Closing The Harry Potter Divide. “Yes, our fourth graders do not score well on basic reading tests. Recent news stories tell of schools buying laptop computers
(approximate cost, $1500 each) for students to take home. We have a better
idea. For a cost of only $6 per student (approximately what you might pay for a
danish and double latte, or your fuel costs to drive your SUV 50 to 60 miles), every
fourth grader in America can be equipped with a paperback copy of the first Harry
Potter novel, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” This will help close the great
Harry Potter divide in America, where more than 60% of fourth grade students have
limited or no access to Harry Potter, a proven reading motivation program that
works particularly well with the difficult audience of young boys.”

The Top 12 Most Luddite Films of All Time, from The Luddite Reader; actually there are fifteen, because of some ties and the inclusion of a very welcome runner-up, Alain Tanner’s 1976 gem To Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. But they forgot Bill Forsyth’s 1983 Local Hero. [By the way, why is The Luddite Reader online?]

Warez, Abandonware, and the Software Industry. ‘What does it mean to own software? When I buy a game, what
can and can’t I do with it? Does illegal copying of software really
hurt anyone? If a company no longer sells a game, should I be able
to download a copy of it?… The battles over software include many combatants. The software
companies are trying to stop the illegal copying of their products.
The abandonware users skirt along the border of legality,
sometimes obtaining permission for their actions, oftentimes not; in the meantime, they try
to distance themselves from the warez crowd as much as possible. The warez users are the
anarchists of the bunch, in effect saying, “Sure, what we’re doing is illegal. So?” ‘ About.com

Hunting the secret cyber-stash. The advent in May 2000 of non-degraded GPS services for civilians has led to the new activity of geocaching. ‘Someone
hides a “stash” — usually a large Tupperware container
filled with assorted goodies — in an interesting,
out-of-the-way place, and records the exact coordinates with
a GPS device. Those coordinates, along with a few helpful
hints, are posted to the geocaching Web site. The stash
seekers then use their GPS systems to find the treasure.
Each person who locates the stash adds an entry to the
included log book, takes one of those goodies, replaces it
with one of their own, and then re-hides the container…

The log book… includes about 20
entries from visitors (some of whom stumbled across the
stash unintentionally). “Humans are strange and wonderful”
says one hiker, who also uses the space to shill his band, the
Radiant Radishes. “You should be looking for natural food
to eat from indigenous plants,” writes another. “Survival
will not depend on your G.P.S.” And my favorite: “In our
unemployed state we went hiking on the coastal trail, and
found this treasure. We have left behind the keys to our
failed dot-com. Hopefully they will help someone. Cheers.” ‘ Salon

Guinea Pig Zero: a journal for human research subjects “… is an occupational jobzine for people who are used as medical or
pharmaceutical research subjects. Its various sections are devoted to bioethics, historical
facts, current news and research, evaluations of particular research facilities by volunteers,
true stories of guinea pig adventure, reviews, poetry and fiction relating to the
disposability of plebeian life.”

Cremation Nation: As the popularity of cremation grows, more and more elaborate — and bizarre — options for scattering or retaining the ashes appear. “It’s a good thing so many
Americans are choosing
cremation for their dearly
departed. The new options for
memorializing ‘cremains’ would
make some of them turn in their
graves.” Silicon Valley Metro

Cremation Nation: As the popularity of cremation grows, more and more elaborate — and bizarre — options for scattering or retaining the ashes appear. “It’s a good thing so many
Americans are choosing
cremation for their dearly
departed. The new options for
memorializing ‘cremains’ would
make some of them turn in their
graves.” Silicon Valley Metro

Cremation Nation: As the popularity of cremation grows, more and more elaborate — and bizarre — options for scattering or retaining the ashes appear. “It’s a good thing so many
Americans are choosing
cremation for their dearly
departed. The new options for
memorializing ‘cremains’ would
make some of them turn in their
graves.” Silicon Valley Metro

Aaronland | weblog | theory and practice, “a very casual and unscientific project to keep a record of the various writings on and about
weblogs.”

Google Tales: Searching for directory sites: Google – Yahoo! questions “We began to notice in early March that Yahoo! pages seemed to be rising in Google search rankings. This was
several months before Google’s alliance with Yahoo! was announced on June 26, so we had no reason to think that
there was any connection. But Yahoo!’s rankings kept rising in the succeeding months, and the announcement of
the Google-Yahoo! alliance naturally raised questions about the connection.”

