Writers at Work: how to write the perfect author bio for the back flap of your book jacket… or maybe your weblog? Moby lives

Footnotes to History: “The nations you didn’t learn about in high school geography.”

How Bush Had to Calm Hawks in Devising a Response to China ‘Within his party, and even his administration, many chafed at China’s obstinacy,
and even at the administration’s decision to use the words “very sorry” to
describe Washington’s reaction to an incident that the Pentagon painted as
entirely China’s fault.

Yet in his first serious foreign policy challenge, Mr. Bush quickly suppressed his
initial instincts — which had led him to step out of his office and demand the
immediate release of the crew and the plane, with barely a nod to China’s
sensitivities.

He quickly took a more conciliatory approach that required tamping down some
of his administration’s hawks and many uniformed commanders. He even kept
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, whose troops were being detained,
from having any public role.’ New York Times

Doctor at Antarctic Station Is Stricken. For the second time, the only physician working at the Amundsen-Scott station at the South Pole has been stricken and had to do self-diagnosis. Dr. Ronald Shemenski appears to have acute pancreatitis, has done an abdominal ultrasound on himself, inserted a nasogastric tube, etc. Recall Dr. Jerri Nielsen’s October 1999 emergency evacuation after she was stricken and diagnosed her own breast cancer. New York Times

Fury.com: AOLiza. Hilarious transcripts of AOL chat-room denizens trying to engage a version of ELIZA. ELIZA was Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1966 creation, a program that simulates a Rogerian therapist by parsing excerpts from its interlocutors’ comments and reflecting them back as questions.

Using a publicly available Perl version of ELIZA, a Mac with nothing better to do than
play psychoanalyst, a few applescripts, and an AOL Instant Messenger account that has a high rate of
‘random’ people trying to start conversations, I put ELIZA in touch with the real world. Every few days
I’ll put up the latest ‘patients.’ Names have been changed to protect the… well, everyone.

Some claim that ELIZA passes the Turing Test, in which subjects cannot determine if they are talking to an actual human being. I’m not sure these AOL chatters pass the Turing Test themselves, though, after reading this…

Deconstructing the Essential Father.

“Neoconservative social scientists have claimed that fathers are essential to positive child development, and that responsible fathering is most likely to
occur within the context of heterosexual marriage. This perspective is generating a range of governmental initiatives designed to provide social support
preferences to fathers over mothers; and to heterosexual married couples, rather than to alternative family forms.

The current article proposes that the neoconservative position is an incorrect or oversimplified interpretation of empirical research. Using a wide range of
cross-species, cross-cultural, and social science research, the authors argue that neither mothers nor fathers are essential to child development, and that
responsible fathering can occur within a variety of family structures. The article concludes with alternative recommendations for encouraging responsible
fathering that do not discriminate against mothers and diverse family forms.”

The processor industry-backed company developing extreme
ultraviolet lithography chip-making equipment has demonstrated its
first prototype.

The machine etches circuits on a wafer of silicon. The microscopic
‘wiring’ is 0.01 micron wide – just 5.6 per cent of the width of the
circuits in today’s top-end 0.18 micron CPUs.

That, researchers reckon, will allow Intel, AMD, IBM, Motorola and
co. make chips that run up to 10GHz and up by 2005. The Register

Chinese Claim a Moral Victory, Describing a Bigger Battle. Fascinating. The letter of ‘apology’ was negotiated in English only, allowing for different nuances of Chnese translation in describing it to the Chinese public. Depending on how you translate “very sorry”, it either implies culpability or not. In case there was any doubt, Li’l George issued a statement as soon as the plane’s crew were safely out of Chinese clutches making clear we had done nothing wrong. Sino-American relations just got a whole lot more interesting. New York Times

“Browsing takeaway pizza websites will never be the same again: you’ll soon be able to download and print the pizza’s aroma and taste. A company called TriSenx of Savannah, Georgia, will launch a device next month that looks like a desktop printer but which can ‘print’ smells and tastes. The $269 printer is loaded with a cartridge containing more than 200 water-based flavours that are deposited in varying combinations by a print head onto fibre-based cardboard to make over a thousand different smells. The company is adapting the device to print on an edible paper-like wafer, allowing it to print out tastes too. Included in the price is software to help you avoid combinations that don’t smell or taste too good.” New Scientist

N. N. Holland’s Seminar, Brain & Literary Questions:

” I plan to open up these topics: personal styles; what goes on when we read; Chomskyan and post-Chomskyan ideas of language; cognitive theories of metaphor; the mammalian and neo-mammalian brain; kinds of memory; whether language ability evolved; culture and the child’s growing brain. In this seminar, we shall explore ways in which these new discoveries bear on our understanding of literature and the literary processes of creation and response. We shall be reading such people as: Noam Chomsky, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Hanna and Antonio Damasio, Jerry Fodor, Heinz Lichtenstein, Steven Pinker, Terrence Deacon, Gerald Edelman, some psychologists of reading, and some people who have begun to apply these ideas to literary questions: Richard Ohmann, Mark Turner, Ellen Winner, and myself.”

In a different world: Simon Baron-Cohen, a
clinical psychologist at Cambridge University who runs a clinic for Asperger’s syndrome, heads a team which has come up
with a simple test for autism, suggesting a fresh approach to the social difficulties (and strengths) of AS sufferers.
Here are the items on the inventory, the Cambridge Lifespan Asperger Syndrome Service (CLASS). “Before you panic–or
feel relieved to have found a possible explanation for your problems–ALL 10 descriptions must apply to you, and your
difficulties must be significantly interfering with your daily life”:

I find social situations confusing

I find it hard to make small talk

I did not enjoy imaginative story-writing at school

I am good at picking up details and facts

I find it hard to work out what other people are thinking and feeling

I can focus on certain things for very long periods

People often say I was rude even when this was not intended

I have unusually strong, narrow interests

I do certain things in an inflexible, repetitive way

I have always had difficulty making friends

New Scientist.

“Circling the earth in the orbital spacecraft I marvelled at the beauty of our planet. People of the world! Let us safeguard and enhance this beauty — not destroy it!” — Yuri Gagarin. Today is the fortieth anniversary of his historic first manned spaceflight. Several articles commemorate the occasion by commenting on how we’re doing. First:

Moratorium Asked on Suits That Seek to Protect Species. Latest betrayal of America’s heritage and future on the docket. “The Bush
administration has asked Congress
to set aside, at least for a year, a provision
of the Endangered Species Act that has
been the main tool used by citizens’ groups
to win protection for plants and animals.

The request, spelled out in a section of the
budget document that President Bush sent to
Capitol Hill on Monday, would make it much
more difficult for citizens to use the courts to
force the Fish and Wildlife Service to act on
petitions to list a species as endangered.” Democratic opposition pledges to “any and all” tactics including, finally, filibuster threat, to prevent this, according to spokesperson Sen. John Kerry. New York Times

Related news: “George W. Bush has added a weird twist to his proposed budget. To promote
his goal of oil drilling on public lands, he has made the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge a kind of hostage. In a message that could have been
pasted together from words cut out of a magazine, Bush is telling the
environmental community that if it wants money for energy conservation and
non-polluting energy sources, it will have to let Bush and his allies
drill in the untouched Alaskan wilderness. Either drill in the Arctic
refuge or face deep cuts in renewable energy research.

