Michael Kinsley among the snobs, on O’Reilly Among The Snobs Washington Post

How to say “Oh my God! There’s an axe in my head!” in 68 languages. [via Red Rock Eaters]

Levy’s Nine Laws of the Disillusionment of the True Liberal [thanks, Ivan]

On Day of Sub’s Accident, Tour Was Its Only Mission. “The Feb. 9 training run of the U.S.S.
Greeneville, which led to the
accidental sinking of a Japanese
fishing trawler, was made solely to
accommodate the Navy’s efforts to
promote itself.” New York Times

On Day of Sub’s Accident, Tour Was Its Only Mission. “The Feb. 9 training run of the U.S.S.
Greeneville, which led to the
accidental sinking of a Japanese
fishing trawler, was made solely to
accommodate the Navy’s efforts to
promote itself.” New York Times

On Day of Sub’s Accident, Tour Was Its Only Mission. “The Feb. 9 training run of the U.S.S.
Greeneville, which led to the
accidental sinking of a Japanese
fishing trawler, was made solely to
accommodate the Navy’s efforts to
promote itself.” New York Times

On Day of Sub’s Accident, Tour Was Its Only Mission. “The Feb. 9 training run of the U.S.S.
Greeneville, which led to the
accidental sinking of a Japanese
fishing trawler, was made solely to
accommodate the Navy’s efforts to
promote itself.” New York Times

Computer ‘can talk like a baby’.

“An Israeli company has created a
conversational computer program it claims
could revolutionise the way people interact
with machines.

Artificial Intelligence Enterprises (Ai) says its
Hal program can already converse convincingly
and has the vocabulary and grasp of language
of a 15-month-old child.

Already transcripts of conversations generated
by the computerised child have reportedly
fooled independent judges into thinking they
were reading a write-up of a real conversation.

Now, the company is working on giving its
creation the conversational ability of a
five-year-old. Then it plans to use the program
to do away with keyboards and let people
simply talk to their computers.”

BBC

If you lick your envelopes?? Latest urban legend/hoax meme chainmail I received via email. And a Google search on “lick envelopes cockroach tongue”. Update: As Ed Fitzgerald points out, this legend is debunked at http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/tacobell.htm, as part of the authoritative and entertaining Urban Legends Reference Pages site. [thanks, Ed]

Everyday fantasia: “With the help of sophisticated behavioral
brain-imaging and molecular genetic methods,
researchers are coming closer to
understanding what drives the extraordinary
sensory condition called synesthesia.” First psychologists showed that, in synaesthetes, the associations across sensory modalities are stable over time and involuntary (even when they interfere with normal perception), implying a fixed and automatic mechanism in their brains. fMRI studies showed that the cross-modality sensory areas were actually activated, as one would expect — for example, in a synaesthete who “sees” music s/he is hearing, the visual areas are active as well as the auditory.

In fact, it may be the concept, not the percept, that causes the sensory experience (for example, in one synaesthete tho experiences colors for numbers, presenting him with “5+2” causes him to experience the color associated with the concept “7”). This would turn on its head the usual “bottom-up” notion of sensory processing and would suggest that synaesthetes demonstrate a lack of the usual inhibition of “feed-backward” connections from high-level multisensory areas to single-sense cortical areas. Another theory suggests that synaesthetes’ brains may be richly crosswired with extra connections, perhaps a connectivity with which we are all endowed at birth but which normally devolves. This is not an alien concept; brain development is known in other regards to depend on the dying-off of neuronal connections as much as the elaboration of new ones over time. Any neurophysiological theory of synaesthesia would have to account for the fact that the phenomenon is temporarily induced by hallucinogenic drugs; it would be hard to imagine that the drug experience stimulates the rapid growth of new neuronal connections which then disappear after the drug is out of the user’s system.

Whatever theory is correct, an implication that occurs to me is that there is probably a continuum of synaesthetic experience from total absence to fullblown. While I’m certainly not a robust synaesthete, I suspect I have a degree of the overconnectivity, since I’ve always noticed I have vivid and enduring experiences of colors associated with various concepts — numbers, sounds, names of people and the days of the week. For example, “Monday” is a kind of lime green and “Thursday” a rose-tinged grey, and always has been — no, really! On the other hand (indulge me for a moment), these may not be neurophysiological correlations at all, but rather unconscious psychological ones — i.e. not classically-described synaesthesia at all. For example, while writing this paragraph, endeavoring to describe the color experience I have for “Friday,” I was just now surprised to find that what first came to mind was the phrase “fried-egg-yolk yellow.” It immediately made me wonder if the connection is the sound-association between “Friday” and “fried”, not a cross-modality experience at all. In other words, “Friday” may be that shade of yellow because it reminds me of “fried egg.” There may be similar associative reasons for the other color experiences that are there despite remaining opaque to me so far. Oh, well.

In any case, interesting to me in my professional work, where I focus on the phenomenology of psychotic symptoms, is the suggestion by some researchers that synaesthesia may share some neurobiological similarity with hallucinations. Could schizophrenics think thery’re hearing voices talking to them because they’re, unbeknownst to themselves, experiencing “crosstalk” from a sensory experience in a disparate modality such as taste or vision? This does not at all square with my own theory of hallucinatory experience, but it’s intriguing nonetheless, although difficult to study both because its experiencers are in distress to an extent that would make it hard for them to cooperate with neurophysiological investigation; and because most actively psychotic patients accessible to study are medicated (and it would be unethical not to medicate them, IMHO!).

One curiosity I’ve always had about synaesthesia is if the “crossed” sensory modalities ever include the kinesthetic sense. Often considered our “sixth sense”, this is our visceral body experience — i.e. our perception of the position, extent, and movement of our body parts in space. Are there synaesthetes who, for example, experience a sound or a color when they swing their arm around, take a step, open their mouth? How about the reverse — experiencing movement in or change of position of a body part as part of the perception of a sound or a shape? [Could this relate to the visceral component of aesthetic experience? (Benjamin Whorf: “Probably in the first instance metaphor arises from synesthesia and not the reverse.”)]