A Broken Electoral System: compendium of five articles — by Ariana Huffington, Cedric Muhammad, Harold Meyerson, Steven Hill and Clark Williams-Derry — highlighting the inadequacies of our system so clearly spelled out by this remarkable election. AlterNet

BadAds.org: Slam Bad Ads! [Are there any other kind?]

The Way to Ex-Gay: A growing “ex-gay” movement, largely fundamentalist-Christian-based, is appealing to numbers of men trying not to be gay. There’s also mounting evidence of the damage done to them if they “succeed.” AlterNet

Cremation Nation: As the popularity of cremation grows, more and more elaborate — and bizarre — options for scattering or retaining the ashes appear. “It’s a good thing so many
Americans are choosing
cremation for their dearly
departed. The new options for
memorializing ‘cremains’ would
make some of them turn in their
graves.” Silicon Valley Metro

The Last Green Mile “…When we wake up 20 years from now and find that
the Atlantic Ocean is just outside Washington, D.C., because
the polar icecaps are melting, we may look back at this
pivotal election. We may wonder whether it wasn’t the last
moment when a U.S. policy to deal with global warming
might have made a difference, and we may ask why the
party most concerned about that, the Greens, helped to
elect Mr. Bush by casting 97,000 Nader votes in Florida…

Throughout the campaign, the egomaniacal Mr. Nader — who
makes Ross Perot look selfless by comparison — justified
taking away votes from Mr. Gore by arguing that there really
wasn’t much difference between him and Mr. Bush. And, like
a good Leninist, Mr. Nader also didn’t seem to mind
destroying the Democratic Party to save it. Well, maybe
there didn’t appear to be much difference between the two
men — but there was a huge difference between the
hundreds of key people Al Gore and George Bush would
appoint to staff their administrations. And those hundreds of
people will make thousands of decisions that one day will
add up to a very big difference.” New York Times

Christopher Hitchens: Yes, We’re the Great Pretenders. “I’ve been tempted to exercise this right every time I hear some fool on TV say that the current fiasco proves what a wonderful system we have.
Please. Por favor. Je vous en prie. It proves nothing of the kind. What it does is expose the huge bias against democracy that is built into the
system. Those million uncounted votes in California would have elected two senators if they were cast in Montana or Delaware, thus enabling any
two tiny rural white states to outvote Illinois or New York, and would have elected no senators at all if they were cast in Washington, DC, which is
legally disfranchised. And even if the whole pile of absentee votes had gone to Bush in California, they would still have been “represented” by
exclusively Gore electors in the Electoral College. (Which is why the Republicans do not protest the injustice, since the Electoral College has
become their last best hope.) Other democratic countries do not watch in respectful awe as America avoids “blood in the streets” in a contest
between two bloodless candidates. Other democratic countries say, Wow, whatever system we may have, it’s not as flagrantly fouled up as the
Yankee one. If this were a seriously pluralistic system, a Gore-Nader coalition government would now be in the cards; a ridiculous notion I grant
you, but by no means as ridiculous as two hereditary princes simultaneously trying on the crown while going back to their corporate fundraisers to
hire fresh teams of attorneys. Meanwhile, one Pretender hasn’t even quit as governor of Texas and one Vice Pretender hasn’t resigned as senator
from Connecticut. ” The Nation

F.D.A. Approves New Ointment for the Treatment of Eczema. The topical version of a powerful immunosuppressant (used to suppress rejection in transplant recipients) proves useful in relieving treatment-resistent eczema, probably by suppressing the overactive immune response in the skin in eczema. Because the eczema returns after the ointment is stopped, there’ll probably be a temptation to use it continuously or open-endedly. It appears safe at one-year followup, but don’t get your hopes up. Based on my knowledge (although, of course, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing…), I’d predict that prolonged use might contribute to an increased long-range incidence of skin cancer in sun-traumatized skin. This is because the immune system plays a role in scavenging sun-damaged tissue that might otherwise turn cancerous. And eczema certainly occurs on sun-exposed skin. New York Times

See Spot Run, or Is That Spot’s Clone? “Now that human cloning is in the midst of
debate over the moral implications, the
genetic copying of pets is next on the list.” New York Times

