indefinite hospital commitment. The defendant reportedly has a history of mental illness but he and his defense attorneys insist that there is no basis for the judge to require a competency hearing. There are suggestions that, by waving a gun at federal agents outside the White House, he was trying to get law enforcement officers to kill him. APB News

Smartphone a Hot Seller in S.F. “Kyocera’s newly released personal digital assistant smartphone is sold out in San Francisco.

Retailers are apparently unable to keep up with the demand for Kyocera’s QCP 6035 — a converged PDA
smartphone that runs on the Palm operating system — since its release three weeks ago.” Wired But “only early adopters are snapping up the PDA cell phones in the United States —
and even these users seem to be carrying around more than one device.

PDA cell phones just aren’t light enough and don’t cost what consumers are willing to dish
out, the industry says. In other words, these PDA phones will languish along with the other
high-end cell phones and PDAs floating around the marketplace today.

‘I’m not willing to make a prediction for more than five years,’ said Palm’s developer Ted
Ladd. ‘I carry my cell phone and Palm. There are times when I want one or the other.’ ” Several other contenders vie with the Kyocera phone as combination devices, using various OS’s for their PDA components. Wired The trick would be if PDA cell phones avoid doing two things badly, because we already have devices that do each of the two things well.

A ‘Tiger’ of a Different Stripe. Crouching Tiger, a hit in the US because it’s so Chinese, is a flop in China because it’s so Chinese… and because it’s a hit in the US. “Put bluntly, almost every major cultural export from China over the past 25 years that has made it in the West has flopped in China…” Washington Post

With an administration full of his Daddy’s people who last did any foreign relations when we were accustomed to thinking of Russia as the Devil Incarnate, it’s no surprise the Blank Stare is taking us back into the Cold War with the biggest expulsion of suspected spies since Reagan took similar action in 1986. Reuters It’s not as if both countries haven’t been spying on each other in the interim. A Russian Foreign Ministry official’s comment that the order “went much deeper than a mere expulsion” should be seen in light of the US’ destabilizing move of meeting with Chechen representatives, and of course the broader context of our planned unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty to build the NMD (national missile defense) system. Russia signalled its intention to respond 1:1 to the expulsions. As usual, the Shrub and his handlers “do protest too much”, finding it necessary to assure us that he was in charge of this decision. The ‘spin’ aims to persuade us that the President has a new, hard-line, “realistic” way of looking at our foreign adversaries.

MSNBC.com photo contest turns into Israeli-Palestinian battle. “A Web site’s photo contest that
became a cyberspace battleground between Israelis and Palestinians has been pulled because users were
voting for the same image multiple times, officials with MSNBC.com said.” Nando Times

USDA Seizes Vermont ‘Mad Cow’ Sheep. One of two flocks in which sheep had tested positive for TSE (transmissible spongiform encephalopathy), the generic term for the class of “prion diseases” that includes sheep scrapie, BSE, and new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans, was seized in a commando-style raid, the shepherd says before he could mount a challenge to what he says was an improper testing process. These diseases are probably just species-specific names for one process; the prions can be passed across species by consuming infected tissue, and cause an inevitably fatal neurodegeneration after a scarily long incubation period responsible for the former name for the conditions, “slow virus diseases”. What this may mean is that there are multitudes of cases currently incubating; perhaps a die-off of epidemic proportions is in store for us.

The Other Red Meat? “No beef? Try ostrich. Yes, ostrich. Gripped by ‘mad cow’ madness, many Europeans are rejecting beef for
healthier alternatives—and redefining their culinary traditions.” Time Europe

CDC’s internal climate report and forecast: phthalates up, lead levels down, cotinine down, mercury alarming. And, if the Shrub has his way, it’ll be up with arsenic and radionucleotides.

DMT: The Spirit Molecule, by Dr. Rick Strassman.From the author’s blurb: “In 1990, I began the first new human research with psychedelic, or
hallucinogenic, drugs in the United States in over 20 years. These
studies investigated the effects of N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, an
extremely short-acting and powerful psychedelic. During the project’s
five years, I administered approximately 400 doses of DMT to 60
human volunteers. This research took place at the University of New
Mexico’s School of Medicine in Albuquerque, where I was tenured
Associate Professor of Psychiatry.

I was drawn to DMT because of its presence in all of our bodies.
Perhaps excessive DMT production, coming from the mysterious
pineal gland, was involved in naturally occurring ‘psychedelic’ states.
These might include birth, death and near-death, psychosis, and
mystical experiences. Only later, while the study was well under way,
did I also begin considering DMT’s role in the ‘alien abduction’
experience….