Yet, Bush’s bizarre decision to hold the Alaska refuge hostage is only one
part of a federal budget that has the look of a battle plan against the
environment. ” The Consortium

Ile-Alatau Journal: Pristine Park Draws Poachers to Central Asia. “Throughout the five nations of Central Asia, a struggle is under way to save
unspoiled ecosystems like this one. There are 32 nature preserves that were
spared the nuclear testing, exploitation of resources and general environmental
insensitivity of the Soviet era.

The new assault comes not from development and growth but from neglect and
desperation bred of poverty. Many people in Central Asia are poor, and
poaching, subsistence ranching and small-scale logging in these fertile enclaves
are matters of survival for many of them…

For the most part, the governments lack the resources to protect these isolated
preserves. Well-intentioned bureaucrats cannot compete with people trying to
find food. Few international organizations are involved, and environmentalists
say assistance is needed badly.” New York Times

Chimps have culture; researchers observe them to imitate local customs when they change groups. Recall last year’s report about the cultural activities of humpback whales as reflected in the spreading popularity of an unfamiliar whalesong introduced by visitors from a different region. New Scientist

Driving with a soda as risky as a cell phone. SF Gate

Personalize me, baby “The Net is finally
delivering on an old promise: Introducing us to new music
that we really, really like… Another company has emerged from
Boston: Media Unbound. Like Firefly, Media Unbound is
offering a personalized recommendation system that will
suggest bands you might enjoy, based on ones that you
already like. Unlike Firefly, Media Unbound does what it
promises to do: introduce new, obscure bands you’ll actually
like.

And Media Unbound isn’t alone — there’s also Mubu.com,
which offers a similar service; and MoodLogic, which takes
a more search-engine approach. Similarly, the
music-discovery search engine Gigabeat was purchased by
Napster two weeks ago.

And that’s where it gets interesting. If personalization that
works truly has broken through, it’s possible to imagine a
future in which obscure bands do get more time in the sun.
Because personalized music recommendation technology in
combination with file-trading services like Napster or
Gnutella could be an amazingly potent brew.” Salon

R.I.P. Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth; “Car Designer, Cultural Icon Created Rat Fink” LA Times

The Music of the Internet: “This site converts the IP-Address of your computer(or any internet address you enter) to music. The sound is created online
from the four nodes of your IP address with a fractal composition program…” There’s also a link to download the composition program, MusiNum, itself.

The Vocabula Review: “A society is generally as lax as its language.”

OtherSide City Search: enter a city name and it’ll tell you what’s on the exact opposite side of the globe, i.e. where you’d end up if you dig straight down and keep going. Since this site was mentioned on Metafilter, it’s so busy its search script chokes and it gives you an error, but sooner or later you’ll get it to work, I’m sure. This site, jessamyn.com, does pretty much the same thing, and is less busy. Write me if you think you’re the FmH reader closest to the exit from my tunnel starting here in Boston; we can arrange to meet halfway and split the effort, okay?

Floating clinic will offer the sick offshore euthanasia The Guardian

How to E-Mail Like a C.E.O. New York Times Magazine More articles from the “How-to” issue of the New York Times Magazine.

Orwell Would Revel in ‘Collateral Damage’, says communications director of the American-Arab
Anti-discrimination Committee:

Timothy McVeigh, who is scheduled to be executed May 16, has solidified his
position as the poster boy of cold-blooded villainy. The Oklahoma City bomber has
once again outraged the American public when he described the 19 dead children
among his 168 victims as “collateral damage” in an interview.

Although it scarcely seemed possible, this appalling comment has made
McVeigh an even more despised figure in American society. It produced
widespread and justified expressions of revulsion and anger at his lack of regard for
even the most innocent of his victims.

There is no doubt that McVeigh is an exceptionally malevolent and brutal
criminal. Yet the rest of us may not be as distant from his propensity to rationalize
the killing of innocents as we prefer to believe. All too often, good people allow
themselves to believe that the end justifies the means, that “war is hell.” Or they
find some other means to dismiss the deaths of those who did nothing to deserve
being killed.

It is worth recalling where McVeigh got this chillingly antiseptic phrase
“collateral damage.” It was coined by the Pentagon during the Gulf War to describe
the deaths of innocent Iraqis during the massive bombing campaign in 1991 and
was an attempt to obscure and rationalize these deaths through Orwellian jargon.
“Collateral damage” during the Gulf War included, in only one instance, 313
people incinerated at the Amiriya bomb shelter in western Baghdad, which was
deliberately attacked.

When asked about the extent of Iraqi casualties toward the end of the Gulf War,
then-military Chief of Staff Colin Powell blandly remarked: “That is really not a
matter I am terribly interested in.” LA Times

Four psychoanalysts comment on the therapy scenes in this Sunday’s Sopranos:

“My other thought about Dr.
Krakower is that his technique of ignoring Carmela’s defenses
and confronting her right down to her marrow served multiple
functions, not the least of which was ridding himself of a patient
that he didn’t really want to see. As analysts, we always have to
reflect upon the meaning of starting a treatment with telling a
patient how she must live her life and also laying out that they can
expect no help from us for anything short of following through on
our expectation. I’m not saying that we analysts don’t ever
confront; of course we do, but usually only after we have
established a relationship in which a patient feels known and
understood. In my own career and in all of the supervision I have
done with other analysts, when someone does what Dr. K. did,
they are really interested in taking care of themselves. I don’t think
that this is bad; obviously it indicates that this would be an
abysmal therapeutic match, even though it is a great dramatic one.”

“He was certainly a stark contrast to the “moral
relativism” of psychiatry that Jennifer’s husband complains about.
Peggy also raises questions about why Jennifer would pick him as
the analyst to whom she refers Carmela. Since he was her
teacher, she must have known that he would take the kind of
hard-line, moralistic approach that we saw. Could she have even
guessed that he would tell her to leave Tony? If so, was Jennifer
unconsciously disposing of her rival? Was this a
countertransference enactment in that sense? All of you noted the
problem with telling Carmela what to do after one session. It
reminds me of the cartoon about managed care that features
one-session therapy: The therapist says to the patient, “Whatever
you’re doing, stop it!” Dr. Krakower knows that dispensing this
kind of advice is not going to work because he knows that
Carmela has complicated reasons for staying involved with Tony.
Despite his lamenting that psychiatry has become a kind of
victimology, his message to Carmela seems to be that she is a
victim of Tony and the only solution is to remove herself from the
victimizer.” Slate

College admissions essays focus on Columbine. “The massacre at Columbine High School two years ago this month penetrated the psyche of American
teenagers in much the way John F. Kennedy’s assassination or astronauts walking on the moon did for their
parents’ generation.

The very word Columbine is shorthand for a complex set of emotions ranging from anxiety to sadness to
empathy. Nowhere is this knotted mix of feelings as clear as in the essays young people write as they apply for
admission to college.