A number of fascinating hits emerge from a Google search on “(synesthesia OR synaesthesia) AND (kinesthesia OR kinaesthesia)”, including this collection of interesting analyses of Beatles music.

Love’s illusions: Americans tend to be overly optimistic about their chances of marital success.

Does Being a Jock Make a Man Gay? Timothy Noah:

‘The theory that ring finger size is destiny has resurfaced.
Faithful Chatterbox readers will recall that a year ago this
column asked, “Does A Short Index Finger Make You Gay?”
Chatterbox cited a study published in Nature (click here to
read a press release on the findings) maintaining that lesbians
tend to have ring fingers that are exceptionally long relative to
their index fingers, apparently because their mothers had high
levels of male hormones in the womb. A less intuitive finding
was that gay men also tended to have long ring fingers, owing,
again, to their mothers having high levels of male hormones in
the womb, though this correlation was more tentative. Mark
Breedlove, the Berkeley psychology professor who authored
the study, used the occasion to suggest that gay men, far from
being feminized men, were in fact hypermasculinized men.
Chatterbox himself struck a rigorously neutral pose, then
stated Chatterbox’s Law of Biological Determinism:
Conservatives believe that genes determine everything
except homosexuality, while liberals believe that genes
determine nothing except homosexuality.’ Slate

Although scientists still aren’t sure what human consciousness is, they are coming up with something just as
intriguing — neurobiological evidence for the human unconscious state. In psychoanalysis, a core concept is that signal anxiety — the unconscious anticipation of an adverse outcome when presented with a situation reminiscent of an unpleasant event from the past — prompts our neurotic reactions. Now two scientists — Philip Wong of the New School in NY and Howard Shevrin of U. Michigan — have demonstrated neurobiological evidence for the existence of this “immaterial” unconscious process. Psychiatric News

A reader pointed me to this — Frontline: the merchants of cool, a report on the creators and marketers of popular culture for teenagers and the symbiotic relationship they have with modern youth. Interviews with cultural critics, media executives and market researchers, as well as reactions from teens and a dissection of media conglomerates. There’s a feature on “how to get really close to teens’ lives” and another on “what it’s like hunting for ‘cool’ “. It’s going to take some delving into…

The Browser in the Belly. Jorn Barger, of Robot Wisdom, thinks web-based phrase-searching is the key to success in scholarship:

“Searching at http://www.google.com has been made so efficient that I
almost called this article ‘the Google in the Belly’: the first step to
becoming an Internet scholar is to train yourself so that whenever
and wherever you see an unfamiliar phrase, your immediate gut-
instinct is to copy it into Google…

But for literary research in particular, Web search-engines offer
something far, far more powerful than a super-encyclopedia– they
effectively offer a _super-concordance_ of every document on the Web…
and not just the simple word-by-word concordances that scholars have
learned to settle for– if you understand the search-syntax, you can
search for any _phrase_ in every document on the Web.”

Here’s Jorn’s customized Finnegans Wake search page (you might find it useful for other things too…)

‘Noted Weed’ (sonnet 76): Bard ‘used drugs for inspiration’. “Scientists in South Africa have uncovered
evidence that Shakespeare might have been a
cannabis user who took the drug as a source
of inspiration.

Research published in
the South African
Journal of Science
shows that pipes dug
up from the garden of
Shakespeare’s home in
Stratford upon Avon
contain traces of
cannabis.” BBC

At Lehman’s, the Only Thing That Gets a No Is Electricity. This mail order company has provided the Amish community with a source of non-electric alternatives to all sorts of appliances and equipment for more than 40 years. (Ironically, its website brings in a good proportion of its sales). Now the California energy crisis has greatly boosted the company’s sales volume. LA Times

Not-Really-Surprising-News Dept.: ‘Community work linked to happiness, a new study finds.

A nationwide survey conducted by Harvard University and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University
examined “social capital” — the connections that bind people together and strengthen the places they live.

Researchers found that areas where residents had high civil involvement were happier than those with more
wealth but less community participation.’ Nando Times

The keys to a quick mind: “If you want your children to extend their
minds, develop skills in multiple dimensions
and become ‘whole’ human beings, forget
yoga, vitamin C and green vegetables. Insist,
instead, that they learn music.” The Telegraph

Soul-Searching Doctors Find Life After Death. ‘The first scientific study of “near-death”
experiences has found new evidence to suggest
that consciousness or the “soul” can continue to
exist after the brain has ceased to function.

The findings by two eminent doctors, based on a
year-long study of heart attack survivors, could
provoke fresh controversy over that most profound
of questions.’

Silence of the Lambs: the election story never told. All along, it’s seemed that this was the bigger travesty in Jeb Bush’s Florida, as investigative journalist Greg Palast reports:

Here’s how the president of the United States was
elected: In the months leading up to the November
balloting, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary
of State, Katherine Harris, ordered local elections
supervisors to purge 64,000 voters from voter lists on the
grounds that they were felons who were not entitled to
vote in Florida. As it turns out, these voters weren’t
felons, or at least, only a very few were. However, the
voters on this “scrub list” were, notably,
African-American (about 54 percent), while most of the
others wrongly barred from voting were white and
Hispanic Democrats.

Beginning in November, this extraordinary news ran, as
it should, on Page 1 of the country’s leading paper.
Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain.

An examination of the docility of the American press. mediachannel.org

Expert proposes new ideas about technology and evolution. “Complex tool-making, which required fine motor skills, problem-solving
and task planning, he argues, may have influenced the evolution of the frontal lobe, and co-evolved with the gift of
grammatical language 300,000 years ago.” EurekAlert!

Hallucinogens on the Internet: A Vast New Source of
Underground Drug Information: “Using the Internet, potential hallucinogen users can
bypass traditional channels of medical information and learn in great detail how to obtain and use numerous drugs with unknown hazards”. American Journal of Psychiatry

Fourth Alzheimer’s Drug Approved: “Alzheimer’s sufferers are about to get a fourth
medication option to help slow the worsening of the devastating
brain disease.