In a nation that dreams it lives by the rule of law, those who stoop to conquer and their supporters are of course making claims on a daily basis of what the law mandates in the Florida vote count boondoggle. Two of the most recent examples — the claim that Florida law does not in fact give the Legislature the authority to mount a slate of electors if the results of the vote have not been certified by the deadline; and the argument that, in the Seminole County absentee ballot controversy, Florida law requires that all the absentee ballots be thrown out if some are found to be tainted. Of course, there’s that famous inconsistency about deadlines for recounts that started this whole thing off in the first place. In the face of the predictable partisan attempts to co-opt the law for one’s own ends, it’s inevitable for the courts to be involved sooner or later. But it appears that when the going gets tough for conservative politicans, the conservative jurists in the federal courts get going to explain why technical election-law provisions must take precedence when they help Bush win the White House, but should be set aside if they assist Gore’s case. consortiumnews

Yahoo’s collection of the news photos of the year. Surprisingly, it doesn’t include what was IMHO the single most spectacular picture of this or recent years — the elk silhouetted against the forest fire in the Bitterroot in Montana.

Humans did come out of Africa, says DNA. “Research
revealed in this week’s Nature lends
support to the idea that we appeared in
one location in sub-Saharan Africa and
spread from there, replacing
Neanderthals and other early humans as
we went.

Researchers led by Ulf Gyllensten of the
University of Uppsala in Sweden have found evidence that we are all
descended from a single ancestral group that lived in Africa about
170,000 years ago. And they suggest that modern humans spread across
the globe from Africa in an exodus that took place only around 50,000
years ago.

Gyllensten’s team didn’t scrutinize fossils to come up with these results —
instead the group examined DNA from living people around the world.”

Fooled again: The received wisdom is that human reasoning proceeds by formal rules. But Princeton psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird thinks that, while we can with much effort follow the rules of deduction, we usually don’t think that way, instead employing shortcuts — building “mental models” of the possibilities of a situation — that are much less energy-intensive. The problem is that that, if falsity enters into these models, logic fails us. Johnson-Laird feels this type of confusion may be responsible for some disastrous examples of human error, e.g. the Chernobyl meltdown and the downing of KAL fligot 007 after it strayed off course into Soviet airspace in 1983.

You might have experienced this logical breakdown while hiking
or driving with the aid of a map. If you are on course, then the
landscape you see corresponds to the features the map tells
you to expect. But if you find yourself off-course, working out
your location–and the way back to the right road–gets much
more difficult. You have to deal with false situations: if you
had been on the right track you would have seen a gate
leading into a wood, for example. But you didn’t, and
attempting to compare what you didn’t see with what you
should have seen leads you easily into confusion. Eventually,
you give up on the logical solution to your problem and head
onwards. When you do see something that relates to the map
working out your whereabouts becomes trivial. That’s because
it’s easier to deal with a true scenario than a false one.

The article contains some logic puzzles that may show you — they did me — how easy it is for reasoning to break down. New Scientist

The Simple Things in Life. “Humans like to believe that life is a very complex issue…. (but) perhaps we’re incredibly simple animals, destined to go round and
round according to a few simple rules…. Two separate studies
in the US have drawn the conclusion that planetary life cycles are in
fact much more simple than we ever imagined. In fact, for some
organisms, a straightforward game of paper-scissors-rock pretty well sums up their existence. Beyond 2000

Remembering Dec. 8, 1980. A number of notables recall their reaction to hearing of John Lennon’s murder. “It was 20 years ago today.”

Yearning for a Palm device but abit strapped? Palm Inc.’s online store seems about ready to start offering refurbished models. There’s nothing currently listed but it’s probably worth checking once in awhile.

More Than 400 People Castrated in Norway between 1934-69 in a crackdown against sexual crimes. However, those affected included psychiatric patients, epileptics and gays, said historian Per Haave after research in the Norwegian health archives. Sweden revealed in 1997 it had sterilized more than 60,000 people between 1935-75, many coercively, in a “campaign to improve racial purity.” Norway also carried out forced sterilizations. Reuters

Secrets of incorporating food into sex

Protesters Taunt Troops with Mirrors Sunlight has replaced stones as the weapon of choice for Lebanese flocking to
the border with Israel to taunt Israeli troops stationed there.

Lebanese venting their rage at the Jewish state are using mirrors to reflect sunlight straight into the troops’ eyes and into
the lenses of Israeli surveillance cameras. Reuters

X-treme Performance Art Moves From the Margin to the Mainstream The Village Voice [via Robot Wisdom]

Australian weds television set Twice-married, twice-divorced ‘Mitch Hallen promised to “love, honour and protect” his
true love at a ceremony witnessed by friends and
performed by a priest at his Australian home.