From New Jersey to Virginia to Texas, Columbine is cited as life’s defining moment.” College admissions officers are considering asking applicants to write about something else already. Philadelphia Inquirer

Euthanasia Bill debated in Netherlands. Further evidence that the “We Deliver!” sensation was a hoax; the legalization of euthanasia is just now being debated. Nando Times

Violent TV Shows Wipe Out Memory of Commercials: “While there is growing concern about
the effects TV violence has on children, the bloodshed and mayhem
continues–in large part because advertisers want to reach the
under-34 crowd that watches violent programs. But new research
suggests these advertisers are shooting themselves in the foot.

Violent shows seem to make people forget they ever saw the
commercial breaks, according to a review of 12 studies published in
the April issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Across the studies, which included about 1,800 individuals, people
were less likely to remember sponsors’ brand names and advertising
messages when they viewed violent programs than when they
watched violence-free shows.” Reuters

Mountain Gazette returns. This monthly eco-literary magazine had a great
run between 1972 and 1979, when it published such noted authors as
Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and George Sibley. I was a charter subscriber, devoured every issue, and cried in my beer when it folded. The newly resurrected
Mountain Gazette is a grassroots effort by a former contributing editor at Backpacker and a former editor of The Aspen
Daily News who drive all over the
Rockies and the Sierras to deliver the newsprint-stock magazines. A reader explains:

‘What’s most appealing about the Gazette is its refusal to pander to the
Mountain Dew generation, with its Xtreme sports mentality that shouts, “Get
out of my way.” The Gazette fosters an anti-Xtreme mind-set. Several hundred thousand mountain
lovers have already read enough magazine stories about 20-year-olds
kayaking off 100-foot waterfalls.’

Study challenges ‘crack baby’ phenomenon: “The ‘crack
baby’ phenomenon is overblown, according to a
study that suggests poverty and the use of
cigarettes, alcohol and other drugs while
pregnant are just as likely as cocaine to cause
developmental problems in children.

Blaming such problems on prenatal cocaine use
alone has unfairly stigmatized children, creating
an unfounded fear in teachers that ‘crack kids”
will be backward and disruptive, according to the
study, an analysis of 36 previous studies.” SF Gate

Egyptian ‘Islam Line’ profits from religious advice. “In this country, where people consult their religion several times a day for guidance, authoritative
answers can be as hard to find as Pharoanic treasures entombed in the Giza pyramids. But a new
24-hour hot line called Islam Line makes it as easy as picking up the phone.

Islam Line has been so successful since its August launch that the owners plan to expand to the rest of
the Arab World, and eventually to Europe and the United States. Just last month it became available to
mobile-phone users in Jordan.

The hot line, dubbed ‘Dial-a-Fatwa,’ averages 300 callers a day from men and women of every age and
social class. Callers simply dial a number and leave their questions on a recording. Within 24 hours they
can call, punch in the number designated for their question, and listen to the answer. The phone service
is staffed by six highly respected, moderate clerics trained at Al-Azhar, a thousand-year-old university
that’s considered the cradle of Islamic learning.” The Nando Times

“Long-term users of ‘ecstasy'(methylenedioxymethamphetamine [MDMA]) tend to experience memory impairment, according to a study reported in the April 10 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of
Neurology.

Fifteen MDMA users, ranging in age from 17 to 31, participated in the year-long study. Participants of the study took the drug an average of
2.4 times per month. The testing regimen included measures sensitive to intelligence and every day memory functioning.

Over the period of one year the test scores either declined or kept static, but did not improve. …For example, the ability to recall a story after a brief delay declined by approximately 50
percent between the first and second assessments. The drug affects the hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with learning and the
consolidation of new memories.”EurekAlert!

Researcher finds retroviral ‘footprint’ in brains of people with schizophrenia; “…strongest evidence yet that a virus may contribute to some cases
of schizophrenia.

In this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (Johns Hopkins) Children’s Center neurovirologist Robert Yolken, M.D., and his colleagues report
the molecular “footprint” of a retrovirus in the cerebrospinal fluid of about 30 percent of people with acute schizophrenia and about 7 percent of
people with a chronic form of the disease. The footprint was absent in the brains and cerebrospinal fluid of all people who did not have
schizophrenia. ” EurekAlert! The study was conducted at Johns Hopkins’ Stanley Neurovirology laboratory, which focuses on “the elucidation of the role of infection and immunity in the etiology of schizophrenia and bipolar
disorders.”

New research finds that vitamin treatment brings dramatic improvements for one form of the rare neurological disease, hereditary ataxia.

Spying From Space: U.S. to Sharpen the Focus

Anyone wondering where U.S. military investment is
headed need look no farther than the next generation of spy
satellites that are being built now and will start going into orbit
in 2005.

The estimated 20-year price tag is $25 billion, making this
program the most expensive venture ever mounted by U.S.
intelligence services. In comparison, the Manhattan project, the
World War II crash program to build the atomic bomb, cost
$20 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.

For its money, Washington expects to get a new system of
electronic cameras that can be trained on potential trouble spots
anywhere on the planet on a couple of hours’ notice or less. It
will be “an incredible improvement” in America’s ability to spy
from the sky, a U.S. official said in Washington. He said the
satellites would be able to track objects as small as a baseball
anywhere, anytime on the planet.

European nations argue that the EU ought to put up its own network of spy satellites to prevent reliance on US data. Germany has been vocal about the exposure of its troops in the Balkans to needless risk because of inadequate access to US intelligence data. International Herald Tribune

German Threat Raises Infowar Fear. Germany’s Interior Minister suggests that the German government resort to denial-of-service attacks against U.S. and other foreign right-wing websites promoting hatred and encouraging the growth of German neo-Nazism. Wired

Cypherpunk’s Free Speech Defense. Update on Jim Bell‘s first day of testimony at his Tacoma, Washington trial for “internet stalking.” Declan McCullagh’s coverage places Bell’s actions squarely in the same boat as the “Nuremberg Files” website (as I discussed last month, recently exonerated of fomenting violence by posting the names and personal details of doctors who perform abortions). Wired

Japan’s pet-friends: “The Japanese economy may be heading back
into recession, but one line of business is doing
very well despite the economic gloom.

Pet shop owners are
enjoying a bonanza as
the Japanese turn to
dogs and cats as an
antidote to all the
stress they are
suffering.” Dog owners travel more than an hour by train to get to a park where, for $12, they can let their dogs run free off the leash. A special housing complex — where the elevator has a warning light to tell others when a dog is on board — caters to pet owners in a country where most apartments forbid pets larger than a hamster. And, if the problems of ownership appear insurmountable, you can rent a dog for the equivalent of around $4 per outing. BBC

WordNet: “an on-line lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical
memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying
lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets.

WordNet was developed by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University under the direction of Professor George
A. Miller (Principal Investigator).” You can use WordNet online or download your own copy.

A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices — more than sixty, to improve the effectiveness and elegance of your writing, or to learn some obscure words that will help you solve erudite crossword puzzles. And a taxonomy of logical fallacies; recognizing and characterizing why someone’s argument does not make the point they claim it makes.

Center for Exorcistology “Never say the following: I rebuke you, I command you, or I adjure you. This will only make it personal and it may cause
you more attack. Try to leave the narcissism out of it. Don’t be lazy, learn this prayer of adjurement.” [via wood s lot]

Eyes wide apart: “Stare into Michelle Pfeiffer’s eyes, and other faces will
suffer by comparison…,” according to a paper recently published in Nature Neuroscience. The Guardian

FreeAnswers (“Ask a question just as if you were talking to a support technician”) is a natural-language search interface to the knowledge bases for Microsoft, Intuit and Adobe products. It does considerably better than, for example, Microsoft’s own front end to its knowledge bases at figuring out what it is you want to know. Brian Livingston reports on this in his Window Manager column in InfoWorld.