The Spirit Molecule reviews what we know about psychedelic drugs
in general, and DMT in particular. It then traces the DMT research
project from its earliest intimations through the maze of committees
and review boards to its actual performance.”

A reader wrote wondering whether anyone is investigating whether the monarch butterfly die-off in Mexico might relate to crops genetically engineered to contain the Bt gene for pest resistance. Rampton and Stauber, in their book Trust Us, We’re Experts, reported that more than 20 million US acres are planted with Bt crops, which are poisonous to many classes of insects. So I did a Google Search: “monarch butterfly” “Bt gene” “bacillus thuringiensis”, which comes up with legions of net references to concern about the lethality of Bt to monarchs in particular. Now, is Mexican agriculture into Bt? [thanks, Holden]

The first schizophrenia gene is discovered:

“A gene variant contributing to the cause of catatonic schizophrenia in a large pedigree was discovered by scientists of the
Julius-Maximilians-University of Wuerzburg, Germany. The variant was detected when a group of psychiatrists, geneticists, and neuroscientists
around Klaus-Peter Lesch and Jobst Meyer at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy investigated genes on human chromosome 22 to
elucidate the genetic background of dominantly inherited catatonic schizophrenia, which is characterized by acute psychotic episodes with
hallucinations, delusions, and disturbed body movements. The protein encoded by this gene, which has been designated WKL1, shares some
features with ion channels. Ion channel proteins are located in the cell membrane and assist transportation of electric currents along neurons.
Mutations in the potassium channel KCNA1, another ion channel which is remotely related to WKL1, cause episodic ataxia, a rare movement
disorder lacking psychotic episodes.” EurekAlert!

South Africa: More HIV Than Thought: “One in nine South Africans is HIV-positive, the government said Tuesday, more
than previously thought in a country that already has the world’s largest population of infected people.

In the hard-hit eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, the infection rate was greater than one in every three
people, a government study said.” If anywhere near accurate, this is utterly staggering. AP

Somewhat clumsy portrait of Kate Bush. Salon

Visitors to New Art Show Draw a Blank A British art gallery has taken what constitutes art to a new extreme — by putting on an
exhibition of absolutely nothing.

Salon.com Seeks Subscriptions Depicting itself as a vital alternative to the mainstream media, cash-strapped
Salon.com Tuesday asked its readers to pay an annual $30 subscription to help keep the online newspaper
alive… Readers who pay the fee will receive a new premium service that blocks out an onslaught of larger ads that
San Francisco-based Salon has started to sell to boost revenues. AP

Breaching the Last Taboo? Heavy Petting: Bioethicist and animal liberation advocate Peter Singer comments on Midas Dekkers’ book Dearest Pet: On Bestiality. Nerve

Greatest Net Dupe in History? “A restaurant worker allegedly masterminded the largest theft of identities in Internet history and is suspected of stealing millions of dollars from celebrities, billionaires and executives such as Steven Spielberg and Ted Turner. … (The) high-school dropout, Abraham Abdallah, 32, duped more than 200 of the ‘Richest People in America’ listed in Forbes magazine by skillfully using computers in a Brooklyn library.” Wired

The boundaries of science or the
boundaries of idiocy? “Rodd Millner, an Australian
ex-commando, … intends to don a
space suit and ride a balloon 130,000 feet up to
the edge of space. Once he gets there, he will
jump. An experienced skydiver, speedboat racer,
scuba diver, and, before that, an insurance
salesman, Millner believes that he will reach a
speed of between 700 and 900 miles per hour
within one minute of leaping from the balloon. If
he is successful, he will be the first human to
break the sound barrier sans vehicle.” Feed

R.I.P. John Phillips. dead at 65. Memorable to most for his role in the saccharin Mamas & Papas, let’s not forget his vision as the chief organizer of the Monterey Pop Festival.

(For all you at the cutting-edge intersection between privacy/conspiracy concerns and space-exploration fanaticism): Spy Agency May Have Located Mars Polar Lander: “The Mars Polar Lander may have been
found — intact — by a top-secret spy imagery agency.

The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) has been
quietly scanning Mars pictures, looking for the Mars Polar
Lander since early December 1999. According to a source
close to the NIMA effort, photographic specialists at NIMA
think they’ve spotted something. But NASA officials say it’s
too early to tell.