The Food and Drug Administration approved
Reminyl, a drug derived from daffodil bulbs, late Wednesday.” The generic name of Reminyl is galantamine. It works via the same mechanism of existing Alzheimer’s drugs — it’s an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. Early animnal research indicated that it might have other neuroprotective properties as well and, thus, be superior to existing medications for Alzheimer’s dementia. But in preapproval testing, the drug’s manufacturer Janssen tested it only agsinst placebo, nto against other Alzheimer’s drugs.

Pentagon Unveils Plans for a New Crowd-Dispersal Weapon. Non-Lethal Weapons: <a href=”http://www.zarc.com/english/non-lethal_weapons/nlt-usaf.html
“>Terms and References, and the British Non-Lethal Weapons Research Project Research Report [via Red Rock Eaters]

Scholars lament Afghan relic purge “Defying international
condemnation, Afghanistan’s ruling
Taliban turned to artillery and explosives
on Friday to destroy two giant rock-hewn
Buddhas they decry as un-Islamic.

Mortars and cannon were being used to destroy the Buddha
statues in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, defying protests and
diplomatic pressure, sources in Kabul said.” The Taliban have been deaf to plaints from the United Nations, the European
Union, Russia, Pakistan, and India to reconsider. They
consider their efforts to be a campaign against idolatry. I have long cherished my memory of my visit to the Bamiyan Valley in the mid-’70’s, and wish there were some effective way to halt this ignorant travesty. New York Times

Connection duo, WBUR disconnect permanently. The Boston Globe describes the concluding blows in this dispute on which I blinked earlier. While the WBUR management issued a statement describing Lydon and McGrath’s “inform(ing) WBUR that they are leaving their employment to pursue careers in a for-profit, independent production company”, Lydon countered with a statement that WBUR had unilaterally terminated negotiations afteer locking them out for a week. Both Lydon and the station are the losers here, but of course the real losers will be The Connection‘s listeners. WBUR says it will continue the show with a series of guest hosts until they designate a replacement in late spring, but it remains in doubt whether anyone can follow Lydon’s “tough act” of wit, depth, literacy and passion. Lydon and McGrath seem to want to find other outlets to deliver similar content, but an erudite, receptive audience will elude them unless Boston’s other NPR station WGBH hosts them. They’d be blown out of the water by audiences anywhere else in the talk radio universe. These competing statements sound for all the world like the positions the players take in a classical labor-management dispute — essentially, countercharges of greed vs. exploitation — and should be understood in the context of recent struggles between creative personnel and celebrities on the one hand and the producers and media channels that distribute their content on the other hand, for control of the equity value of thier charisma, celebrity or creativity.

Author Bill McKibben recently profiled Lydon and the dispute in Salon, making his biases clear at the outset:

“The
Connection” is the best call-in radio show that anyone’s ever
done; Lydon is America’s best interviewer; and the hours
between 10 a.m. and noon feel lonely as hell without him.

Those are large claims, but you can test them out for yourself at
theconnection.org, where a full archive of recent shows can be
accessed via streaming audio…

If you think this is easy, listen to “Talk of the Nation,” the main
NPR chat show, some afternoon. Juan Williams currently
presides over the festivities, sounding uncannily like a man
ordering cheeseburgers over a drive-through microphone. He
is no nincompoop; “Eyes on the Prize,” his TV history of the
civil rights movement, was hot stuff. But the radio has clearly
defeated him. With its intimacy and its acres of open time, it
requires a nimbleness that he can’t muster.

Pow! Wham! Permission Denied! No homoerotic exegesis of Batman for DC Comics, thanks. Lingua Franca

Arsenic: A new type of endocrine disrupter? “Recently, it has become clear that decades
of exposure to very low doses of arsenic — such as levels found in drinking water in many areas of the United States — may
substantially increase the risk of vascular disease, diabetes and several types of cancer. Until now, little was known about
how arsenic might contribute to these diseases, however.

Using cultured animal cells, a team led by toxicologist Joshua Hamilton, director of Dartmouth’s Toxic Metals Research
Program, found that exposure to very low concentrations of arsenic disrupts the function of the glucocorticoid receptor, a
steroid hormone receptor that regulates a wide range of biological processes.” EurekAlert!

You’re not as nice as you think you are. EurekAlert!

Evidence of Celtic ritual cannibalism in Iron Age Britain.

Slaughter of the innocuous. A vet and researcher into the history of
foot-and-mouth at the University of
Manchester (UK) writes: “From the panic and the headlines you would imagine that this
is a most dreadful disease. Yet foot-and-mouth very rarely kills
the animals that catch it. They almost always recover, and in a
couple of weeks at that. It almost never gets passed on to
humans and when it does it is a mild infection only. The meat
from animals that have had it is fit to eat. In clinical terms,
foot-and-mouth is about as serious, to animals or to people, as a
bad cold.

Why, then, the concern? And why the policy of wholesale
slaughter? The concern, of course, is economic. This is a
financial issue, not an animal welfare issue, nor a human health
one.” The Times of London

The British Medical Journal reviews Vivisection or Science? An Investigation into Testing Drugs and
Safeguarding Health. Italian scientist Pietro Croce used to do it himself, but now says animal experimentation is unethical — not because of what it does to the animals, but what it does to us. As Russ points out, however, a response by a Dr JH Botting to the favorable review of this book points out: ‘The antivivisection literature is replete with emotive propaganda and exaggerated claims of “bad
science”. However a definitive examination of the literature generally exposes criticisms as spurious.
Their perpetuation in books such as “Vivisection or science” does nothing for the ethical debate.’

