The Perfect Storm: Meteorologists at NOAA and elsewhere believe we are now entering a cycle of intensified mega-storms threatening our coasts. There may be an effect from global warming from the greenhouse effect, but there also seems to be an inherent 25-40 year storm cycle in the North Atlantic associated with a periodic rise in ocean temperature. So why are public officials ignoring the threat? Tompaine.com

Mysterious ice rings in Ontario and Quebec are baffling investigators tracking the
appearance of strange circles in ponds and fields across Canada.

Cold, hard facts about the frozen phenomena are scarce, making it too early to tell if the rings are
related to their better-known cousins, the crop circles that continue to turn up in farmers’ fields
worldwide, says a newly released report. National Post

James Fallows’ email exchange/interview with Christopher Hitchens about his recent book Unacknowledged Legislation and his argument that Henry Kissinger should be indicted as a war criminal. Atlantic Monthly

We’ve Still Got a Long Way to Go. The Europe researcher for the Women’s Rights
Division of Human Rights Watch comments in the Moscow Times about the nascent movement against domestic abuse in Russia.

Social ecology “seeks to fundamentally transform society to abolish the
nation-state and capitalism. As such it is integrally embedded in the
tradition of the left, especially the revolutionary libertarian left. Social
ecology calls for a decentralized, libertarian politics based on the
tradition of direct democracy, known as libertarian municipalism. It
proposes a face-to-face democracy that can potentially create an
institutional counterpower to the nation-state and capitalism, and
thereby lead to the creation of an ecological society.” Red Pepper In the ’70’s and ’80’s, particularly in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, a very similar-sounding bio-regionalist movement called for — and perhaps lived out — the devolution of the state, finding expression in Peter Berg’s Planet Drum (no, not the Mickey Hart project) and poet Gary Snyder’s thinking.

Observer review: Grammars of Creation by George Steiner: “In Grammars of Creation, he puts pressure on us to consider the
various nothingnesses we live with. Not only are our individual
lives haunted by our forthcoming absence, but every work of art –
and art, for Steiner, is at once our grand inquisitor and the best
way life has come up with of justifying itself – is ‘attended by a
two-fold shadow: that of its own possible or preferable
inexistence, and that of its disappearance’.”

Let’s Ditch Dixie  – The case for Northern secession:

‘You hear echoes of Southern nationalism
whenever Mississippi invokes “states’ rights” to justify flying
the Confederate flag over their capitols; or when the GOP’s
honorary Dixie chick Gale Norton mourns the defeat of the
South saying that “we lost too much”; or when John Ashcroft
praises Southern Partisan magazine for helping “set the
record straight” on the War Between the States.

This re-emergence of Confederate pride is merely the
symptom of a much deeper problem: The North and South
can no longer claim to be one nation. If you want proof, just
look at the electoral map from the last presidential election.

(T)he cultural
gap that pits NASCAR fans against PBS viewers continues to
widen. Ted Turner all but confirmed the balkanization of
America when he established a cable network exclusively for
the citizens of Dixie, serving up finger-lickin’ TV fare that
includes Andy Griffith reruns, the best of World
Championship Wrestling, CNN South, and slapstick movies
such as Dumb and Dumber (which, according to the president
of “Turner South,” gets unusually high ratings regionally).

The United States doesn’t have to refight the Civil War to set
matters right. Rather, North and South should simply follow
the example of the Czech Republic and Slovakia: Shake
hands, says it’s been real, and go their separate ways. And if
the South isn’t inclined to leave anytime soon, then we should
show them the door by seceding unilaterally. Because for all
the hue and cry of the South being a conquered people, it is
the North that increasingly finds itself under the dominion of
the Confederacy. ‘ Slate

Bush, in Reversal, Won’t Seek Cut in Emissions of Carbon Dioxide, says his earlier promise was a “mistake.” Trends are clear — he continues to pander to corporate interests, he continues to demonstrate that he doesn’t really understand the positions he takes, and he’s fully able to leave his cabinet officials — in this case EPA chief Christie Whitman — swinging in the breeze. And yet — this boggles the mind, although, by the dictum that a people get the ruler they deserve, it shouldn’t — the illegitimate son’s job approval rating is 60%, similar to that his father and Bill Clinton had early in their presidencies. It probably has something to do with the incredibly bald-faced bribery of his tax cut promises. Heartening, though, that in that poll, half of respondents recognized he’s not really in charge of what’s going on in his administration. And almost half of Americans, and more than three-quarters of African Americans, do not feel he’s their legitimate president. New York Times

The destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan had been reminding me of Sheldon Kopp’s book, If You See the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him. Just then, Jim Higgins sent me a pointer to Sheldon Kopp’s Escatological Laundry List. (“The only victory lies in surrender to oneself.”)

Higgins also writes:

The New York Review of Books online is carrying neurologist Oliver Sacks’ introduction to Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter’s Life with Autism, Clara Claiborne Park’s 2nd book about her daughter Jessy, a person with autism who has grown up (with much help from her parents) to be a talented artist. The NYRB package online also includes several pieces of Jessy Park’s artwork.

If you have followed Sacks, you know that autism is one of his special interests. True to form, he is interested not only in the limits of a person, but also the soul and the paradoxical gains that come from having a certain illness or disorder.

To my great pleasure, I discovered that Dr. Sacks has a personal website here, with goodies such as links to artwork by people Sacks has written about and links to interviews with Sacks or feature articles about him.

Adbusters’ Fools Festival: “On April 1st, party rules apply. Anarchy will be
enforced. Abby Hoffman proved, on the floor of
the New York Stock Exchange, that throwing
money at the problem works — when the
problem is conformity.