The Mars Polar Lander (MPL) dove into the Martian
atmosphere on Dec. 3, 1999, heading for a soft landing on
the planet’s south polar region. But contact was never
reestablished after the probe was to have touched down. On
Jan. 17, 2000, after a series of efforts to communicate with
the spacecraft failed, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who
managed the mission, declared it a loss.” space.com [thanks, Abby] More about NIMA can be found here.

Martin Klein, who like myself posted the story about the massacre of the monarchs to his weblog, sent me a link to this LA Times story refuting the claim: “The Mexican environmental watchdog Profepa announced that a scientific
analysis of 300 butterfly corpses from the Cerro San Andres sanctuary in central
Michoacan state showed no traces of toxic substances from pesticides.
It concluded that the butterflies had died from the cold.” Klein, as a result, deleted the original post from his weblog. I, being the querrulous sort that I am, wonder instead whose interests Mexico’s environmental protection agency actually serves and what political power the Mexican timber concerns wield, and thus whether its announcement is credible or should be taken as a coverup. Googling on “Profepa AND Mexico” comes up with this. Here, incidentally, is last year’s coverage of concerns about the monarchs’ wintering grounds from ABC News. Klein’s blog is here. As a self-described “environmental bureaucrat” for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, perhaps he has a line on the credibility of Profepa that I don’t, but all I could think about were the scenes in Traffic about the gullible Americans’ cooperation with their corrupt Mexican counterparts in drug enforcement. Not to stereotype or anything, and why should I have any greater faith in the righteousness of, say, Whitman’s EPA?

Sydney Morgue Investigated Over Corpse Experiments: ”virtually a body parts supermarket for medical researchers.” Reuters

Claire Field wins Harry Potter Web site case: “Warner Brothers has backed down on its legal threats against
15-year-old Claire Field – owner of the Web site
www.harrypotterguide.co.uk.

In a fax sent to Claire’s lawyer, Matthew Rippon of Prettys Solicitors,
Warner Brothers said that in view of the facts that Claire had
registered the URL in good faith and was not using it for commercial
means, there was no need for it to continue in its action.

Previously, Warner Brothers claimed that Claire’s site infringed its
trademark as it had the rights to the forthcoming Harry Potter film.” The Register

Schizophrenia ‘helped the ascent of man’. ‘Tiny mutations in our ancestors’ brain cells triggered mankind’s
takeover of the world 100,000 years ago. But these changes
also cursed our species to suffer from schizophrenia and
depression.

This is the controversial claim by biochemist David Horrobin in a
new book, The Madness of Adam & Eve: How schizophrenia
shaped humanity, to be published by Bantam Press next
month.

Horrobin – who is medical adviser to the Schizophrenia
Association of Great Britain – argues that the changes which
propelled humanity to its current global ascendancy were the
same as those which have left us vulnerable to mental disease.’ Horrobin lists families sharing great creativity and madness — Jung, Einstein, Joyce, etc. — and geniuses considered to be mentally imbalanced. I’d love to see his statistical reasoning, without which it feels like sampling bias to me. Most dicey, however, seems his assertion that the critical mutation involved the fat content of human neural tissue. He argues that the transition to an agriculturally-based diet altered the fat content of our food and left us vulnerable, as our hunter-gatherer ancestors hadn’t been. Although I haven’t read the book, and am arguing only with the blurb, there appear to be several problems with his thesis. First, he appears to lump together all major mental illnesses, not explaining their very real differences. Second, this doesn’t explain why some people get the illnesses and others do not; why no one has ever found the association between a high-fat diet and relative immunity to schizophrenia (or an inverse relationship between vulnerability to heart disease and mental illness…) his theory would seem to predict; or differences across populations with very differing diets. But, then again, until recently he was the managing director of a company promoting essential fatty acid natural dietary supplements. The Guardian

The rapper has a Ph.D. “Let’s take a look at the resume of Henry Biggs, aspiring rap
music artist:

Assistant dean of arts and sciences at Washington
University. Attended high school at Country Day. A doctorate
in romance linguistics with an emphasis on French and
Italian. Graduated cum laude from Harvard after studying
ancient Greek and Latin. Chaired the foreign languages
department at tiny Houghton College. Has been in the Big
Brother program for 17 years. Completed the Boston and
New York marathons and an Ironman triathlon. Swam the
English Channel.” StL Today

Politically Correct and the Arts “Those of us who believe there is a value difference between
playing a Brahms sonata and banging a dustbin lid should be acutely aware that such views are no
longer educationally acceptable.”