GOP Targets 45 Rules To Overturn Washington Post

Lyme Disease Vaccine’s Safety is Questioned. The possibility that there have been more than a hundred dire reactions to the Lyme vaccine since its FDA approval two years ago “have renewed a debate on the risks and benefits of vaccines for illnesses, such as Lyme disease, that are treatable or avoidable by other means.” Critics claim that the vaccine is being “grossly overpromoted” in parts of the country without a significant incidence of the illness, and that it is less than acceptably effective, requiring frequent booster shots to maintain at best imperfect immunity. Members of the preapproval FDA advistory committee expressed concerns about the vaccine’s potential to provoke arthritic reactions in some recipients, but what they did with these misgivings was to ask for post-approval followup by the vaccine’s manufacturer. Washington Post There is a raging debate, however, about whether Lyme disease is underdiagnosed, whether it may be responsible itself for a broader range of symptoms than generally accepted, including serious neuropsychiatric complications; and whether these serious complications really do readily respond to treatment, as is accepted in the infectious disease mainstream. I keep up on the literature about this partly because a former high school classmate of mine got in touch with me several years ago to describe how he is at the thick of the controversy because he claims he’s been debilitated by effects of Lyme disease that the medical establishment will not acknowledge. Several of the specialists by whom he’s been treated have been discredited, including, coincidentally, someone with whom I was in graduate school before either of us became a psychiatrist. The possibility that the long-term effects of Lyme infection are more dire, more common, and less-treatment-responsive than acknowledged, of course, would tip the risk-benefit calculations in favor of the vaccine.

Nemesis: Does the Sun Have a ‘Companion’? A UC Berkeley physicist is not letting go of the discredited idea that our sun has a companion red dwarf whose periodic approaches are responsible for recurrent episodes of mass extinction on the Earth. “Give me a million dollars and I’ll find it.” space.com

Working Mom? With Gov. Paul Cellucci confirmed as Bush’s ambassador to Canada, Massachusetts is abuzz about the promotion of Lt. Gov. Jane Swift, pregnant with twins. Wendy Kaminer: “We’ve
gotten used to no-show governors. Bill Weld played squash for six years; Paul Cellucci went on trade missions.
Considering the record of her predecessors, it will be hard to criticize Governor Swift if she stays home with her babies.
But living down to low standards shouldn’t make her a feminist role model. Women who want to be taken seriously as
officeholders had better take their offices seriously.” The American Prospect

Start Making Sense: “Eighty miles southwest of here, a small group of writers is plotting
to overthrow a common enemy: the monolithic, ever-oppressive New
York Literary Establishment. Tired of McSweeney’s, M.F.A.s, and
literary mooning, the Underground Literary Alliance (ULA) promotes a
straight-talking, street-smart prose of yesteryear (think Dickens)
designed to supplant the perceived products of postmodernism
(think Foster Wallace) that flood our bookstores. ULA founder and
promoter Karl “King” Wenclas disdains the “literati” for being like
“French kings and Russian czars”–out of touch and producing work
that’s irrelevant beyond New York City. He boasts that his “lowest of the low” ULA-ers (dishwashers, army
enlistees, skid-row dwellers) write with a “raw power” that’s absent from literature today.” Village Voice

Season of Carbon Action Freezerbox

Season of Carbon Action Freezerbox

Season of Carbon Action Freezerbox

The Stories You Probably Didn’t Read All About Last
Year Baltimore City Paper

“The new century’s most
important and confusing big-power dance will arguably be
between the United States and China. ” International Herald Tribune News Analysis: Both Sides in Uncharted Territory: ” ‘Americans only know one international pattern – Cold War or
friendship,’ said Robert Ross, a specialist in foreign policy at
Boston College who happened to be in Beijing last week during
the standoff. But neither path, many argue, is inevitable or
perhaps even likely with China – or, indeed, with other nations,
as complex and ambivalent ties become the norm in a world
with a globalized economy and one true superpower.”

James Ridgeway: China Conflict: The Profit Motive “The Bush administration’s great China standoff has less to do with a
downed American spy plane and a missing Chinese pilot than it does with U.S. and China competing
for control of the world oil routes that cross through southern Asia. Also at stake is an electronics
gravy train for the corporate interests of Silicon Valley.

In seeking to protect shipping lanes for oil tankers, the U.S. has considered equipping nations along
the Asian routes—including Taiwan—with the military might needed to defend the surrounding seas.
China, which is also seeking greater access to fuel, has expressed anger over the transfer of arms to
neighboring Taiwan.” Village Voice Do the Illegitimate Son and his handlers understand anything as subtle as the importance of saving face in “getting to ‘yes’ ” in political negotiation, especially with China?

U.S. knew China pilot as ‘cowboy’ who taunted Americans. “The missing
Chinese pilot who collided with
a U.S. surveillance plane had
been flying extremely close to
U.S. reconnaissance aircraft for
months, even once flashing a
sign with his e-mail address on
it, U.S. officials said yesterday.

The pilot, identified in state-run
Chinese media as Wang Wei,
became so reckless that Washington twice complained to the
Chinese government, most recently in a diplomatic protest in
December, defense officials said, speaking on the condition of
anonymity.” Or at least this is the ‘spin’ the US government would be planting now to justify evading its own responsibility, at least to apologize. Seattle Times

1628 people and counting: We’re sorry! “Well, if you’ve been keeping up on the news, you
know all about the spy plane incident in China.
Apparently, China demanded an apology – nothing
more – and Bush refused! So, now exists this page,
apologizing to the entire world for our stupid fucking
president.”

dangerousmeta pointed to this New Republic piece about the budget crisis in Texas, attributable in large measure to Little George’s tax cut mania. Pity more attention isn’t given to this in the current debate.

At least Dubya’s presidency will be of unprecedented assistance to the arts!

And the New York Times today suggests that Dubya’s unsubtle pandering to the right since his inauguration ought to be reinfusing almost every facet of the left end of the American political spectrum with outrage and resolve. Let’s hope progressives, and Democrats in general, can do something with it. I worried after Dubya’s ascendency to the throne that political memory is too short, conciliatory tendencies too strong, and Bush’s handlers too unscrupulous and disingenuous for an effective opposition to grow just when this country (and the world) need it most.Now glimmers of hope, to the contrary, that Bush just might continue to be an effective collaborator in the process. Continue to follow me on this emotional roller coaster ride between political encouragement and despondency…

Barbra Streisand’s call for stepped-up Democratic Oppositon to Bush Agenda: “In late March, Barbra Streisand sent a personal memo to a limited group of leading Democratic
legislators, urging that a more forceful effort be made to resist the rush of legislative proposals and
presidential edicts from the Bush administration which threaten to undermine 30 years of progress in civil
rights, environmental protections and Political process. Since this memorandum was leaked to the
press, primarily the D.C. magazine Roll Call and The Drudge Report, and since it has been angrily
misreported by a wide range of right wing media, we felt visitors to BarbraStreisand.com would like to
read the updated text of her thoughts.” And here‘s Tom Daschle’s response [grin].