Let’s do it again — for real!

Let handfuls of dollar bills rain down on the
trading floor of your local stock exchange or,
failing that, shopping mall.

Are you fool enough to do it?” If you shower down $100 in small bills at your local Temple of Mammon and document the resulting mayhem on video, Adbusters will reimburse you your $100.

Hoaxbusters, a service of the Computer Incident Advisory Capability (CIAC) of the U.S. Department of Energy. “In addition to describing hoaxes and chain letters found on the Internet, we will discuss how to recognize hoaxes, what to do about them, and some of the
history of hoaxes on the Internet.

Users are requested to please not spread chain letters and hoaxes by sending copies to everyone you know. Sending a copy of a cute message to one or two
friends is not a problem but sending an unconfirmed warning or plea to everyone you know with the request that they also send it to everyone they know
simply adds to the clutter already filling our mailboxes.” […but you knew that already, right?]

Napster Blocking Creates Dan Quayle Effect: “America doesn’t need to worry that Napster will teach children to steal, but thanks to
the RIAA, it will create a whole array of new vocabulary!” InfoAnarchy

Psychiatry in the Media: The Vampire, The Fisher King, and the Zaddik. I was delighted to find this essay by Dr. Ron Pies, who I know to be an insightful psychiatrist and who turns out to be an observant critic as well, in the latest Journal of Mundane Behavior. In essence, he says the media portrayal of psychiatrists is anything but mundane.

Picture of the imminent $10 paper cellphone. Made possible by a new technqiue allowing the printing of circuits on paper with magnetic ink, you buy it like a phone card and throw it away when its prepaid calling quota is used up.

Oscar winners to express thanks online. The producer of the televised Oscar awards show suggests that award recipients confine themselves to a 45-second acceptance speech. A list of all the people they want to thank would then be run on oscar.com under the winner’s picture. But, alas, this is a suggestion only, not a requirement… My question: would the price of the gowns come down any if they were only going to get onscreen for 45 sec.?

Teacher punishes child with firing squad: “A Spanish schoolteacher has been reported to the
police for conducting a mock firing squad in the
classroom.” Ananova

Russians approve the use of
bananas during sex. “The change in policy came after party members
decided the fruit could not transmit Aids.

Party officials decided to adopt the change in policy
after a heated debate over the practice. African
peoples have a long tradition of ritually deflowering
virgins using bananas, the party’s state session in
Vologda heard.” Ananova

The Human Body Shop Dozens of groups in industry and academia are… working on
techniques for fashioning new organs out of cells
from embryos, cadavers or patients themselves,
combined with special biomaterials. Most current
work in the commercial realm focuses on tissues, valves and other components of organs. Already, there are a handful of tissue-engineered products
on the market—skin, bone, and cartilage implants and patches—the first successes in a young
field. MIT Technology Review

Cult fear hits Bush plan to fund by faith: ‘George Bush’s plan to channel US government aid to
“faith-based” religious charities is being held back by the
fear that it could end up funding controversial groups such
as The Church of Scientology, Hare Krishna and the
Unification Church – the Moonies..

The initiative, launched with great fanfare at a White House
prayer breakfast in the president’s second week in office,
has stirred up a hornet’s nest of accusations across the
spectrum of religious groups and is being radically
redrafted.

The decision to delay its introduction was taken at the end
of last week after an unexpected war of words on the
religious right threatened to derail the entire scheme.’ Guardian

Boston Ballet lawsuit over anorexic death dismissed: “A judge has thrown out a wrongful death lawsuit brought against the Boston Ballet by a woman
who claimed her anorexic daughter died because ballet officials pressured her to remain thin.”

CNN obtain photo of Taliban destroying statues “The news that an international outcry had failed to save the
monuments, carved more than 1,500 years ago, came from the
Unesco director general, Koichiro Matsuura, whose special envoy,
the French diplomat Pierre Lafrance, confirmed that the statues
had been destroyed.” CNN

US Said To Export Torture Weapons. “Dozens of U.S. companies sell weapons and other
equipment used overseas for torture, Amnesty International said Monday,
calling for a ban on the sales.” APB News

Hot on the heels of the axe-in-the-head project comes the “I Can Eat Glass” Project, “the result of high technology in the hands of people who have no idea what to do with it.”

Handspring gets skinnier with its handheld. I previously discussed this upcoming PDA with excitement. Notch the excitement down by one now with this news that it’ll have a black and white screen, unlike Palm’s upcoming color successor to my Vx. ZDNet

St. John’s Wort Plus Prescriptions Equal Trouble. While this paper reports only on one particular type of interaction, it illustrates a general problem. Many patients don’t think it’s significant to tell their MDs about the over-the-counter medications or natural remedies they take, yet these can have significant and sometimes detrimental interactions with their prescribed drugs. And many physicians are neither interested in or knowledgeable enough to assess these effects.

Scientists Test Hallucinogens for Mental Ills New York Times

Thurmond’s Wife Is Insistent: No Service in Senate for Her. The deteriorating health of Strom Thurmond, at 98 the oldest member of the Senate, is a matter of intense political focus and expectancy because the Democratic governor of South Carolina would probably appoint a Democrat as his replacement, giving the Democrats a 51-49 majority. Thurmond, who is probably too enfeebled to do his job already but hangs in there, reportedly secretly offered the Governor his resignation if his wife would be appointed to complete his term, but she has just indicated her unwillingness to do so. New York Times

Jim Crace’s Layered Being Dead Wins Critics Circle Fiction Award New York Times This is on my rading list.