There’s lots to moan about nowadays so where have all the
protest singers gone? “The Falklands gave us Elvis Costello’s Shipbuilding and Billy
Bragg’s Island of No Return. But the Kosovo conflict has
produced nary a B-side.” The Times of London

Pay for play “Why does radio
suck? Because most
stations play only
the songs the record
companies pay them
to. And things are
going to get worse.” Salon

Online Ads to Get Bigger: “Renewing their bid for the eyes and minds of consumers, a
panel representing the beleaguered online advertising
industry announced new guidelines Monday for bigger,
bolder ads on the World Wide Web. The new ad formats, supplementing the widespread and oft-criticized
banner ads appearing atop many Web sites, call for advertisements in
seven new shapes and sizes.” E&P Online

“Mothers still bear responsibility for most
of the world’s childcare, but when it
comes to bedtime stories they are simply not as well equipped as fathers.” Guardian-Observer

We’re all Irish now “What
is happening on 17 March: a multiethnic karaoke night? …
Don’t be an eejit. This isn’t your traditional St Patrick’s Day, a
day for Irish people to get all misty-eyed about all things Irish.
This is St Who’s Day, a day for everybody to ‘go Irish’ and give
it some praise, thanks and welly down the local pub.

Haven’t you heard? We’re all Irish now.” spiked-life

Weeds in disturbed areas may be source of more medically important compounds than plants in tropical rainforests. ‘The idea that tropical rainforests may hold the key to new medicines that can solve everything from AIDS to cancer has been around for some
time. Indeed, one study found that of the 95 plant species now used for prescription drugs, 39 originate in and around tropical forests.

Stepp, however, began to ask a simple question during his doctoral field work in the Mexican state of Chiapas and research with North American
tribes: Why would indigenous people walk miles to find medicinal plants if the plants were available on a roadside a few houses down? Working
with the Maya in Chiapas, Stepp found that, in fact, nearly all the medically important plants being used grow as weeds in disturbed areas not
far from their houses or villages.

“What we found is that people use what they have nearby, except on rare occasions,” said Stepp.’ [Although it predated my interest in ethnopharmacology, I did fieldworkwith the Highland Maya in Chiapas in the early ’70’s myself.]

Despite Sub Probe, Military Quietly Revives VIP Tours: “Five weeks after a U.S. submarine struck and sank a
Japanese trawler off Hawaii, the presence of 16 civilian VIPs on the craft remains a
point of controversy and a focus of an official Navy investigation.
But on Monday, a group of freshmen lawmakers from the U.S. House will
climb aboard a sub in Florida’s Port Everglades for eight hours of instruction and
excitement–just the sort of thing that had been planned for visitors on the sub
Greeneville before its deadly Feb. 9 collision.
The Distinguished Visitors Program has quietly come back because–bad
publicity or no–it’s simply too important to the military to give up.” LA Times

A Counterpunch essay on Freud, Zionism and Vienna by Palestinian-American academic Edward Said is, to start with, interesting because we get to hear his explanation of the famous news photo of him as a “rock-throwing terrorist.” I blinked to this photograph when it appeared in July, 2000. (The direct link to the photo is expired now.) Said was invited by the director of the Freud Institute and Museum in Vienna to deliver the renowned annual Freud lecture there in May 2001. He has a longstanding interest in Freud, who was an early anti-Zionist, Said explains, although advocated a Jewish state as European anti-Semitism grew with Hitler’s rise. Said planned to discuss non-European influences on and applicability of Freud’s basically Eurocentric views. But Said’s invitation was rescinded “because of the situation in the Middle East”. Requests by Said for further explanation went unanswered but the Institute director told the New York Times, as Said construes it, that the rock-throwing incident was the reason.

From J I M W I C h, tragic news that loggers in Michoacan, Mexico may have deliberately massacred up to 22 million monarch butterflies in their overwintering grounds, in order to regain access to the protected land. Links to news of the event, and background on the butterflies and their momentous annual migration, surely one of the miracles of nature. For those of you who are impatient for just the facts, here‘s CNN’s news article.

Who’s Feeling No Pain? “The latest trendy drugs are old-fashioned painkillers. They’re chic,
mellowing and way addictive.” Time I’m not a big fan of what passes for in-depth analysis at Time, which is sounding more and more like People, but they’re talking about a legitimate issue here. On the front lines I see that the degree of abuse of hydrocodone (Vicodin) and oxycodone (Percocet, Percodan, Oxycontin and others) has skyrocketed. While I believe firmly in adequate pain medicine prescribing, the range of chronic pain complaints for which physicians are doling out these “synthetic morphines” is astounding.