The Village Voice, usefully, collects links to all its vitriolic coverage of GB2’s early days in this ‘peek into (his) honeymoon suite’. And the Booknotes weblog neatly sums it all up, with the newfound authority the inauguration has conferred on Molly-Ivins-loving commentators from Texas:

“I just had a horrifying thought. The Bush administration might be up to
something. They spend their 100 day honeymoon ramming though their real
agenda and paying back their money backers, igonoring the polls. Then
they spend the next 3+ years polishing their image for the next election. The
American population is famous for quickly fogetting what at one time
enraged it. Think about it.
And don’t stop thinking about it until you get a chance to vote again.”

After all, somebody’s going to get inaugurated in around 45 months…

Season of Carbon Action Freezerbox

Men Sense ‘Scent of a Woman’: ‘Could love truly be in the air?
Researchers in Texas believe men become especially attuned–and
attracted to–female body odors during the most fertile stage of the
menstrual cycle.

“These findings raise serious doubts about conventional scientific
wisdom that human female ovulation is concealed…and that men cannot detect when women are
ovulating,” according to Drs. Devendra Singh and P. Matthew Bronstad, psychologist researchers
at the University of Texas in Austin.’ Reuters Health

Update: A reader asked what’s new about this news, given the well-known phenomenon of women’s menstrual cycles synchronizing when they live together. Several things. First, menstrual synchronization may be because of subliminal awareness of menstruation, not ovulation. That’s not so surprising, given that menstruation provides external, overt or subliminal, clues. Second, this study shows not only subliminal awareness, but that, as with our primate forebears’ behavior around oestrus, men find women more sexually attractive at precisely the time they are most fertile. As such, it is of evolutionary biological interest.

Scientists boost fruit fly lifespan: Humans next? The Times of India

São Paulo’s ‘Roofless’ Seize Downtown Buildings. Squatting, Brazilian-style; some estimates indicate that more than 50% of São Paulo’s population of 10.5 million live in “irregular circumstances.” New York Times

How to Harvest a Live Organ. Not the stuff of the urban legend about the victim who wakes up in an ice-packed bathtub in a strange hotel room after a night of oblivious carousing to find a note and an incision in his/her flank, but the real thing. New York Times Magazine

Mars Odyssey Scheduled for Liftoff: “NASA will
try to snap its losing streak and send
another spacecraft to Mars on Saturday
after two humiliating failures.” New York Times

“Ginsberg
talking is like Charlie Parker
taking his saxophone out for
a spin at the far reaches of
harmony and rhythm…” A Yale English professor reviews Spontaneous Mind: selected interviews 1958-1996 by Allen Ginsberg. The reviewer is rhapsodic that “Ginsberg’s
uniquely frank and vivid voice, silent now
these past four years, seems to sound
again in its deftly edited pages.” Ironically, with the passing of the last major Beat figures Ginsberg and Corso, the immediacy at the core of the Beat Generation is reduced to static words on a page for now and forever.

The candor and passion are to be expected, but the stereotype of
Ginsberg as a semiliterate primitive leaves one unprepared for his
erudition and intellectual brilliance. A question about his youthful
discovery of Cézanne elicits six long pages on the transcendental
implications of the painter’s ostensibly workmanlike notation of optical
phenomena, and the relevance of those implications to Blake, haiku
and the composition of ”Howl.” Elsewhere, belying dismissals of the
Beats as willfully ignorant of literary history, Ginsberg details the ways
the movement placed itself within both American and modernist
traditions, as well as within the mystical tradition that leads back
through Gnosticism to the ancient mystery cults. Other passages remind
us of the courage and prescience of the man who was proudly,
publicly gay over a decade before the Stonewall uprising. We find
him talking about global warming in 1968. Above all, we find him
continually challenging settled ideas, especially his own. Yes, as a
1976 interview shows, he eventually questioned some attitudes of the
60’s left, but the fact is that, as we see in a 1963 interview, he
questioned many of them almost before there was a 60’s left…

Each
interviewer tries to elicit the Ginsberg of his or her imagination —
William F. Buckley Jr., the dangerous radical; Playboy, the
homosexual crusader; fellow dropouts, the mocker of squares — and
each time, Ginsberg performs judo flips on their expectations, handing
back complex, nuanced versions of the attitudes with which they’ve
tried to saddle him. Indeed, he helps us appreciate the great
difference between a celebrity and a public figure — one the creation
of the media, the other a full human character seeking to act within the
public sphere — as well as why we don’t really have any of the latter
anymore.

New York Times Book Review

In conjunction with the review of this book, Ginsberg is the Times’ “featured author.” Here is a collection of links to reviews of his other works, articles by and about him, a link to a streaming audio of a reading he gave at the 92nd St. Y in New York in 1977 (42 min.), and a slide show.

Harry Potter and the Court Battle Over Creativity: “…(A) growing
parade of aggrieved writers and artists
… have helped to turn intellectual
property litigation into a burgeoning
cottage industry, with its own small plaintiffs
bar and even insurance policies to protect
successful writers and musicians from the
high cost of fending off claims.

Blockbuster books, movies, plays and songs
have always provoked anger and legal
actions on the part of little-known artists who
say their work has been usurped. The vast
majority of lawsuits are as improbable as
one New York designer’s unsuccessful claim
that the best-selling “Goosebumps” series of
children’s books stole a graphic he designed
for the Lithuanian basketball team.” New York Times Business

How world religions view homosexuality

Are You in Anthropodenial?

After finishing Frans de Waal’s
engaging history of primate
studies, The Ape and the Sushi Master, I
wasn’t surprised, a day later, to come
across a Web site called ”Bush or
Chimp?” The juxtaposition of head shots
of the new president alongside
chimpanzees, in poses ranging from
slack-jawed joviality to goofy hooting,
plays off a timeworn joke.

The laughter depends on the underlying
assumption that while apes may look like
humans, akin even to the most powerful
leader in the world, there still must be a
quantum leap from them to us. But the
laughter grows thinner by the year as
one by one the supposed bellwether
differences between apes and humans, like toolmaking, fall away.
Chimpanzees use leaves as seats, as it turns out; they fashion a kind of
footwear to protect themselves from thorns; they ”fish” for termites with
twigs and reeds they strip and cut for the occasion. New York Times

This is not, as far as my searching could reveal, on the ‘net, but is a shocking and important enough finding that I thought I’d post it:

Homicide a Leading Cause of Death in Pregnant Women :

The leading cause of death among pregnant women is homicide, according to a
study published in the current issue of the Journal of Midwifery and Women’s
Health.

The study’s authors reviewed 651 autopsy charts from the District of Columbia’s
Chief Medical Examiner’s Office for cases from 1988 until 1996. The researchers
discovered 13 homicides of pregnant women that had not been reported with the
21 maternal deaths from medical causes (eg, hemorrhage and infection). These 13
unreported deaths account for 38% of pregnancy-associated deaths…

Other findings include:

Pregnant homicide victims are more likely to have been killed early in the
pregnancy, which can make it difficult to identify the pregnancy and link it
with the homicide.