Even Without Evidence, String Theory Gains Influence “String theorists keep saying that
they’re succeeding. The rest of us can wonder whether they are walking along the road to
triumph or whether in 20 years they’ll realize that they were
walking into this enormous, beautiful, mathematically elegant cul-de-sac.”

String theory has constantly changed since it first emerged several decades
ago, and even its ardent adherents concede that they still do not understand
more than what Dr. Gross called “the tail of the tiger,” or a few suggestive
parts of what is believed to be a complete theory. Until recently the physical
crux of the theory was thought to be vibrating, 10-dimensional loops of string
roughly a billion trillion times smaller than a proton. Different modes of
vibration of the strings (made of what, no one is sure) represented different
particles in nature.

Now physicists believe the ultimate objects are 11-dimensional membranes.
Either way, the extra dimensions beyond the usual four would be curled up so
as to be nearly imperceptible. And because the vibrations would include the
graviton, the particle thought to transmit gravity, as well as particles involved
in the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism, string theory
offered the prospect of unifying physics.

But with that aesthetic attraction came deep problems. First, in the 1980’s, it
seemed that the strings had a basic inability to cope with known differences
between particles and their mirror images, and other such broad facts of
nature. But closer study showed that, contrary to all expectation, various
terms in the theory canceled each other, fixing the problem. New York Times

Inside Russia’s Hacking Culture: `Many of their peers in the Western world say Eastern Europe’s computer crackers and hackers are
the most skillful in the world — far superior to the so-called “script kiddies” who have gained a fair
amount of notoriety.

“We call Russia the Hackzone because there are so many of us here, and we are so good at what
we do,” said Igor Kovalyev, a self-described cracker living in Moscow. “Here hacking is a good job,
one of the few good jobs left.”

Kovalyev claims he is often hired to “have fun” with the websites and networks of his employer’s
competitors.

He is paid 3,000 rubles per job — about $104 American. It may not sound like much, but a college
professor gets paid about $150 per month.’

Wired

Stop being paranoid, Britain’s parents told. “Controversial book (Frank Furedi: Paranoid Parenting) says obsessive fears about children’s
safety are a bigger threat than bullies or paedophiles.” The Guardian

Shane MacGowan gets the drinks in. A sort of a God in Dublin, a paradigm of debauchery, he’s portrayed on the occasion of the publication of a sort of a memoir, A Drink with Shane MacGowan. Bono: ‘Shane is more together than people imagine,’ as the author of this interview goes to great pains to establish as well, to the great relief of all of us who expect more great things of him… The Guardian [via Robot Wisdom‘s ‘must-read’ category]

Taliban Kills Buddha: ‘…the fate of the Bamiyan Buddhas is a matter of who may control our notions of permanence; of who
will have the power that goes with defining the sacred…. The demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas is a flashpoint between two warring notions of permanence, two
irreconcilable considerations of the sacred. What we are witnessing now in Afghanistan is a charismatic
moment, one that does not give a damn for the permanence or the sacredness we find in the “world’s cultural
heritage.” ‘ But the joke is that it’s a textbook illustration of the central Buddhist truth of the impermanence of all things. Killing the Buddha

boing boing points to this hilarious offer of deity action figures at Jesus Christ Superstore.

Courtesy of Lake Effect, a magnificent image of space shuttle Columbia being ferried from California to Florida piggyback on its 747 carrier; and another one.

Aimster Pig Encoder: “As of Sunday March 4, 2001, at midnight, Napster began monitoring the file names that its
users put into the Napster database, for the purpose of blocking certain file names. This is a
serious invasion of your privacy as a Napster user. The file names on your hard drive are
your personal property and should not be monitored by anyone without your permission.
The Aimster Pig Encoder makes it more difficult for anyone to monitor the file names on
your computer. The Aimster Pig Encoder is very simple but effective. It takes each of the file names of the
mp3 files in your Napster directory and encodes the file names so that the name cannot be
easily monitored.”

90% of people don’t believe what they read on
the Web, but read the article anyway. The Register

“If you build it, they will come”?? Prodigy founder buys former Aryan Nations compound at Hayden lake, Idaho, plans to turn it into an anti-racism center. “Greg Carr has stepped in to rid Idaho of white supremacists.” The Register

The Debated Mind : Evolutionary Psychology Versus Ethnography ed. by Harvey Whitehouse. “This collection of articles questions how the human mind influences the content
and organization of culture. It pitches the arguments for innatism (proposed by
evolutionary psychologists) against ethnographic perspectives which question
the theories of evolutionary biology and cognitive science.”

The National Security Archive: “. . . combines a unique range of functions in one non governmental, non-profit institution.
The Archive is simultaneously a research institute on international affairs, a library and
archive of declassified U.S. documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, a
public interest law firm defending and expanding public access to government information
through the FOIA, and an indexer and publisher of the documents in books, microfiche, and
electronic formats. The Archive’s approximately $1.8 million yearly budget comes from
publication revenues and from private philanthropists such as the Carnegie Corporation, the
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. As a matter of
policy, the Archive receives no government funding.

The National Security Archive was founded in 1985 by a group of journalists and scholars
who had obtained documentation from the U.S. government under the Freedom of
Information Act and sought a centralized repository for these materials. Over the past
decade, the Archive has become the world’s largest non governmental library of declassified
documents. “

Foxwatch Ireland , not designed to please fans of the hunt.