Controversy over ‘non-heart beating’ organ donors: “The possibility of a new source of organs for transplant is appealing
because it might alleviate a small part of the shortage of donor organs…. But the emergence of a form of organ donation where the donor’s
heartbeat and breathing have stopped but he is not brain dead unsettles
some ethicists and philosophers, and it has made the procedure
vulnerable to bad publicity.

Sometimes, families permit the patient to be whisked, still alive and still on
the ventilator, to the operating room for organ recovery. Only in the OR is
the ventilator removed, the heart and lungs stop, and the patient can be
declared dead. That borders on ‘ritualized surgical savagery,’ contends George Annas,
professor of health law at the Boston University School of Public Health.” Boston Globe

From J I M W I C h, tragic news that loggers in Michoacan, Mexico may have deliberately massacred up to 22 million monarch butterflies in their overwintering grounds, in order to regain access to the protected land. Links to news of the event, and background on the butterflies and their momentous annual migration, surely one of the miracles of nature. For those of you who are impatient for just the facts, here‘s CNN’s news article.

Detecting Chester Himes: “Absorbing biography of a misfit writer who reinvented the mystery genre.” Idiosyncratic, complex and conflicted, sometimes abstruse, outspoken expatriate crime writer who was a bestseller in France and some of whose titles you’ll recognize as minor films. SF Chronicle

Curve Ball: “The steep downward spiral of the stock markets, while bad news for Americans’ bank accounts, may actually be a good thing for their souls. …(T)here’s simply been too much money around lately for people to be happy.” The New Republic

“With an ally now in the White House, House Republicans yesterday opened a coordinated campaign to begin imposing new restrictions on abortion, starting with a bill that would impose penalties on people who harm a fetus during an assault on a pregnant woman.” Washington Post The strategy seems to be a war of attrition on opponents, starting with a move guaranteed to evoke maximum sympathy in a broad segment of the populace. (After all, who could oppose a measure responding to attacks on pregnant women!) If the opposition doesn’t draw a line in the sand, it appears certain a full constitutional challenge to a woman’s right to choose is in the offing. Let’s hope the Democratic leadership isn’t led to the slaughter singing the same old reconciliation and compromise song.

Palestinian intifada going mainstream. Probably because of Israel’s election of Sharon as well as the draconian isolation of Ramallah, a broader cross-section of Palestinian society is joining the mass protests. But even Palestinian observers are uncertain whether the intifada will move in a nonviolent direction or if belligerency will escalate. Christian Science Monitor

Lydon to reappear with a Web cast “Next Tuesday, nearly three weeks after WBUR-FM severed
ties with ”Connection” host Christopher Lydon and senior producer
Mary McGrath after a bitter contract deadlock, Lydon will resurrect the
popular show with a one-time, one-hour Web cast.” Update on the acrimonious Boston dispute that probably means the end of the most intelligent radio talk show ever, which I’ve blinked before. Boston Globe

Bush lets deadline pass on missile defense. “Pentagon officials said Friday the Bush
administration has let a March 16 deadline pass, without notifying Congress of
any intent to begin building a radar on Alaska’s Shemya island, making it
unlikely that construction of a national missile defense system can begin this
year.” CNN Wisdom or merely indecision?

Scientologists Force Comment Off Slashdot: “Last Saturday a comment was posted here by an anonymous reader that contained text that was
copyrighted by the Church of Scientology. They have since followed the DMCA and demanded
that we remove the comment. While Slashdot is an open forum and we encourage free discussion
and sharing of ideas, our lawyers have advised us that, considering all the details of this case, the comment
should come down….

This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of
its content, and believe me nobody is more broken hearted about it than me. It’s a bad precedent, and a blow
for the freedom of speech that we all share in this forum. But this simply doesn’t look like a case we can win…. We need to choose our battles and this isn’t one we want to have. …

Now there is the matter of this specific comment. It contained a text called “OT III”, part of what is known as the
Fishman Affidavit. This text is Copyrighted by the Church of Scientology. In compliance with the DMCA, we are
removing it from Slashdot. In its place we are putting non-copyrighted text: Links to websites about the church of
Scientology, as well as links to how you can contact your congressman about the DMCA.” Slashdot

The End of Science and Math? The Omega Man: Gregory Chaitin, a mathematical researcher at IBM, has discovered a number, Omega, that is uncomputable and demonstrates that it crops up all over mathematics and blows holes in the consistency of mathematical theory.