Bush’s Death Squad 2001: ‘The bill, the Terrorist Elimination Act of 2001, was introduced on Jan. 3 by Republican Bob Barr. It would nullify parts of
three previous executive orders prohibiting assassination or conspiracy to commit assassination. The new bill states that,
“as the threat from terrorism grows, America must continue to investigate effective ways to combat the menace posed by
those who would murder American citizens simply to make a political point.” ‘ Critics say this just legitimizes what we’ve been doing all along, that the prohibition on state-sponsored assassination has never been taken seriously. eye [via Wood s Lot]

With excitement I clicked on this link in Wood s Lot; an Interview with Samuel R. Delany! Alas, it is from 1996. Left me wondering what he’s up to now; found this interview from November, 2000. Interesting aside — he apparently interviews himself. “K. Leslie Steiner”, from the 1996 conversation, is said to be a pseudonym of his. The discussion early in the interview about how he declined face-to-face contact and insisted they conduct their interchange in written form takes on new meaning in that light.

protonic.com : “fast free technical support — an online
community which provides
technical support to computer
users for free.

All the techs are volunteers,
and we have been featured in
many media publications.”

He beat me to the punch! I swear, I had the same association Chuck Taggart, at Looka!, had. As he put it:

“He reads! He reads! Here is my favorite line from The
Blank Stare’s address to last night’s joint session of Congress:

Some say my tax plan is too big, others say it
is too small. I respectfully disagree. This plan is just
right.

Even though it’s claimed that this man does not read books, we
can all rest in confidence that he has at least read “Goldilocks
and the Three Bears” (or at least his speechwriter has).

I guess this is how they’ll try to sell this thing to us — by
assuming that the American public is as simpleminded as Shrub.”

Eugenics Alive: coming soon to a country near you. On the threshold of human genome engineering, ‘fretting about the ethics of these issues is a thing that only Western countries are going to do. Elsewhere, eugenics — including
“genetic enhancement” — will not be fretted about or debated, it will just be done.’

A rough kind of eugenics has, in fact, been practiced in China for a long time. Several years ago, when I was living in that country, I mentioned Down’s
Syndrome in conversation with a Chinese colleague. She did not know the English term and I did not know the Chinese, so we had to look it up in a
dictionary. “Oh,” she said when she got it. “That’s not a problem in China. They don’t get out of the delivery room.”

As I said: While we are agonizing over the rights and wrongs of it, elsewhere they will just be doing it. National Review

And speaking of eugenics:

The “Genius Babies,” and How They Grew: the ‘truth’ about the “Nobel Prize sperm bank”, the Repository for Germinal Choice. Slate

Once-Weekly Prozac Approved by FDA. The formulation contains 90 mg. of the active ingredient, fluoxetine, in a time-release formula, and is intended for patients whose depressive symptoms have stabilized but need continued maintenance drug therapy to prevent a relapse. The truth of the matter, however, is that fluoxetine has such gradual rate of metabolism and elimination from the body that the plain old original Prozac formulation, which is usually 20 mg., can be given less frequently than daily — in some cases as infrequently as once a week — for many maintenance purposes, and (as scandalous as its price seemed when it first entered the marketplace in the early ’80’s) is considerably less expensive. Eli Lilly’s last decades of profit were built upon Prozac’s cash cow, but it has seen its market share erode with the introduction of subsequent (and in some cases superior) antidepressants, and the company will take a big hit in August when it loses patent protection over Prozac and a generic fluoxetine is launched by a competitor. A new formulation like Prozac Weekly will regain them proprietary rights.

In a similar maneuver, they’ve recently released the product Sarafem for premenstrual tension symptoms. This is plain old fluoxetine as well! The clinical literature has long noted benefit from SSRIs for PMS symptoms whether the sufferer is depressed or not, and many of us have long prescribed Prozac for that indication. There’s nothing different about Sarafem [except its ability to support Lilly’s stock prices?]

This is the second psychiatric instance of a new pharmaceutical marketing trend that seems particularly disingenuous from my vantage point. Here was the first — have you seen any of the TV ads for Zyban, marketed as a smoking cessation aid? The ads tell you it’s “not for everyone,” in particular mentioning that you shouldn’t take it if you’re taking the antidepressant Wellbutrin. They don’t explain why, but the reason is a simple one — Glaxo Wellcome’s Zyban is identical to Glaxo Wellcome’s Wellbutrin; they’re both, generically, bupropion, in the same 150 mg. sustained release form, at virtually the same price.

In my opinion, there is no justification except the attempt to increase market share through deceptive marketing for one company to push the same pharmaceutical under different brand names for different indications. Instead, the product labelling of their existing product should be changed to reflect any added indications they receive from the FDA. I have already seen several cases in which patients have been prescribed Zyban by their primary care MDs while receiving Wellbutrin from mental health practitioners, either because of a lack of crosstalk among the parties or ignorance on the part of one practitioner of the ingredients in the other prescription. And the potential medical consequences of such inadvertent “doubling up” of bupropion dosing, including seizures, are nontrivial! TV advertising which prompts patients to develop brand recognition of medications and ask for products from their physicians by brand name is part of the problem. I find that, over the last decade, there’s been erosion in patients’ understanding of the concept of generic equivalents of medications. Unless there’s a good reason to prefer a particular company’s brand (and there rarely is), I do all my prescribing by the generic name of the medication.

Sex-Change Deputy to Break New Ground. “Another milestone was reached
on Tuesday in the Lone Star state when a Texas sheriff said one of his top deputies would
become the first police officer in the state to undergo a sex change operation.

Bexar County Sheriff Ralph Lopez said he had given the male deputy permission to start
wearing a woman’s uniform and ordered the other deputies not to razz him about it.” Might be the first time Texas lawmakers are ordered to mind their manners with a lady…

Open Season on the Outer Planets. Space scientists at the recent Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston brainstormed about the next two decades of exploration of the outer planets under NASA’s newly-formed Outer Planets Program Directorate. Outer planet projects are expected to be picked in open competition among a concentration of innovative and sometimes outrageous proposals.