“…this place,

if I could describe this
place, portray it, I’ve tried, I feel no
place, no place around me, there’s
no end to me, I don’t know what it
is, it isn’t flesh, it doesn’t end, it’s
like air…”

The Sunday Times of London profiles “Big Time” Cheney. ‘Bush, not realising a microphone was live, called a liberal reporter
a “major-league asshole”. Cheney agreed. “Big time,” he affirmed.
“Big Time” is now Bush’s private nickname for Cheney.

Participants in Oval Office meetings say Cheney is deferential to
Bush, but Big Time speaks for itself. Apart from selling the budget,
masterminding foreign policy and ensuring that old chums such as
Rumsfeld are back in the administration, Cheney, as Senate
president, will also cast tie-breaking votes in a chamber divided
50-50 between Republicans and Democrats. The late-night
television jokes are now about “President Cheney”. ‘

Pluto: Comet or Planet? It’s nothing recently learned about the object as much as what’s been recently learned about its neighborhood at the outer edge of the solar system that tempts some to downgrade its status. National Geographic

Spectacular Bodies: the art of anatomy: “Spanning 500 years of anatomical representation, the book examines the paintings, sculpture, diagrams, and
medical illustrations found at the intersection of art and science. From
Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp to 19th-century studies of
musculature to the grisly and gristly work of contemporary British artists, the
human figure has always been central to both fields.” Brill’s Content

Newspaper: Gore Might Have Won A ballot design that confused voters into chosing two
candidates cost Democrat Al Gore 6,607 votes in Palm Beach County,
The Palm Beach Post reported in its Sunday editions.

The newspaper counted more than 19,000 overvotes, or ballots on which more than one
vote was recorded for a presidential candidate. It concluded the net gain of votes for
Gore would have been 10 times more than he needed to erase Republican George W.
Bush’s slim margin of 537 votes in the state. AP [But we knew that already, didn’t we?]

Man Gets 99 Years for Killing Over Song.

A Texas man was sentenced to 99 years in prison for killing a musician who did
not know the song he requested, a prosecutor says.

Ramon Cabrera, 48, became angry with David Saenz, 57, because Saenz could not play “El Guajolote,” or “The
Turkey,” so he shot him in the head with a .38 caliber pistol, Assistant Nueces County District Attorney Mark Skurka
told Reuters on Friday.

“As a prosecutor, I’ve seen a lot of senseless killings, but this one — there’s just no way” to explain it, he said.

Shepherd Shot Dead, Sheep Blamed: “An Egyptian Bedouin shepherd was shot in the chest and killed on Thursday
when one of his flock jogged his loaded shotgun as he slept, police said.”

Remember the old wives’ tale about masturbation and blindness? Here’s the modern version. Reuters

Salad Psychology: “Are you shy? Think you’re smart? How you eat your
salad may give you away.”

Unlocking the brain’s potential Researchers may have identified a part of
the brain, which if switched off, can stimulate
“artistic genius”. The left anterior temporal lobe is damaged in demented patients who develop artistic talent and in savants with artistic abilities. When transcranial magnetic stimulation was used in normal volunteers to ‘turn off’ that brain region, a number of them temporarily developed ‘savant skills.’ Researchers speculate that a normally functioning left anterior temporal region suppresses access to more ‘primitive’ areas that do more unmediated processing of sensory data and numbers. BBC

Salad Psychology: “Are you shy? Think you’re smart? How you eat your
salad may give you away.”

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is a stereo view of astronaut Pete Conrad on the lunar surface. Got your red-green glasses handy? The link will only work today, as the APOD site posts a different image each day, but that’s no reason not to click on it tomorrow or thereafter…

Helena Norberg-Hodge, a linguist by training and a native of
Sweden, has been extremely critical of conventional notions of
development. She is the author of the highly acclaimed Ancient
Futures: Learning from Ladakh. She first went to Ladakh in
1975 and shortly thereafter founded the Ladakh Project, with
the goal of providing Ladakhis with the means to make more
informed choices about their own future. For her work as
Director of the Ladakh Project, Helena Norberg-Hodge shared
the 1986 Right Livelihood Award, otherwise known as the
‘Alternative Nobel Prize’. She is the Director of the <a href=”http://www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/International Society for
Ecology and Culture in London.

In this interview…, Ms. Norberg-Hodge discusses the implications of
development as it is currently constituted and also what her vision of an
alternative development would consist in.”

Conditions are not ideal is most rural areas of the so-called “Third World” (terrible poverty following generations of colonialism, monocropping, an exploding population, to give only a few indicators), but they are vastly better than in most urban slums. Asia Source [via Jim Higgins]

Strong Imagination: Madness, Creativity and Human Nature, a new book by Daniel Nettle. How
could (psychotic disorders ) persist in the human population, when their effects are so obviously deleterious? “The hypothesis that the traits underlying psychoticism
can also have beneficial effects, specifically in creative thinking, is critically examined, and the evidence for it laid out. Implications of this
hypothesis for mental health, for culture, and for the evolution of the mind are then examined.” And depression, creativity and the meaning vortex, some musings on vtheory about the work-in-progress of psychiatrist Eric Maisel about just this conjunction.