Pregnant homicide victims are more likely to be killed with a gun.

Pregnant teenagers (aged 15-19 years) were more at risk.

… “What pregnant women do not know,” said American College of Nurse-Midwives
Executive Director Deanne Williams, “is that instead of facing joyful
celebration at the announcement of pregnancy, too many face violence and death.
We have got to do a better job of identifying this problem and helping the
women and their partners not end up with such a horrific outcome.”

The authors note that the deaths in the study, although not officially reported
within maternal mortality ratios, may truly be pregnancy-related in that the
violence might not have escalated to result in death had the women not become
pregnant.

A reader provided me with a link to a related study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

SETI founder speaks about Intel P2P cancer
project. “If corporate America was involved in a community PC effort to find
these wonder cancer drugs, who would ultimately benefit?” The Register

“Japan is the global imagination’s
default setting for the future. ” Modern boys and mobile girls: William Gibson explains his fascination with all things Japanese, which is evident when you read any of his writing. And he flatters the British for their unique vantage point on the East. The Observer The little blurb about the author at the bottom, by the way, mentions that the title of his forthcoming book is Pattern Recognition. That‘s been another central concept in all his novels, hasn’t it?

I do miss the BlogVoices discussion capability now that I’ve eliminated it. The blog is loading much faster, and several readers have written celebrating the fact that they can read me more easily now, that BlogVoices broke their browsers in various ways. So it’s history. But I did enjoy bringing up the page and scanning down through the items I’d recently posted looking for the indication that there were comments posted, that this isn’t a one-way conversation. Even though that’s what blogging is supposed to be all about…

Reprinted from Looka! “Horrendous classical music joke of the day: A-one,
and a-two, and a-three … (*bomp*bomp*bomp*)

You say Carmina, I say Carmana,

You say Burina, I say Burana,

Carmina, Carmana, Burina, Burana.

Let’s Carl the whole thing Orff.

— Robert Feiertag, posting on soc.motss”

Cheaper Flat Panels Comin’ At Ya’ The Register

“For healthy people, mind reading is an innate and effortless
ability, even though it’s in fact very complicated. For people
with autism, it’s like doing mental arithmetic.” Mind theory: “The brain regions critical in allowing us to
understand another person’s thoughts are
revealed.” Several years ago, researchers found that, in autistic subjects, facial recognition of others uses the same brain regions as object recognition, not the distinct specialized areas for person recognition. Now, a complementary study shows that patients with Asperger’s syndrome (arguably related to autism) do not use distinctive brain regions, as non-AS subjects do, to solve problems involving figuring out or imagining what another person is thinking or feeling. They have an impairment in the capacity to form a ‘Theory of Mind’; more simply put, empathic ability. Extraordinary to think that specific brain regions subsume this skill; it gives new meaning to the notion of humans as the ‘social animal’. However, reading this research made me wonder (as it turns out in the last paragraph does the study’s author) whether these findings might enable us to probe the claim that other animals — notably chimpanzees — have the capacity for a Theory of Mind. New Scientist

UCSF researchers move in on role of brain’s naturally occurring marijuana: “Nearly a decade ago, researchers determined that the brain contains a molecule that mimics the active ingredient in marijuana, but its
location and role in the brain were unclear. Now, UCSF researchers have discovered that the molecule acts, at least in part, in a region of
the brain that plays a key role in learning and memory.

The study, reported in the March 29 issue of Nature, suggests, the researchers say, that the molecule, known as a cannabinoid, plays a role
in particular cognitive functions within a structure known as the hippocampus. Paradoxically, marijuana disrupts cognitive function and the
likely explanation, the researchers say, is that marijuana disrupts the very cognitive system the cannabinoid normally supports.” EurekAlert!

So Gore Really Won? “One day after the Miami Herald published a story that prompted
national headlines about George W. Bush being the real winner in
Florida, the newspaper effectively recanted.

In a new story in Thursday’s editions, the Herald acknowledged what we also
pointed out: that a careful examination of the Herald’s own data would have
led to a conclusion that Al Gore was the choice of Florida voters under a
reasonable standard judging the “clear intent of the voters.”

The Herald’s data revealed that by looking at the so-called ‘undervotes’ in all
67 counties and counting various markings for president, Gore would have
won Florida and thus the presidency.” The Consortium

Free-Floating Planets — British Team Restakes Its Claim. “An academic tug-of-war over worlds beyond our solar system continued Tuesday, with two British
scientists reasserting their claim to have found free-floating planets that others say are nothing of
the sort.” Departing from the commonly-understood concept of a planet as an object orbiting a star, the argument here is that measurements of these objects — in the Trapezium Cluster of the Orion Nebula — qualify them as planets because they are “sub 13Mjup”, i.e. less than 13 times the mass of Jupiter. Nothing smaller has sufficient temperature and pressure in its core to support fusion. The counterargument is that the calculations are off and that these objects are really more massive brown dwarf stars, “unattached balls of gas.”

I’ve been had! …along with alot of others, it seems. Thanks to a reader who alerted me to this. To be fair, I did ask you if you really believed the “We Deliver” spiel. ‘(T)he
We-Deliver.tv domain name is registered to Sputnik7, a
New York entertainment portal out to grab some eyeballs
by any means necessary.

The We Deliver Web site is a form of “stealth marketing,”
says Sommer Hixson, the company’s public relations director.

“We Deliver is Sputnik7’s first original, live-action ‘webisodic’
about a fictional weed delivery service in New York called
Green Acres,” she says. “The 10-part series will launch on
Sputnik7 on Friday, April 20. We-deliver.tv is a campaign
to create a pre-launch buzz.” ‘ Salon

DOJ: Cypherpunk Threatened Feds. “A federal prosecutor said on Wednesday that an Internet essayist spent
months illegally compiling information about IRS agents through CD-ROM databases and conversations
with members of a mailing list of ‘cypherpunks.’

Robb London, an assistant U.S. Attorney, said in court that Jim Bell was not conducting a legitimate
investigation of government wrongdoing last year but instead was a disturbed person who had never
renounced a political treatise he wrote entitled ‘Assassination Politics‘, (a) long-winded thought experiment predicting how future
technologies including untraceable digital cash, encryption and anonymity should allow
anyone upset with the feds to bet on when a certain government agent will die. The
winner, presumably the assassin, wins the pool of money… Bell has pleaded not guilty to five counts of interstate stalking that allegedly took place
last year, saying he was legally assembling information about government agents he
thought were participating in a conspiracy involving illegal surveillance. ” Wired Wired correspondent Declan McCullagh, who has covered the Jim Bell affair and is covering the trial, was forced to testify over his objections that he might be compelled to reveal the identities of confidential sources of some of his information. The Register McCullagh describes the first day’s proceedings here. cluebot.com

Three New Places to Fight Hate. “Hate speech may flow freely on the Internet, but it just got a powerful rebuttal in the form of a trio of
new websites preaching tolerance.