Chaitin has shown that there are an infinite number of
mathematical facts but, for the most part, they are unrelated
to each other and impossible to tie together with unifying
theorems. If mathematicians find any connections between
these facts, they do so by luck. “Most of mathematics is true
for no particular reason,” Chaitin says. “Maths is true by
accident.”

This is also bad news, for example, for physics. It implies, he shows, that ‘there can
never be a reliable “theory of everything”, neatly summarising
all the basic features of reality in one set of equations.’ In other words, he claims nothing less than that there are fundamental limits on what we can know. New Scientist
A Google search for <a href=”http://www.google.com/search?num=100?client=googlet&q=Gregory%20Chaitin
“>”Gregory Chaitin” provides further references, the text of some of his technical papers, and a pointer to his home page at IBM.

Now available, “Follow Me Here” teeshirts, mugs and mousepads, with a discreet little logo. Coming soon: baseball caps.

Researchers identify an enzyme that regulates the action of chronic cocaine. This work elucidates the biochemical basis of addiction and points to possible biochemical interventions. It may also point to a way of quantifying individual differences in genetic susceptibility to cocaine abuse. The press release, quite curiously, does not mention that principal researcher Greengard was a co-winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine. EurekAlert! And, in another story related to genetic susceptibility to substance addiction, researchers reported that the legendary Chinese weakness for opiates appears to exist. “Mutant genes associated with ‘pleasure and reward pathways’ in the brain make an unusually high proportion of Chinese susceptible to heroin or opium addiction, a two-year study by the Chinese University of Hong Kong has found. Researchers suspect that the Chinese love of gambling may also have a genetic component and are keen to begin blood tests on local gambling addicts.” The Telegraph UK

Sleeping dogs lend a paw to narcoleptics. While various etiologies for narcolepsy have been explored, some evidence points to the hypocretin neurotransmitter system. Deficiencies in hypocretin secretion or the receptors which detect it have correlated with narcoleptic symptoms. Narcoleptic poodles, Labradors, dachshunds and Dobermans have been shown to have a mutation in the gene coding for the hypocretin-receptor. Canine narcolepsy is considered a close analogue to the human malady. EurekAlert!

Deepest ever picture of the universe reveals new type of quasar “Astronomers have peered deeper into the universe than ever
before – and discovered a new type of quasar 12 billion light years away. The
joint venture between the space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory and the
Very Large Telescope in Chile also found that giant black holes were far
more active in the early universe than they are today.” Physics Today

Seeing with your tongue. Because the density of touch receptors on the tongue is so great, mapping visual stimuli onto it with a “tongue display unit” has sufficient resolution that it may allow the visually impaired to navigate. New Scientist [via EurekAlert!]

Brazil ‘days away’ from eco-disaster.

Brazil’s state oil company, Petrobras, says a giant oil rig damaged in explosions on Thursday is in danger of sinking and provoking a major environmental disaster, possibly within three days. The floating platform, the largest in the world, has 1.5 million litres of petrol and oil on board, much of which could spill into the sea if the structure collapses.

…The incident is the latest in a series of other accidents. The oil workers’ union says that over the last three years 32 people hired or subcontracted by Petrobras have died in a total of 99 accidents.

…oil industry analysts say that Petrobras and other Latin American state-run oil companies tend to be short of funds, with governments often extracting large revenues to pay for social and other programmes. BBC

First, direct observational evidence of a change in the Earth’s greenhouse effect between 1970 and 1997. “Previous studies in this area have depended on theoretical simulations because of the lack of data. However the Imperial team reached their
conclusions after analysing data collected by two different earth-orbiting spacecraft, in 1970 and 1997.

Comparison between the two data sets has unequivocally established that significant changes in greenhouse gas emissions from the Earth have
caused the change to the planet’s greenhouse effect over this time period.” EurekAlert!

Spelling of Languages Can Affect Dyslexia, Study Finds: “… new research shows that dyslexia–the most common learning disability in
the United States–arises from a problem in the brain that cuts across language
barriers, cultural borders and writing systems…
But the very character of certain written languages, including English and
French, makes the condition worse because their spelling is so dramatically at odds
with how words sound, the researchers discovered.” EurekAlert!