Today’s New York Times could fill a weblog, as in the next six entries:

In Dawn of Society, Dance Was Center Stage. An Israeli archaeologist says he has pieced together evidence of a role for dance as early as the transition from hunter-gatherer to pastoral society in the Middle East. New York Times

A Short, Speckled History of a Transplanted Hand. After twenty-nine months, the hand is amputated by the same surgeon who had originally done the transplant. The patient says he feels the best he has since he received the hand, and acknowledges his responsibility for not keeping up with the anti-rejection drug regimen and the physical therapy necessary to maintain its viability. This man who originally told his surgeons he had lost his hand in an industrial accident turned out to instead have received the injury while in prison serving time for fraud. His con game evaded months of pre-transplant interviewing and psychological testing. Nine patients in six countries have since received transplanted hands, including three who have gotten double transplants of both the right and left hands. The New York Times report says that all appear to be doing well.

Experiment in Assisted Living Exposes Regulatory Confusion. The article describes the way assisted living in New York has been transformed [and I’ve seen the same thing here in Massachusetts]. Starting out as a means of allowing a continuum of escalating care so that elders can “age in place” in a setting of their own choosing, assisted living centers have instead become ways to house enfeebled Alzheimer’s patients with less regulatory oversight, and hence less adequate care, than in nursing homes. In essence, the industry has backed its way into being part of the healthcare industry rather than a housing alternative, in the process securing itself a niche in which it’s protected from regulation that would eat into its profits.

The headline says “China Ratifies Human Rights Treaty.” But read further and you see that they “voted not to accept a key provision in the pact.” Human rights groups are guardedly optomistic that this will make a real difference, but I’m dubious. This seems like window-dressing to deflect scrutiny of China’s record on human rights two weeks before a U.N. human rights conference in Geneva. New York Times

Clinton Pardons Called ‘Accident Waiting to Happen’: “From the beginning of his presidency,
Bill Clinton moved to take away the Justice Department’s
traditional role of being first to review requests for
clemency, the agency’s former pardon attorney told a
congressional committee Wednesday.

‘The final Clinton pardons were an accident waiting to
happen,’ Margaret Colgate Love, who served as pardon
attorney from 1990 to 1997, told the House Judiciary
subcommittee on the Constitution. New York Times

A 7.0 Earthquake Shakes Pacific Northwest. Does it seem to you that newsworthy earthquakes seem to hit disparate places on the globe in clusters? Within the month, we’ve seen the Gujarat quake, the El Salvador quake, and now this. Is this a geophysical clustering or a sampling effect of what the media pay attention to? In related news, researchers studying the magnitude-7.7 Indian quake now say that faults beneath California’s populous areas “could
produce larger earthquakes than
previously thought… The type of fault that produced the deadly Jan. 26 quake – a
blind thrust fault – is also found in California, including at least
one running directly beneath the skyscrapers of downtown Los
Angeles.” Blind thrust faults are difficult to map because they do not break the surface. Earlier estimates capped the potential force of a blind thrust quake in California at not much more than the 1989 San Francisco earthquake or the 1994 Northridge quake, but the researchers are revising their estimates considerably upward after looking at Gujarat.

Barbara Ehrenreich reviews Trust Us, We’re Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber:

“… a gripping exposé of the public
relations industry and the scientists who
back their business-funded,
anti-consumer-safety agendas. There are two kinds of “experts”
in question–the PR spin doctors behind the scenes and the
“independent” experts paraded before the public, scientists who
have been hand-selected, cultivated, and paid handsomely to
promote the views of corporations involved in controversial
actions. Lively writing on controversial topics such as dioxin,
bovine growth hormone, and genetically modified food makes this
a real page-turner…”

Polar Bears and Three-Year-Olds on Thin Ice : Donella Meadows’ last Global Citizen column before her death, which I previously noted here.

LA Times op-ed piece by two Rand Corporation analysts on why the NMD (national missile defense) program could make China a bona fide nuclear threat.

The only thing that stands between China and a large strategic nuclear arsenal is
motivation. And that could be deeply affected by the decisions that the United
States makes about national missile defense and perhaps even theater missile
defense in Asia.
Ultimately, the United States may decide that, on balance, its security would be
better off with a national missile defense, even if China expands its nuclear forces
significantly. But China’s possible response and all of its implications must become
part of the debate.

As the Spike Report pointed out, this piece carries one of the more idiosyncratic headlines seen on an op-ed page in a long time.

Skeptic Magazine editor Michael Shermer’s exposé of How Psychics and Mediums Work: a case study of James Van Praagh. “Throughout much of 1998 and 1999, the best-selling book in America was by a man who says he can talk to the dead (and so can you, if you buy his book).” Shermer concludes, “The freedom to grieve and love is one of the fundamentals of being human. To try to take tht freedom away on a chimera of feigned hope and promises that cannot be filled is inhuman…”

Happy Mardi Gras! …your last chance for awhile?

humanspellcheck.com: spelling-bee survivors R us. The quest for typographical and orthographical excellence on the web.

More fMRIe (functional magnetic resonance imaging excitement): Location of Sense of Humor Discovered. Activity in a region in the orbital prefrontal cortex correlates with the experience of appreciating a joke or a pun. It makes sense that the arguably uniquely human (cf. for example the 1938 classic Homo Ludens: a study of the play element in culture by historian Johann Huizinga) capacity to appreciate the complex phenomenon of a joke resides in this uniquely human cortical area. Independent

Online debate “What is the evidence for and against the modern theory of
evolution?” between Dr. Jonathan Wells, who has Ph.D.’s in molecular and cell biology (Berkeley) and religious studies (Yale) and is the author of the recent Icons of Evolution, who argues that therre are serious chellenges to the “neo-Darwinian idea
that random mutations can create new body plans and organisms”; and Dr. Massimo Pigliucci, director of the Evolutionary Ecology Lab at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and prize-winning teacher of evolution. The URL above links you to the complete debate in Real Video. The recent event was hosted by U.T.’s Theatre dept. as part of a week commemorating the
75th anniversary of the Scopes-Monkey Trial.

Study: Autumn Babies Live Longer. There’s a 0.3- to 0.6-year increase in lifespan for babies born during the autumn in either the northern or southern hemispheres, according to a new study. Authors speculate that it relates to the nutritional benefits of being pregnant during summer and early fall; if so, this would probably speak to maximizing consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables during pregnancy regardless of the season. [Sorry, an earlier version of this post misstated the study as finding a “3-6%” increase in lifespan, which is of course far more substantial.]