Museum of the Sub-Conscious,

located in Namibia, Africa, … has as its purpose, the task to solicit donations of human sub-conscious, to store them,
to catalogue them and to make them available for study and research.
But why in Namibia? Well just think for a moment. The materials (human sub-conscious) to be deposited in this
museum are simply immaterial. Thus, they exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time. So, why not select an
obscure landmark in a country, not on the major tourist routes, as the principal entrance to this museum.
(Conceptually, to appreciate this museum and its collections(s) it is not necessary to ever visit the physical place,
designated as the “Public Entrance”.) Also since we are talking about “art”…did you know that the “Charcoal
drawing of an antelope” (charcoal and ochre on shale – 9.5×12.5/1.5 cm) and the “Charcoal drawing of
animal-human figure” (charcoal on shale – 11x8x9.5 cm)–both in the State Museum of Namibia, Windhoek–are
now considered by scholars to have been created sometime between 27,000 and 25,500 years before now! This
suggests that these “drawings” are probably the oldest “art works” yet discovered anywhere!

By the way, the State Museum of Namibia has a robust web presence, as this Google search indicates, although it doesn’t appear the above-mentioned charcoal drawings are depicted anywhere…

The Bush-Kim-Moon Triangle of Money: “At this past week’s summit, George W. Bush and South Korean President Kim
Dae Jung disagreed publicly on how to deal with communist North Korea – Bush
advocated a harder line. But the two leaders have a little-known bond in common:
the political largesse of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

For more than three decades, Moon, the founder of the South Korea-based Unification
Church, has spun a worldwide spider’s web of influence, connecting to hundreds of powerful
leaders through the silken threads of his mysterious money.

Moon’s beneficiaries include the Bush family and, according to U.S. intelligence reports, Kim
Dae Jung.” Ties with the Reagan-Bush administration are well known, emanatig from his financing of right wing causes and his control of Reagan’s “favorite” newspaper, the reactionary Washington Times. His ‘in’ with Kim Dae Jung emanates from his having turned to funding the South Korean opposition after his overtures to the former South Korean administration of the despotic Roh Tae-Woo. Consortium News

The Future of Psychiatry: Eric Kandel Says It Lies With Biology. Kandel is a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist who has elucidated some of the basic neural principles behind behavioral and cognitive functions by studying the simple nervous system of Aplysia (a snail). His most renowned findings relate to the structural changes associated with learning and memory, and the gene expressions that control them. But his proclamation that “the time has come
for psychiatry, … long an art
more than a science, to reinvigorate itself by embracing
biology” has been old hat for fifteen to twenty years already to anyone practicing in the field! Modern psychiatrists have evolved beyond the old dichotomy between “organic” disorders marked by obvious brain lesions and “functional” ones reflected solely in behavior. Kandel’s observation that, “Insofar as
psychotherapy works, it’s got to be doing
something [in the brain], and if it does, one should be able
to detect it with various imaging techniques” is trivially, reductionistically, obvious to us all. I know I link to all those exciting functional MRI findings pouring out these days, showing the localization of various cognitive functions, but that’s just entertainment in a sense. Neural insights and behavioral insights have a profound mismatch of scale; the former are either too fine-grained or too coarse-grained to contribute measurably to the latter or, certainly, to have any impact on clinical mental health practice .

Kandel is more right than he appears to know with his following statement — that “…it’s
really a question of time and resolution…” It’s a long way from a nervous system whose connections you can count on the fingers of one hand to the operation of human consciousness (or the unconscious) embedded in the almost infinite connectivity of the brain, which remains a “black box”. A mechanistic understanding of the complexity of its function or dysfunction is still overwhelmingly — some might say impossibly — distant, and modern psychiatry will for a long time — certainly for the remainder of my professional career, and those of my trainees — have room for and require “artistry”, Kandel’s straw man. Believe me, our nonpsychiatric medical colleagues scoff at psychiatrists as much for going too far as pretenders to a scientific grasp as for the nonscientific “witch doctor” aspects of our practice.

Kandel appears to acknowledge some of this, as the essay indicates in its penultimate paragraph, in a reply to his critics. And he’s absolutely right about the potential for the cross-fertilization with neuroscience to go the other way: “As psychiatrists and neuroscientists
find more common ground, the former could help define for
the latter the mental functions that should be most closely
studied.” Most neurologists make the sign of the cross and cower in the corner when confronted with a consultation question about the higher mental functions such as cognition, emotion or complex behaviors. They remain much more comfortable with disorders of more ‘lowly’ functions such as sensation, balance, coordination or movement that can be tested and measured readily.

According to Education World, Secret Service Report Targets School Violence. But no, it doesn’t, really. It sidesteps the social emergency that creates the climate in which this can happen so viciously and frequently, which of course the Secret Service is unqualified to think about. Instead, it targets the shooters as lone gunmen in an otherwise-intact environment, missing the point and proposing remedies including early recognition of troubled kids and encouraging other students to inform on them. If there ever was going to be a move that accentuates disenfranchisement, alienation and divisiveness, it’s this. Media critics have derided the crop of newspaper columns empathizing with Griffith’s chronic schoolyard victimization, as if it’s only kneejerk emotionalism from isolated others unlucky enough to have had a history of being bullied themselves. I agree that the shooters shouldn’t be exonerated by a blaming-the-victim defense, but the social intolerance and anomie that epitomize American social life guarantee a continuing crop of these incidents. I’m a psychiatrist with a special interest in clinical populations with impulsivity, aggressiveness and irritability, but those whose violence-proneness is neurobiologically mediated form only the smallest segment of our societal violence epidemic, IMHO. The Surgeon General’s Report on Youth Violence is more thoughtful, providing a public health perspective and expressing prominent concern about the availability of firearms.

I share the esteem in which my comrade-in-arms to the north holds Bruce Cockburn, just inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. Toronto Star [via wood s lot] People have been scared by his faith and his political commitment, which are IMHO foundations of his authenticity and intensity. Here, also thanks to wood s lot, is The Bruce Cockburn Lyric Library.