Entire packing depot staff found stoned after cannabis cake prank: “Workers in New Zealand were found crying by their
machines and wandering around stoned after unwittingly
eating birthday cake containing cannabis.” Ananova

Amygdala responses to facial expressions [Thomas KM et al, Biological Psychiatry, 15 February 2001, vol. 49, no. 4, pp. 309-316(8)] “The amygdala plays a central role in the human response to affective or emotionally charged stimuli, particularly
fear-producing stimuli. We examined the specificity of the amygdala response to facial expressions in adults and
children (with fMRI)….Adults showed increased left amygdala activity for fearful
faces relative to neutral faces. This pattern was not observed in the children who showed greater amygdala activity with
neutral faces than with fearful faces. For the children,… boys but not
girls showed less activity with repeated exposure to the fearful faces.” [requires free registration]

A Night to Remember A roundup of research from animal and human studies supporting the theory that there’s a connection between sleep and memory consolidation, and the intriguing idea that there may be subjective experience — “dreaming’ — throughout the animal kingdom. The Scientist [requires free registration]

The Organization Kid: “A few months ago I went to
Princeton University to see what
the young people who are going
to be running our country in a
few decades are like. Faculty members
gave me the names of a few dozen
articulate students, and I sent them
e-mails, inviting them out to lunch or
dinner in small groups. I would go to
sleep in my hotel room at around
midnight each night, and when I
awoke, my mailbox would be full of
replies—sent at 1:15 a.m., 2:59 a.m.,
3:23 a.m.” Very little dating, no time for intellectual discussion outside classes and study, no involvement in ‘larger issues’, little insight into issues of morality or character, and not at all unhappy with the situation! The Atlantic

Annals of the Invasion of Privacy (cont’d.): Smile, You’re On Scan Camera “When football fans learned that their faces were scanned and compared to mugshots of common criminals at
this year’s Super Bowl, many were outraged. But they shouldn’t have been surprised.” Wired

Score one for the
evolutionists: Snake study boosts theory of natural selection.

The 140-year-old theory that animals mimic the appearance of poisonous cousins to improve their chances of
survival is widely accepted in
evolutionary circles but has never been conclusively proved. Now a simple but elegant study with decoy snakes provides empirical evidence. Nando Times

Gadget Wars: “A new breed of consumer-electronics device is emerging
from the computer industry, and with it a new sort of
consumer-electronics company…This fabled “convergence” of the analogue consumer-electronics
world with the digital world of computing has been a long time
coming. But unlike the simple substitution of, say, a digital
camcorder for an analogue one, the new products have
fundamentally different DNA from their predecessors. The new
wave of digital devices not only use PC technology and are
marketed as PC peripherals, but are often made by companies that
have their roots in the PC industry itself.” The Economist

The Censorware Project: Exposing the secrets of censorware since 1997. “The Censorware Project was formed by a group of writers and internet activists in late 1997. Our goal is to
bring to light information about censorware products which is, by its nature, hidden.

… Censorware typically works by blocking you from receiving information — or by
preventing you from seeing it once it’s received, which has the same effect. But
it’s also censorware that blocks data flow the other way, typically by X’ing out
parts of your email, or preventing you from posting to a discussion website…

We at the Censorware Project believe that this type of software is the greatest
single threat to free speech as we know it on the internet over the next decade.
We are committed to exposing the flaws of this misunderstood software and
working to encourage alternatives to censorship. ” [via Red Rock Eaters]

junkfaxes.org – Helping to Stop Illicit Junk Faxes “The transmission of unsolicited faxed advertisements has been illegal under U.S. Federal
law since 1991. In addition, many state laws also prohibit the practice.

The reason? It’s theft. Honest advertisers pay to get their message in front of prospective
customers. Junk faxers steal the resources of the recipients… fax paper, ink, personnel
costs, and the time that their equipment is tied up receiving ads instead of being available
for legitimate purposes.

… This web site has been established to disseminate information on various junk fax senders
as an aid to the recipients who wish to enforce the law by pursuing the remedies under
applicable state and federal laws, as well as the growing number of states’ attorney
generals and other government agencies who are stepping up enforcement efforts.”

The time is certainly right to reassert the sense behind the separation of church and state. Selection from the first chapter of Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore: The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness

Americans seem to fight about many silly things: whether a copy of the Ten Commandments can be posted in a city courthouse; whether a holiday display that
puts an image of the baby Jesus next to one of Frosty the Snowman violates the Constitution; whether fidgeting grade-schoolers may stand for a minute in
silent “spiritual” meditation before classes begin. Common sense might suggest that these are harmless practices whose actual damage is to trivialize religion.