The three sites will help fill a vacuum left by Hatewatch.org, which closed shop in January after its
founder said hate groups had failed to gain widespread acceptance on the Internet.” Wired

The neural correlates of person familiarity. More interesting and powerful findings from functional MRI. Comparing the brain activation patterns of people seeing familiar vs. unfamiliar faces, and listening to familiar vs. unfamiliar voices, reveals the neural correlates of familiarity or recognition — areas of the posterior cingulate gyrus of the cortex, for those who know neuroanatomy. I have long been interested in the dramatic psychotic symptom called Capgras’ delusion, which involves the belief that familiar others have been replaced by nearly — but not quite — identical duplicates. Extreme cases in which the patient was convinced that their entire city was replaced by a near-duplicate have been described. The deep resonances of this terrifying experience are reflected in such classic films as Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which the panic-stricken protagonists cannot convince others that people around them are being replaced or controlled.(Of course, on another level, films of this ilk are talked about in the context of our Cold War societal complex about Communist brainwashing and takeover — which may be coming back into fashion — but that’s a different story; I think they speak to something far more primal.) It has long been observed that the Capgras delusion occurs both in “functional” psychoses (e.g. schizophrenia) and a variety of “organic” conditions (e.g. carbon monoxide poisoning). Back in psychiatry’s dark ages of either/or, this was one of the early suggestions that functional mental illnesses were diseases of the brain as much as of the mind.

I have been suggesting for a long time that the Capgras symptom arises from a disorder of the machinery underlying the sense of familiarity in the brain, and that it might have some similarity to other so-to-speak delusions of unfamiliarity. For example, there is a class of paranoid patients whose concerns revolve around the conviction that people come into their homes while the patient is asleep or out, rearranging or absconding with things there. I suspect that the failure of these patients to retain a sense of familiarity about the arrangement or placement of the objects in their environment is the basis of their belief that things have been meddled with. There is also a particular set of paranoid fears that arises as memory and familiarity fade with the progression of Alzheimer’s and other dementias. There is also a symptom called derealization, in which people have a strange sense that the world around them is not real but a caricature or cartoon version of itself; they cannot articulate percisely what is different, but they know it is. This often occurs in temporal lobe epilepsy, which can involve the cingulate gyrus, and is related to frequent deja vu experiences, clearly a disorder of the sense of familiarity. Now, with the demonstration of neural correlates of the experience of familiarity, even if no new treatment interventions arise, a convincing explanation may at least some of the time be a comfort to the patients so afflicted, or their families. As an aside, I’m curious to see whether the more disembodied familiarity of media celebrities is subsumed by the same machinery as the more intimate experience of the familiarity of our associates, friends and family. Brain

An FmH reader writes that this is probably the real reason San Diego is dropping the use of the word ‘minority’ in its documents. “Yes, I think this should be derided, but not for the reason you give“, he says, alluding to my lampooning such apparent political correctness.

Monsanto v. Percy Schmeiser. A disturbing story to which I was originally pointed by jimwich, here summarized on Tompaine.com. 40% of farmers in Western Canada, including farmer Percy Schmeiser’s neighbors, grow generically modified canola. Pollen from his neighbors’ fields blew onto his land and, when Monsanto took seed samples from his canola crop without his permission and found “their” genes, they sued under Canadian patent law that makes it illegal to re-use patented seeds without a licensing agreement. Now Schmeiser is forced to pay thousands of dollars in royalties on GM seeds found on his land without his having bought the seeds or benefited from their inadvertent presence in his crop (they were engineered to be resistant to a Monsanto weed killer Schmeiser does not use). IMHO, this story, perhaps the first of many in Monsanto’s promised draconian crackdown on “seed-savers”, illustrates the real disaster of agribusiness giants’ taking proprietary control of crop genomes through GM. Placing the burden of assuring non-contamination with GM materials on the individual producer is an insidious means of crushing independent competition. This is far more worrisome than speculative and largely misplaced concerns over direct biological effects of engineered genes on the foodchain.

“…some of the most extremely violent rhetoric, from both sides, that
I’ve ever heard between a government and a terrorist organization…” “Muslim extremists who have been holding
an American hostage for the past eight months threatened to behead
their captive and send the head as a birthday present to President
Arroyo Thursday.

The Abu Sayyaf said the head of Jefrrey Schilling, the 25-year-old
Oakland, California native whom the group has held in the jungles
of Sulu since August last year, will be sent as “a gift” to the President
for her 54th birthday.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Arroyo declared yesterday all-out war against the
Abu Sayyaf rebels and ordered troops to take no prisoners unless the
bandits surrendered.” Phillipine Star A discussion thread on Plastic in reaction to this story suggests that the hostage is apparently an American Muslim who sought out the rebels himself “to hang out with them,” then got into trouble because he couldn’t answer their questions on Islamic doctrine.

San Diego will drop use of word ‘minority’ in its documents. Calling someone a minority implies that he or she is inferior, says sponsor of the measure which passed the San Diego City Council unanimously yesterday. “Schoolteachers and others, often
unconsciously, expect less of those who are labeled members of minority
groups. Those classified as minorities may even expect less of themselves…” No more consciousness-raising; the only politically correct solution these days is consciousness-lowering.

Do you believe this? We Deliver is an online drug dealing service that “got a really, really good idea”, they say, by reading the U.S. Postal Code closely. It turns out that the Netherlands legalized euthanasia in November, 2000. It also turns out that postal inspectors in the U.S. are “prohibited from the internal examination of any
package containing the remains of a human whose life
be deemed legally and prematurely ended from without
the borders of the United States”, a provision originally intended to insure that the remains of soldiers who die abroad are unimpeded in getting back to their grieving families. So We Deliver hooks you up with the ashes of your long-lost and recently-euthanized Dutch relatives, they say. “…For a reasonable fee, we
set it up so that a guy in Amsterdam will send you a
little bit of the deceased’s ashes. And he’ll measure out
the exact amount of ounces (or pounds) of ashes that
you wanna order, put it in a box, slap on an official
Netherlands ‘Euthanized Remains – Urgent’ sticker and
send it to yer address.” You receive your package, open it and, lo and behold, find that the shipper goofed and it is not ashes but an equivalent weight of some other ‘stuff’. “Of course you might still be a little skeptical. You don’t
know for sure if we legit. And that’s why we givin’
away a free joint to everyone who signs up for our
newsletter before 4/20/01. Try it out, see if you like it,
and then see if you don’t come back. We Deliver, y’all.” [via Plastic]

Read Any Good Pictures Lately? In Reading Pictures: a history of love and hate, a sequel to his A History of Reading, Argentinian writer and critic Alberto Manguel “coax(es) every possible allusion from the shadows… deconstruct(ing) the picture’s meaning for the artist while enriching the viewer’s understanding of what we are looking at, and why our responses can be so intense and complex”, in a meandering, eclectic way. The Independent

George Bush is sorely mistaken if he thinks there’s nothing that Britain and the rest of the world can do about US renunciation of the Kyoto accords on greenhouse gas emissions. Boycotts, restitution, withdrawals and expulsions, will follow. And any Briton who visits the US will be expected to drive on the left. The Guardian

Socially inept, self-involved and geeky? Temple Grandin, “perhaps the world’s best known sufferer of Asperger’s Syndrome”, recognized a fellow traveler in Kevin Mitnick when she watched him in a TV interview about a year ago. She, and others, have been thinking about whether AS is an indication that a child is at risk of becoming a hacker. Mitnick himself identified with a fellow hacker imprisoned with him and diagnosed as having Asperger’s. Some counter that Asperger’s is closely associated with rigid rectitude; if not hackers and crackers, how about a link between AS and nerdiness in general? USA Today