Jackie Mason on Starbucks. Old, but apropos. [thanks, Anihoo]

Did You Ever Wonder? … worth the wait for the download [thanks to David Anderson]

Alien Abduction, How To Prevent. Study this, take notes, carry it around with you all the time, be prepared:

‘When you are abducted, it is your energy-body that is taken, not your
physical. This is similar to out-of-body projection except that it is
forced. Out of body travelers get back simply by thinking “Go physical,
now” or “Return to physical body” or similar. Return is always instant…
If you find yourself in the middle of an abduction, remember above then
think (say if you can) forcefully to yourself (not them; you don’t care
about them) with all the conviction you ever have mustered:
“IN THE NAME OF GOD, CHRIST and the HOLY SPIRIT, I DEMAND IN MY PHYSICAL
BODY!!! NOW!!!”

The abductors (the greys, Nordics or whatever) may respond with “We
don’t care about your God! Resistance is useless!” or something like that.
You could retort, “Aw shaddup! Who asked you!?”
Be MEAN! Be a bad-ass mother-****!

But anyway, best to just IGNORE THEM! No matter what they say or what
kind of high-pitched noise they make; continue saying it or thinking it
to the exclusion of everything else until it works. Say it ten times, a
hundred times, a THOUSAND TIMES! DEMAND IT!!!’

Turn-off: Motorola has found a way to render electronic devices useless if illegally exported. A chip is embedded in the device linked to a GPS or a recognized national broadcast signal. New Scientist

New E-Mail Will Be Personalized. Its promoters think this arrangement to attach animated faces to email to convey the emotion of the writer will be the next “killer app”, even though it’s little better — or perhaps less effective — than those silly little “emoticons” no one’s used for years. The developers of this system trumpet that it will fulfill the potential of the Internet, and they’re right — it may very well complete the move to the complete banality of e-communication! Oh, and let’s not forget its potential applicability to e-commerce, via the creation of “virtual sales clerks… to answer all your questions and take your orders”. Actually, I wish that I had the capacity to attach an animated face to this message right now, just this once — if it could adequately convey disdain.

“A world that sees dead babies’
organs being cannibalised still has need of the
vampire.” New Statesman

“What are the prospects for a multiracial coalition emerging on the right? George W. Bush’s campaign efforts to court voters of
color, as well as the spectacle of inclusion and diversity at last summer’s Republican National Convention, have made this issue all
the more pressing. Widely denounced as an illusion, the ‘rainbow’ convention did raise two important and interrelated questions:
what can the right offer to minorities, and what can minorities do for the right?” Dissent Magazine

Super Vision: ‘Today, vision correction is only for people with
poor eyesight. But soon even people with good
eyesight will be able to experience enhanced vision.
A technology that astronomers call “adaptive
optics,” used to enhance telescopes’ views of the
heavens, will allow ophthalmologists to improve
people’s vision well beyond the “perfect” 20/20.’ Popular Science

Hindu Extremists Block Christian Aid to India’s Earthquake Victims. They are apparently harassing Western relief agency representatives, some of them Christian missionaries; refusing to allow distribution unless victims or refugees — some of them Muslim — acknowledge Hindu deities; and are hijacking goods to redistribute themselves.

(You)2: interview with anonymous molecular biologist with the ambition and, apparently the means, to be the first to clone a human. Wired

Scientists work out best way to crack egg Ananova

Curry craving lead to round-the-world takeaway trip. Ordered from a takeout in Newcastle, delivered to Sydney four days later. Ananova

Calls for Rushdie’s death renewed. While the fatwa, or death edict, issued against Rushdie on February 14, 1989 for alleged blasphemy against Islam in his book The Satanic Verses has largely lapsed, it cannot be rescinded because under Islamic law only its author can do so; the Ayatollah Khomeini has since died. Now one hard-line Islamic daily observed the twelfth anniversary of the edict by renewed calls for Rushdie’s death.

The daily said in an editorial that Rushdie’s move to the
United States would make his killing easier, saying his
new location offered “more possibilities of executing this
traitor in America.”

The foundation that funded the $2.8 million bounty on Rushdie’s head affirmed that it would be paid with interest to anyone enforcing the decree. Salon

Battlefield rules in Razzies’ list of bad flicks: the 21st annual Golden Raspberry Award nominees for worst films of the year are out. The winners are announced the day before the Academy Awards. CNN

Does Vivaldi Deserve to be Looked Down Upon So? New Yorker

Inhaled Insulin Could Replace Injections, aerosols could be available in 2-3 years.

Rocky picture show as movie theaters fade to black. Shakeout in the movie theater industry; they just built too many megaplexes, it’s said. The bankruptcy of Loew’s will take out alot of the screens I frequent in Boston, most lamented will be the Nickelodeon art theater.

Clinics Full of Frozen Embryos Offer a New Route to Adoption. While rarely chosen yet, “adoption” might be an option for tens of thousands of frozen embryos stored after in vitro fertilization; they are a potential source of embryonal stem cells as well, whose use is controversial because harvest of the stem cells renders the embryos nonviable. New York Times

Powell Surprised On Bombing Clamor: ‘At a news conference after meeting here with Israel’s Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon, Powell said the attack could have been coordinated better in order not to inflame Arab sentiment. “Our action was a little more aggressive than usual and got a little more attention,” Powell said. “But I have no apologies.” ‘ Cracks in the administration facade already? Dubya, in his statement on the airstrike, could do nothing but drone on repeating the “routine” mantra over and over.

U.S. Agrees to Clinton-Era Arms Talks with Russia. “The United States on Saturday accepted a Russian request that arms control experts resume talks in the framework developed under Russian President Vladimir Putin and former President Clinton. A senior U.S. official said Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov told Secretary of State Colin Powell (news – web sites) at their first meeting in Cairo that Russia liked the old framework for talks and wanted to know if the Bush administration would continue it.”