It’s been too long since I’ve read vtheory. Via another weblog, I was alerted to the fact that tjw’s essay “textured concepts, patterned thinking” takes off from my musings on synaesthesia… and goes wide and deep. Thank you, there’s gold to mine there.

I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ve noticed a number of webloggers’ excited anticipation of the upcoming film Black Hawk Down, based on the October 1993 Battle of Mogadishu.

Battle of the celebrity gender theorists: ‘Christina Hoff
Sommers (Who Stole Feminism?; The War Against Boys) skewers
Carol Gilligan,
Jane Fonda and
their “girl crisis”
rhetoric’ after Fonda donates $12.5 million to Harvard for a gender studies center, endowing a chair in Gilligan (In A Different Voice)’s name. Salon

Bush Puts Brakes on Memorial To Reagan.

The Bush administration surprised Republican members of Congress yesterday by saying that it is too soon to build a memorial to honor former president Ronald Reagan on the Mall.

The spectacle of the new GOP administration casting doubts on a proposal to speed a monument to the party’s most admired living hero arose when Richard G. Ring, an assistant director of the National Park Service, testified to the House that it was Reagan himself who signed a 1986 law that barred any memorial on the Mall until 25 years after a person’s death. Washington Post

Boy, 14, Gets Life in Prison. “A boy who says he was
imitating body-slamming pro wrestlers when he killed
a little girl at age 12 was sentenced to life in prison
without parole Friday after a judge refused to reduce
his first-degree murder conviction.”

The Elvis Costello 500: “From Abba to Zamballarana, and from Mozart to Eminem, one of rock’s finest talents has
identified 500 albums essential to a happy life. It was a long, tortuous undertaking, but the man
knows music – and his aim is true.” Compare and contrast with the Recording
Industry of America/National Endowment for the Arts 365 best songs of the century. And the National Public Radio top 100, to which I previously blinked.

Canadian student plans to set up Napster clone in Sealand, beyond the reach of copyright law …if he can raise enough money. The Register

Google Search: “-pound gorilla”, à la Jorn Barger’s cliché searches.

Neil Gaiman uses Blogger to keep a journal about slouching toward the June ’01 publication of his new book American Gods

Rebecca Blood muses about fighting the merchants of cool after watching the Frontline documentary and digging into the website, which I previously blinked.

The Web Standards Project: Fighting for Standards in our Browsers: “Old browser versions are keeping the Web (and your
experience) from being all it could be. Please consider upgrading to one of the following
browsers, which make it easier for Web builders to be sure the sites you visit will work
correctly.”

Three big corporate giveaways by the Shrub’s administration are probably just the beginning of repaying those who bought him the Presidency:

Bankruptcy reform for MBNA

repeal of the Clinton administration’s expensive workplace ergonomic regulations to prevent repetitive strain injury

In a bitter battle, pork producers who voted in January to end mandatory fees on their hog production which funded the promotion program responsible for the famous “other white meat” advertisements have had their vote disregarded and are being forced to continue in the “checkoff” program which funds the National Pork Producers’ Council. This organization, a large contributor to the Shrub campaign, represents the interests of the large agribusiness concerns in whose hands pork production is increasingly concentrated at the expense of independent, family hog farmers being squeezed out of the market.

ACLU Action Alert: Stop Wrongful Executions, Support a National Moratorium! ‘Senator Russell Feingold
(D-WI) has introduced the “National Death Penalty
Moratorium Act of 2001″ (S. 233). This legislation would
impose a moratorium on federal executions while
creating a National Commission on the Death Penalty to
review fairness in the administration of capital
punishment.’ One-click fax support for Feingold’s bill.

Hubble Spies Huge Clusters of Stars Formed by Ancient Encounter

Studying galactic interactions is like sifting through the forensic evidence at a crime scene. Astronomers
wade through the debris of a violent encounter, collecting clues so that they can reconstruct the celestial
crime to determine when it happened. Take the case of M82, a small, nearby galaxy that long ago bumped
into its larger neighbor, M81. When did this violent encounter occur? New infrared and visible-light pictures
from the Hubble telescope reveal for the first time important details of large clusters of stars, which arose
from the interaction. Space Telescope Science Institute (StScI)

Several letdowns in today’s New York Times:

Bush Tells Seoul Talks With North Won’t Resume Now. In one fell swoop, Dubya reverses two years of careful building toward reconciliation and misses what experts call a narrow window of opportunity before North Korea retreats to a hardline stance. New York Times

Parkinson’s Research Is Set Back by Failure of Fetal Cell Implants “A carefully controlled study that
tried to treat Parkinson’s disease
by implanting cells from aborted
fetuses into patients’ brains not only
failed to show an overall benefit but
also revealed a disastrous side effect,
scientists report.

In about 15 percent of patients, the cells apparently grew too well,
churning out so much of a chemical that controls movement that the
patients writhed and jerked uncontrollably.

The researchers say that while some patients have similar effects
from taking too high a dose of their Parkinson’s drug, in this case the
drugs did not cause the symptoms and there is no way to remove or
deactivate the transplanted cells.” Sad news; this technique had excited high hopes for Parkinson’s patients and their doctors, as well as those with other neurodegenerative conditions. New York Times

The problems of preserving dance legacies. Trademark and copyright complications prevent the performance of the works of some choreographers after their death… until they’re too far from living memory to pass on the nuances of their work any longer. Martha Graham’s work is hopelessly entangled, for example. Boston Globe

The Next Wave: ‘What’s got people in the industry buzzing these days really could
be the next great leap forward in broadcasting. Within months,
radio audiences around the world will be able to install
appliances — whether for Internet radio or for satellite radio —
in their homes and automobiles that will dissolve borders and
allow listeners to tune out commercials, silence, moronic
talk-show callers and processed music for good.