Otherwise they threaten no one. Not children, who ignore them as the incomprehensible designs of absurd grown-ups. Not atheists, who may find them
hypocritical and vulgar but hardly intimidating. Not Buddhists and Muslims, who in these small areas of daily practice can demand equal access to the public
landscape. So why do they raise ideological storms?

The answer lies in what history has done to us. Some Americans have inherited extravagant hopes about what religion, specifically Christianity, may
accomplish in solving social problems through moral instruction. Others look to a different legacy, one that suggests how easily partisan religion in the hands of
a purported majority can become a dangerous form of intellectual and political tyranny. Both groups have become masters of hyperbolic language.
However, their quarrels are not about nothing. If Americans have learned to make constitutional mountains out of religious molehills, it is because crucial
principles may become endangered. The creche or the menorah on public property becomes the nose of the camel sneaking into the tent where Americans
have carefully enshrined the constitutional separation of church and state.

Should we be worried? The answer given in this book is yes, at least with respect to one area of ongoing controversy. The authors are concerned about current
pronouncements made by politically charged religious activists, what is called in journalistic parlance the religious right. Their crusade is an old one. Now a
prime target is abortion clinics. Before it was mail delivery on Sundays, or Catholic immigrants, or Darwinian biology in school curriculums. Whenever religion of
any kind casts itself as the one true faith and starts trying to arrange public policy accordingly, people who believe that they have a stake in free institutions,
whatever else might divide them politically, had better look out.

What follows, then, is a polemic. Since before the founding of the United States, European colonists in North America were arguing about the role of religion in
public and political life. Broadly speaking, two distinct traditions exist. We intend to lay out the case for one of them–what we call the party of the godless
Constitution and of godless politics. In brief, this position recognizes that the nation’s founders, both in writing the Constitution and in defending it in the
ratification debates, sought to separate the operations of government from any claim that human beings can know and follow divine direction in reaching
policy decisions. They did this despite their enormous respect for religion, their faith in divinely endowed human rights, and their belief that democracy
benefited from a moral citizenry who believed in God. The party we defend is based on a crucial intellectual connection, derived historically from both
religious and secular thinkers, between a godless Constitution and a God-fearing people.

We will call the other side in this debate that runs through American history the party of religious correctness. It maintains that the United States was established
as a Christian nation by Christian people, with the Christian religion assigned a central place in guiding the nation’s destiny. For those who adhered to this
party in the past, it followed that politicians and laws had to pass the test of furthering someone’s definition of a Christian public order. Recently some who
belong to this party have suggested that the stress upon “Christian” be downplayed in their political pronouncements. By referring more ecumenically to the
United States as a religious nation, they invite other religious traditions to join a family-values crusade launched originally by a particular form of Christian
faith. However, whether the present-day religious right has really moved beyond earlier pronouncements suggesting the forms of American government can
be entrusted only with a Christian people is, with respect to the issues raised in this book, beside the point. A shift in rhetorical strategy to widen political
appeal does not affect the substantive issues at stake.

The label “religious correctness” is pejorative and is obviously intended to turn the tables on those who imagine that the only danger to our free political
institutions lies in something they, pejoratively, call political correctness.

The Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University has online originals and English translations of Greek and Latin classics, English Renaissance text and other source material odds and ends. [via Red Rock Eaters]

“Is it any wonder they are bored, frustrated, angry, troubled and poorly educated
and that, occasionally, some of them engage in desperate acts of destruction? “ Thomas Szasz is still at it! With Friends Like These, Pity America’s Kids: “In words and deeds, young people today tell us that they do not like being
patronized, made to feel useless and baby-sat in day-care prisons called “schools.”
School administrators, teachers, child psychiatrists, child psychologists, social
workers, grief counselors, pharmaceutical companies and the many other
businesses that profit from the education racket are not the friends of children as
they proclaim. The economic and existential self-interests of these do-gooders are
inimical to real education and rational discipline.” LA Times

BYTE Feature – Hello FMD-ROM — Bye-Bye DVD? “If you want DVD-ROM because it’s better than
CD-ROM, wait until multi-layered FMD gets here… Constellation 3D’s
new FMD-ROM drives have the potential for 15x a
DVD’s capacity in the first generation — with
recordable disks, terabyte capacity, and also a
microdrive version to follow. ” That’s 1,000 gigabytes per disk. Byte