Lightly Braised Adverbs. Pay attention to the verbiage of the modern menu to learn when you should run, don’t walk, from that jovial eatery before you waste your money. Irish Times

Distant Supernova Dark Energy. “Light from a star that exploded over 10 billion light-years away is revealed in… a cosmic snapshot of the most distant
supernova. The ancient stellar detonation was detected by digitally subtracting before and after images of a faint, yellowish, elliptical galaxy included in the
Hubble Space Telescope Deep Field image… Remarkable in itself as the farthest known supernova, its measured brightness
provides astounding evidence for a strange universe – one which eventually defies gravity and expands at an accelerating rate. The unseen force driving this
expansion is dubbed dark energy and discovering the fundamental nature of dark energy has been called the challenge of this millennium. Astronomy Picture of the Day

The real computer virus is the Internet’s unmatched capacity for distributing misinformation. When the mainstream media prints an item that seems, in an old newsroom phrase, “too good to check”, it probably is too good to be true.

…In recent months I have found myself quietly
checking the validity of almost everything I find in
cyberspace and whenever possible doing it the
old-fashioned way: consulting reference books in
libraries, calling professors or original sources on the
phone, double-checking everything…

Seven years ago, AJR warned that an over-reliance
on Lexis-Nexis was leading to a “misinformation
explosion.” Since that time, the number of journalists
using the data retrieval service has increased
exponentially; at many news organizations, libraries
have been phased out and reporters do their own
searches. This has led, predictably, to an entire subgenre
of phony quotes and statistics that won’t die. American Journalism Review

“How did everything get to be so complicated? For most people,
a rueful exclamation; for Stuart Kauffman, the most interesting
question about the universe.” A review of Investigations:

Kauffman’s approach to explaining how such things can be is
unconventional. A philosopher turned doctor turned theoretical
biologist, he works out of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico,
where the house style is computer simulation of just about
anything. In his last book, At Home in the Universe , he outlined
the power of self-organisation, arguing that there are laws that
can generate order where we don’t expect it. In Kauffman’s
computer-generated universe, stable structures appeared where
intuition predicted a mess. Wherever he looked – in networks of
interacting genes, in vats of chemicals or in the patterns of
decision that tie producers to consumers in the marketplace –
he saw “order for free”.

In Investigations, one puzzle he wants to cast in a new light is
how to read the energy exchanges that underpin all these
processes.

…The book
is undeniably heavy going in places. Some of the chapters take
for granted science that another writer would explain at length.
Although there are plenty of concrete examples, much of the
core argument keeps trying to turn back into mathematics. Yet
Kauffman’s obsessive probing of the limits of understanding is
pretty gripping, in its way. The book may be science. It may be,
as he suggests hopefully, proto-science. It is certainly a crash
course in how to think like Stuart Kauffman, which is a great
way to see blind spots in the science that already exists. The Guardian

“Holier Than Thou” morality study shows why you probably aren’t as nice as you think. “We knew something had to be wrong when the average person thinks he or she’s a better person than the average person, when the majority of Americans
consider themselves to be members of an elite moral minority. We wanted to know whether people feel holier than thou because they underestimate others’ moral goodness, or because
they overestimate their own.”

Ten Reasons for Reparations: “Conservative muckraker David Horowitz has been verbally mugged for peddling
an ad to college newspapers giving ten reasons why reparations are racist. But the
name callers have done little more than canonize Horowitz as a martyr for truth and
free speech. Even worse, they’ve failed miserably to tell why reparations merit a
serious look. There are ten compelling reasons it does.” AlterNet

Media Gives Bush a Free Pass: ‘The incident occurred in Fort Worth on Feb. 25 when a “very intoxicated” college
student was arrested at a rowdy fraternity party and was, according to the county
sheriff, “very vocal” that his girlfriend was George W. Bush’s teenaged daughter,
who’d also attended the party. After the student used his cellular phone to make a
call from his cell, Secret Service agents quickly arrived to get him out. Bush’s
daughter reportedly waited outside the jail in a Secret Service vehicle.

The White House wouldn’t comment on the matter, and the story disappeared from
the news in a day.’ AlterNet

(Ariana Huffington’s overthrowthegov.com)

“It made me feel like a very cool cyborg surgeon…” It’s in the Eyes. Surgeons complain of being distracted by having to look up from their operating field to view data on a computer screen. Now doctors at the Mayo Clinic are finding “useful and not distracting” a retinal-scanning device that “paints” images and data directly on their eyes, allowing them to review crucial information without ever having to look up from the patient. ‘The main computer sends the needed data to miniature
horizontal and vertical scanners in the control module that then
project the image through the headpiece’s optical element,
where a laser beam places it directly onto the user’s retina.

James says the data looks like it’s being projected onto a “big,
transparent TV screen that’s floating in space about an arm’s
length away from you.” ‘Wired

It reminds me of a scene from Spy Kids, which I saw with my son this weekend. The big sister is outfitting her little brother with his spy gear as they gear up to save their captured secret agent parents. She slips onto his face a set of sunglasses with a computer display on their inner surface superimposed on the visual field. He immediately says “Yecchh!” and she asks him what he sees. “You!” he replies (I guess you had to be there…)

Have You Hugged the Internet Today?. Today has been ‘Back the Net Day’, “a
one-man campaign to revive e-business by
encouraging people to buy online. Or send
online cards, or buy worthless tech stocks
… whatever, just log on now! The Internet
needs you!” Empathize with your local ex-dot.com-billionaire. The Standard

Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): Stepmother Forces Boy to Stitch Up Mouth

W’s Brave Old World: ‘New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd – who made endless fun
of Al Gore for his earth-tone sweaters, his Palm Pilot and his
connection to the book Love Story – isn’t one for making apologies.
But she’s come close to admitting that her election-year ridicule of
Gore might have helped put a dimwitted reactionary in the White
House.

“Forgive me, Al Gore,” Dowd wrote in a column on Bush’s drive to turn back the
clock on the environment and foreign policy. “I’m going hungry for a shred of
modernity.” With her second thoughts about making a mockery of Al Gore and his itnerest in the future, Dowd might not be alone.’ The Consortium

The Macedonian extremists may be dangerous, but they’re not crazy; peace is not the only option. by Paul Glastris, a senior fellow at the Western Policy
Center, who served as a speechwriter for President Clinton
and covered the war in Bosnia for U.S. News & World
Report. Slate

‘Yeti’s hair’ defies DNA analysis. “British scientists on the trail of the Yeti have found some of
the best evidence yet for the existence of the mythical
Himalayan creature — a sample of hair that has proved
impossible to identify.

Genetic tests on the hair, which was gathered from a tree in
Bhutan, have failed to match its DNA to that of another animal.
The findings, which have surprised sceptical researchers, raise
the strong possibility that the sample belongs to an as yet
undiscovered species.” The Times of London

After a comprehensive look at “Jesus through the ages” to illustrate how the Church has repeatedly reinvented him to maintain popular appeal, Fade to Black does its part “in helping the Church create the updated image of Jesus for the new Millennium”, with its Jesus 2000 Contest.