Powell said: ‘Yes, good idea.’ ” How disingenuous of us, when it is the official policy of the new administration to push ahead with the “missile defense” program against “rogue states”, which requires brazen abrogation of the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty and destabilizing the arms race again. Reuters

Sharon Tells Powell Talks Hinge on End to Violence. “Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon Sunday set a end to violence as a pre-condition for peace talks with the Palestinians and demanded President Yasser Arafat take unspecified ‘steps” before Israel eases economic sanctions.” What makes Sharon think that the Palestinian Authority has any control over Palestinian mob sentiment?

Two Heads Not Always Better Than One: “Learning to solve a problem as part of a twosome and learning on your own produce different benefits, a Penn State researcher has found and he says these differences can be exploited to enhance cooperative learning strategies, decision support systems for corporate managers or on line courses.” The research focusd on defining situations in which group or individual problem-solving might have an advantage, but there’s no mention of something that seems abvious to me — that certain people may do better with one strategy or the other depending on their innate characteristics.

New E-Mail Will Be Personalized. Its promoters think this arrangement to attach animated faces to email to convey the emotion of the writer will be the next “killer app”, even though it’s little better — or perhaps less effective — than those silly little “emoticons” no one’s used for years. The developers of this system trumpet that it will fulfill the potential of the Internet, and they’re right — it may very well complete the move to the complete banality of e-communication! Oh, and let’s not forget its potential applicability to e-commerce, via the creation of “virtual sales clerks… to answer all your questions and take your orders”. Actually, I wish that I had the capacity to attach an animated face to this message right now, just this once — if it could adequately convey disdain.

This is from the World Wide Words mailing list:

Turns of Phrase: Deep Web

“The World Wide Web has not only become so big that search engines
can’t index it all (in fact, they manage only a small proportion),
but there’s lots of stuff out there – mostly in databases – that
can’t be reached at all by the conventional search technologies in
use since the Web began. The firm BrightPlanet has estimated that
this ‘deep Web’ (a term it seems to have invented) contains 7,500
terabytes of data, compared with about 19 terabytes of data on what
it calls the ‘surface Web’, numbers impossible to visual in other
than the vaguest way. Even if these figures are overestimates, it
still suggests that there is a lot of material out there that would
be useful if only one could find it. The firm also points out that
the deep data is usually of excellent quality, and that most of it
is publicly accessible without charge. Now all we have to do is
find a way of getting at it.”

The entire 41-page BrightPlanet paper is available for online reading or download (as an Acrobat .pdf) here. And, to delve deeper, a Google search on the term is here.

What Does a Cat Dream About? “New research suggests that we may be able
to tell whether animals dream. If so, this will
have major implications for curing
Alzheimer’s.” Independent

Monkeybone: A Descent Into Unconsciousness, as Freud Might Tell It: “If you feel numbed and
dumbed by the onslaught of
overblown, scattershot
mediocrities like
Silverman, Little Nicky
and Scary Movie, think of
Monkeybone as a homeopathic cure… The movie’s wildness should not be mistaken for the usual
juvenile aggression. Though it seems, by default, to be
aiming for the youth market, its ideal audience may be
children who have had Freud’s Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis read to them at bedtime. New York Times But “this madcap classic is one of the funniest, wildest comedies
in years. Why doesn’t big Hollywood want you to see it?” Salon

Is Bush Bad News for the World Bank? “The motivation of the incoming Republicans in criticizing the IMF and
World Bank lies in their belief in free-market solutions to development and growth. This may not coincide with that of
progressives, who see the IMF and World Bank as a tool of US hegemony. But the two sides can unite behind one agenda at this
point: the radical downsizing, if not dismantling, of the Bretton Woods twins.” Corporate Watch

Jorn Barger reports that John Fahey, whom George Winston called “the first serious composer within acoustic folk music”, has died. [<a href=”http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&ic=1&th=a8d268a7ffc501c6&seekd=916602024
“>Obituary]

“When the Mars Rover sat and
stared at a rock, how do we know that the rock was not staring
right back? ” Life, but not as we know it. Astrobiology is all the rage, but “those in search of alien life could be barking up the
wrong planet…” The Guardian Here’s a link to the new NASA Astrobiology Institute.

Civilian on Sub, Marc Rich Linked. “One of the civilians aboard the submarine that sank
a Japanese fishing vessel is related to a Texas
oilman and big Republican Party contributor whose
company once did business with fugitive financier Marc
Rich.” That’s how the New York Daily News played the story. But the real meat is buried several paragraphs further down, IMHO: “Last week, after the Navy refused to release the names
of the civilians aboard the Greeneville…, a Bush
administration source told the Daily News there was a
‘tremendous amount of nervousness at the White House
about who these guys are.’ ” ..because they’re good ol’ Texas oil boys with ties to Bush, it seems! Meanwhile, “investigators are saying the
crew of the submarine Greeneville knew the
doomed Ehime Maru was sailing above them — more
than a full hour before the nuclear attack sub slammed
and sank the fishing vessel”, but that the”crewman who was plotting sonar readings also has
told investigators he was distracted by civilian guests
in the control room and halted his work.”

Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): U.N. War Crimes Court Convicts Bosnian Serbs in Rape Case. Legal precedent set; rape, in a guise a quantum level beyond isolated crimes against individual women, joins the family of crimes against humanity. The tribunal recognized that “… the rapes were
used by members of the Bosnian armed forces as an
instrument of terror, an instrument they were given free rein
to apply whenever and against whomever they wished.” This was an organized and well-orchestrated system of taking Muslim women into sexual slavery to destroy their people. New York Times

The “No Dubya” Logo by FmH reader Ed Fitzgerald.

Aibo special: Puppy Love for a Robot: “It sounds barking mad, but people are developing
relationships with their robot dogs, as though they were
real pets.

People are adopting Sony Aibos as more convenient
alternatives for travelers and renters who are barred from
having pets. Scientists are now even studying the robots to
see if they offer some of the therapeutic benefits of animal
ownership.”