True, the technology won’t be free. But for many listeners, a
few bucks a month is a small price to pay for real choice.

“We’re going to flip people’s concept of radio on its head,” said
Joe Capobianco, a senior vice president for New York-based
Sirius Satellite Radio at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show.’ Chicago Tribune

Potter fans rally to boycott film: “Warner’s legal wizards have alienated
children by cracking down on fan Web
sites. ” Ottawa Citizen

Arnold Schoenberg: guilty as charged? Is it just to blame him for all that’s wrong with modern music? Independent And: The madness of art: “Robert Schumann spent the last two and a half years of his life
wretchedly incarcerated in a mental asylum. The composer’s
psychiatric condition had never been robust and his fate has
been considered an accident waiting to happen by those who
shake their heads over the angular themes and complex
harmonies in his later works or the gloom of the Manfred
overture.

Generations later, an American academic has taken up his
cause, contending that this was a brutal and unnecessary fate
for a man who was not so much deranged as depressed.
Schumann was not only denied his freedom, but at times even
denied the paper on which to compose. He confronted that
most horrifying of fates: being the one sane man in a house of
the mad. ” The Times of London

Descramble That DVD in 7 Lines. “A new, slimmed-down version of DVD descrambling now exists: a mere
seven lines of Perl code. It’s so lean, you too can attach it to your
e-mail signature file. Hello, movie industry lawyers… The probable spread of qrpff on business cards, on T-shirts, and bumper stickers closely
resembles the distribution of encryption code in signature files and T-shirts a few years ago.
Such civil disobedience flouted U.S. export laws in a kind of global keep-away game. “

Here you go:

$_=’while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;$t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=(
$m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;$t^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16
-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271);if((@a=unx”C*”,$_)[20]&48){$h
=5;$_=unxb24,join””,@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[–$h+84])}@ARGV;s/…$/1$&/;$
d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d8^($f=$t&($d12^$d4^
$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e8^($t&($g=($q=$e14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q<<6))<<9,$_=$t[$_]^
(($h=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x”C*”,@a}’;s/x/pack+/g;eval

Wired

As Buddhas Fall: Richard Cohen’s op-ed piece in the Washington Post suggests that the Shrub’s faith-based initiative ought to be seen in the light of what the “pathologically pious” Taliban are doing to Afghanistan.

Who’s Obscene? Hackers Put Pornography on Hamas Web Site. “Hackers invaded the Internet site of the Muslim militant group Hamas
to make it show pornography on Tuesday, after the fundamentalist organization
claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that killed three Israelis.

Web surfers trying to access http://www.hamas.org were re-routed automatically to a
pay-for-view pornographic site offering a fare ranging from ‘kinky co-eds” to
‘Latina fetish.’ ” Reuters’

Five factors caused sub collision, admiral testifies. Rear Adm. Charles Griffiths Jr. said a longer periscope search could have averted the disaster and cited five contributing factors:

Lack of qualified sonar operators.

Broken equipment that could have helped detect the Japanese ship.

The number and location of the civilian visitors.

A rush to complete the emergency surfacing drill.

A command climate in which crew members were unaccustomed to questioning the commanding officer because they trusted his skills. AP

WHO retracts statement backing South Africa in drug companies’ lawsuit. South Africa is in the midst of an epic patent-infringement lawsuit battle against pharmaceutical giants for the right to import cheap generic equivalents of AIDS drugs to deal with its HIV emergency — an estimated 10% of its population are HIV (+). The WHO now says a spokesperson was in error in stating that the agency believed South Africa’s actions were defensible under international law. AP

FBI protecting actor Russell Crowe. “The FBI is investigating a possible plot to kidnap Oscar-nominated
Gladiator star Russell Crowe.” Life imitating art? “… Crowe played a kidnap-and-ransom expert in his latest movie, Proof of Life.

Don’t look at your nakedwife Geek.com

US couple give up fight for twins BBC

Tim Wise: School Shootings and White Denial. “I can think of no other way to say this, so here goes: white people need to pull our
heads out of our collective ass… I said this after Columbine and no one listened so I’ll say it again: white people live
in an utter state of self-delusion. We think danger is black, brown and poor, and if
we can just move far enough away from ‘those people’ in the cities we’ll be safe.” AlterNet

Add 2 Sperm and Stir:

‘Dr. Calum MacKellar, a bioethicist associated with the University of Edinburgh,
has been outspoken about egg nuclear transfer, expressing a concern that it could
be used to “mate” the genetic material from two sperm cells to create a biological
child from two men. Theoretically, the technique could be used to introduce sperm
DNA into an enucleated egg, fertilize this “male egg” with another sperm and
gestate the resulting embryo in a surrogate mother. (Of course, this could be done
with the DNA of two female eggs as well.) […and recent speculation suggests it’s not impossible to alter a man’s body and hormonal environment to allow gestation…]

As simple as it might sound, this scenario is still somewhat remote, since the
creation and fertilization of a male egg would require researchers to overcome
certain biological obstacles, not just legislative and psychological ones. One such
impediment would be the automatic response that mammalian gametic DNA seems
to exhibit in which it recognizes the DNA of the opposite sex, otherwise known as
imprinting. Nevertheless, MacKellar is concerned that loopholes in the British
legislation allow research that could bring about the male egg. In the draft of a
recent article, he asks rhetorically: “Would society accept such motherless
children?” ‘ AlterNet

Eye of the Beholder?