“Aibo owners say their robot pets aren’t just curiosities; the
metallic mutts are actually becoming family members. Leander Kahney talks about how owners can become ill
when the doggies won’t boot up and are forming support
groups.” (.MP3 audio) Doctor Fun knows all about that issue. [via Dan Hartung]

“Aibos are cute interactive pets that can provide hours of
entertainment. But can they also be used to keep tabs on
children and seniors? Leander Kahney talks with
human-robot experts.” (.MP3 audio) Wired

If you write with a fountain pen (one of my fetishes; I write alot in connection with my day job, and want it to be pleasurable), you’ll appreciate this writer’s thoughtful comparative review of black fountain pen inks. [via Red Rock Eaters]

A Moderate Wouldn’t Make Appointments Like These. ‘It may be legal, but it’s still a coup d’etat. The nomination of Theodore B. Olson
to be solicitor general, a position of such influence that it is often referred to as “the
10th member of the Supreme Court,” affirms that President Bush has turned the
U.S. judiciary over to the far right.’ LA Times In a similar vein: A Bush nominee who should
not be treated gently: “How should Democratic senators act at Olson’s confirmation
hearings? Well, how would Republicans act under like circumstances?” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

How to Write an Op-Ed: “Editors have some very concrete requirements for selection, more or less in this order:

a provocative idea on any subject

an opinion on a current issue that is controversial, unexpected, authoritative and/or news

a call to arms on a neglected subject

bite and wit on a current issue”

I checked several times to be sure this wasn’t from a newspaper dated April 1st. Please tell me this is a joke! New York Times Update: It is.

Bush on Stage: Deft or Just Lacking Depth? We already know the answer to that rhetorical question. The deftness is his handlers’; left to his own resources, he’s a lightweight and a bungler with a slightly panicked tone around whether he’ll be able to stick to the talking points with which he’s been prepped. That’s why it’ll be a long while before he fields questions at a press conference and, oh what a performance that’ll be! Michael O’Hanlon, defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, observing his justification of the Iraqi airstrike, said he “seemed to merge different concepts in his head in a random and somewhat illogical way,” e.g. saying that enforcing the no-fly zones was keeping Saddam Hussein bound to the Gulf War peace accord, when it is nothing of the kind. Republican aides seem to be going to extraordinary lengths to explain and even glorify Dubya’s brevity of response, pointing out that the Americans appreciate someone so to the point and that the public has a limited attention span. And, you know, I think they’re right about that. I continue to rail about his intellectual shortcomings without ever remembering that I’m probably barking up the wrong tree. It’s not that the public doesn’t realize, it’s that they don’t care how lightweight he is. Anti-intellectualism carries the day, and the people who think are likely to be the most disenfranchised — and enraged — in the Age of the Shrub. Washington Post

No coverage of the Grammys here. They’re about as meaningful as the Oscars.

To my mind, this clemency scandal is more telling than Clinton’s philandering, direct abuse of the machinery of power that it is. Clinton Tells Relative to Return Pardon Money. “Former President Clinton
disclosed that two felons to whom he granted clemency on his last
day in office paid large legal fees to his brother-in-law, but he
denied prior knowledge of the payments and directed the money be
given back.” Reuters It’s not like Bill and Hillary aren’t going to reimburse Hugh Rodham under the table for returning the money anyway, is it?

Into the Mystic

After spending 8 years training in the meditative practices of Zen
Buddhism, neurologist James H. Austin spent a sabbatical year from 1981
to 1982 at the London Zen Center. On a pleasant March morning, while
waiting for a subway train on a surface platform and idly glancing down the
tracks toward the Thames River, Austin got his first taste of spiritual
enlightenment.

Instantly, the panorama of sky, buildings, and water acquired a sense of
what he calls “absolute reality, intrinsic rightness, and ultimate perfection.”
He suddenly shed his formerly unshakable assumption that he was an
individual, separated from the rest of the world by a skin suit. The sky and
river remained just as blue, the buildings just as gray and dingy, yet the
loss of an “I-me-mine” perspective imbued the view with an extraordinary
emptiness, he says.

Within seconds, other insights dawned. These included the notion that
Austin had experienced an eternal state of affairs, had nothing more to
fear, couldn’t possibly articulate what had happened, and felt a rush of
mental release that impelled him to take himself less seriously.

In Zen and the Brain (1998, MIT Press), Austin described how this brief
experience spurred him to investigate brain processes that underlie
spiritual or mystical encounters. Science News

Verbal abuse: “My lawyer’s card is in my wallet, can you get me
my wallet?” and “I want my lawyer” express the same thought, but there are situations in which you’d better know the difference. New Scientist

“Violence is seasonal, peaking in late summer and at its lowest ebb in spring, shows an audit published in the Emergency
Medicine Journal. Violence towards women has also been increasing.

Data on community violence were collected from a random sample of 33 accident and emergency departments across England
and Wales between 1995 and 1998.” Because of the proportion of violence that goes unreported to the police, an emergency department is in a unique position to study trends, as opposed to analysis of law enforcement data. EurekAlert

In the beginning was the bit. In the face of conflicting philosophical interpretations of how reality squares with quantum physics —

In the
Copenhagen interpretation, the outcome of an experiment is
only revealed when the quantum system interacts with a
macroscopic apparatus in the laboratory, which eliminates all
possibilities but one. The many-worlds interpretation insists
that all possible outcomes of an experiment actually occur in
as many parallel universes, but as we only occupy a single
branch of the hydra-headed multiverse, we experience only
one outcome. Or, if you prefer, there’s the guiding wave
interpretation, which assigns an undetectable “pilot wave” to
each particle to steer it along a perfectly determined path.
Altogether there are at least eight serious and reputable
interpretations of the theory, which implies that no single one
is convincing.

— a University of Vienna theoretical physicist thinks that the key may be, in essence, to consider bits of information to be the quintessential building blocks of physical reality; giving new meaning to the poetic notion that the world is as we see it subjectively? The essay describes how this paradigm accounts for fundamental quantum mechanical principles. New Scientist