‘Traditionally a procedure sought only by patients with excess eyelid skin or those hoping to lessen signs of aging,
eyelid surgery or Blepharoplasty has become popular among young Asian American women and accepted as
just another cosmetic choice in an array of many — like tinting your eyelashes or straightening your teeth.
Approximately half of Asians are born with eyelids that are naturally smooth and uninterrupted by a crease in the skin. Asian patients
seek out blepharoplasties to create or exaggerate a crease in their eyelids commonly referred to as “double eyelids.” … Critics of eyelid surgery believe it is a cosmetic cop-out for Asian Americans who want to downplay their race,
since all Caucasians and most non-Asians are born with the crease. Still others argue personal confidence is the issue, since an estimated
fifty percent of Asians are also born with the eyelid fold. But Asians have been characterized by their eyes more than any other feature by
Westerners (think Fu Manchu-style caricatures and slant-eye miming in the schoolyard.) This deep-rooted, racist cultural imagery makes
it somewhat impossible not to see the widespread effort to alter this trait as a reaction. as well as a statement about the effects of
Westernization on Asian Americans.’ Wiretap

Microsoft seeks revenue boost with rush Office release: “Within days of launching the Office XP preview program, Microsoft has released final, or gold,
code to manufacturing. In past projects, a gap of up to two months has separated final beta, or
preview, versions and the product’s gold release. The rush this time may well be inspired by
Microsoft’s sagging financial fortunes recently, as the Office line has been one of the software
giant’s most reliable money-makers.” c/net

Emotions and Disease, an exhibit “developed by the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine… to explain to the general public the meaning and relevance of scientific developments linking neurophysiology to the functioning of our immune systems… One of the paradoxes we found was that the close relationship between health,
disease, and the emotions seemed to be more readily accepted in popular culture than
within the contemporary scientific community. Why, we asked, has the close
relationship of emotions to disease been so central to the long history of medical
practice, yet has been regarded with suspicion by some sectors of the modern
biomedical community?

This exhibition evolved as a dialogue between scientists and historians pursuing answers
to these questions.”

Taking the wraps off “Ginger”. Let’s not forget this flash in the pan quite yet. “An article in the March 20 issue of Inside magazine claims that Ginger is indeed a
two-wheeled scooter-like device and further asserts that it will run nearly emission-free using a
hydrogen-based engine. In theory, the engine could power a range of devices.” c/net

Sharp to challenge Palm, Pocket PC with Linux PDA: “Osaka-based Sharp will be the first major maker of PDAs (personal digital assistants) to introduce a Linux OS-based PDA… The new models will be available in the United States and Europe from October… c/net

Life Is a Cabaret, And Death Is Conceptual Art :

In a show that pushes the boundaries of the controversial, a German doctor is displaying real cadavers. Skinned and dissected, the preserved bodies, which were donated by fully informed volunteers, are recomposed in abstract and representational forms for aesthetic effect…

But von Hagens’s “creations,” which are drawing huge crowds to a converted train station in East Berlin, are stirring an intense debate about the limits of expression and the dignity of the dead. And many find something deeply disturbing in this baroque intersection of science, art and entertainment, which invariably resonates with questions about a particular German responsibility to respect the dead. Washington Post

“I console myself with the thought that it
is far better to live in a world with too many books than too
few…” Humiliations: the books that book critics and literary journalists are embarrassed to admit they’ve never read.

The Internet’s public enema No. 1:

‘Rotten.com’s sole purpose is to “present the viewer with a truly unpleasant experience,” and its proprietor is doing a dandy job of that. If it involves bizarre
sex, gruesome death or the sordid side of celebrity, you will find it on this site. “End times are here!” crows Rotten.com, and after a gut-wrenching hour or
two perusing the hundreds of images … archived here, it’s hard not to
agree: We are one screwed-up species.

It’s horrible. And yet, the Net is fascinated. About 200,000 visitors come to Rotten.com every day. … But Rotten.com isn’t just a database of the disgusting; it’s also a venue for making a point about censorship, at least according to “Soylent,” the
pseudonymous proprietor of Rotten.com, whose highly graphic content has earned him enemies around the world. The site is currently being investigated by
Scotland Yard and the FBI for cannibalism. The German Family Ministry has threatened Soylent with legal action if he doesn’t find a way to shield minors
from his site. And then there’s the endless cease-and-desist letters that flood in from a long list of major corporations that object to the site.’ Salon

Browsing my referrer log, it turns out someone got to me by doing an AOLSearch on “clitoral regeneration”. FmH was the 12th of 38 results of that search, because of this article from my archives. Oops, now a “clitoral” search will probably point to the current (March ’01) page as well, and I may even rank higher on “clitoral regeneration” searches. Now, if we only knew what in the world they were really after… Another search that pointed to FmH was a Google query on “prisoner’s right to give interviews in India”; it pointed to one month’s archive in which I had several blinks with the word “prisoner” in them, and several (different) blinks referring to India.

The Disturbing Search Requests weblog, whose founders started out by monitoring their referrer log, is having a similar problem, reports the Village Voice: ‘…by spotlighting the freakiest of the freaky, Disturbing Search Requests has become so loaded with
hot-button search terms that it is itself pulling in plenty of traffic from confused search engines. The site
gets more than 1500 visitors a day, most of them more interested in “nude tennis” or “hairy armpits” than in
meta-Web humor.’