The 42-year-old, from Melbourne, wears a gold wedding
band as a testament to his love and has placed a
matching ring on top of the widescreen TV.’ Ananova

Postal Experiments: The zany folk at the Annals of Improbable Research set out to test the “delivery limits” of the U.S. Postal Service. “In short, how eccentric a behavior on the part of the
sender would still result in successful mail delivery?” You may not believe some of the things their investigators got the post office to deliver. [via the null device]

The title of Cintra Wilson’s book sounded interesting — A Massive
Swelling: Celebrity Re-examined as a
Grotesque, Crippling Disease and other
Cultural Revelations — but her attempt to get humbuggy in Salon just isn’t anywhere near as clever or amusing, IMHO:

And here’s a
variety of other holiday-type pranks to use as an antidote (or an
additive) for your Yuletide misanthropy:

Build a panhandling snowman: Make a sad, one-armed snowman
sitting on the sidewalk, wearing old, grimy clothes. Then put a
crudely written cardboard sign next to it that says, “I am a 56
year old Vietnam veterin [sic] with Hepotitis D Please help.”
Make sure you put out an old hat, and come by every half-hour
or so to collect the money for your very own Christmas smack
fund.

Hang an apartheid wreath: Burn a radial tire and put a metallic
bow on it, then hang it on your front door: “In Remembrance of
those brutally murdered under Apartheid.” Way to bum out the
neighbors and win points for PC sensitivity, too! Plus, the
carcinogenic aroma of burning rubber alloy should transplant
those of clove-studded roasts, pine needles and any other
chestnut-roasting jive smell in your own home and those of all of
your surrounding neighbors for several hours.

Here’s a real Xmas morning “stumper”: Instead of toys in the
stocking for the young ones around the house, fill each stocking
on the hearth with a prosthetic foot — a real ampu-teazer.

Find any church nativity set and surround it with “Police Line —
Do Not Cross” tape, then make it look like baby Jesus shot one
of the Three Wise Men with a handgun. Preferably the black
king. Then you can have Jesus with a talk balloon, saying, “I
thought the frankincense was a gun!” A two-headed baby Jesus
is also a fun changeling substitution.

Another fun one is to rip up cotton balls and throw ketchup on
them, in front of the fireplace. That way, when everyone comes
into the living room for Xmas morning, you can say, “Uh-oh.
White hair and blood. Looks like the dog got him. Poor Santa.”

The peevish porcupine beats the shrill rooster. Camille Paglia covers ground in her year-end wrap-up column. I love the pastiche that cultural critics can make in the name of their craft. She comments on various absurdities of the Florida vote boondoggle and the media’s coverage of it, praises Rush Limbaugh’s integrity and fluency (and credits him with ending the era of political correctness in America), and compiles a hot dog geography of the U.S. I’m glad she includes Simco’s on the Bridge in Mattapan, Mass. I was once lucky enough to work a block away from there and indulged frequently, although the people with whom I took my lunch break there were as much the attraction as Simco’s dogs. Salon

For Busy People, Staying Fit Is Possible. That probably includes you (it does me). If you don’t have enough time to do what you “should,” it still works to do less, especially if you can do it more frequently. Thanks to Rebecca Blood for pointing to this; she titled it “10 min. x 10.” Washington Post

Many Feel They Are ‘Not the Same Person’ They Were “How do you answer the following question:
Am I the same person I was 8 years ago?

New research shows that a large proportion of people believe that they are
not the same person that they were a few years ago. The more time that passed, the less likely this group was
to be connected to their `previous’ self. Reuters

The Third Culture “consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world
who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional
intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives,
redefining who and what we are.” John Brockman takes us further toward (or over?) the edge in convening this online book-length anthology of current deep thinking about the nature of things.

Cowboy Trent Set to Ride Roughshod. “As the law courts make ready the way for Bush Redux, the likes of Senator Lott are
emerging from those dark, cold places in which they were stored during the
governor’s campaign. It’s a wonder that the Gore team never did manage to point
out that the Clinton administration, for all its flaws, acted as a foil for the likes of the
cowboy-hat crowd, those faux populists who pose in denim and carry out the
businessman’s agenda of low labor costs and minimal government regulation. The
government shutdown in 1995 was but a metaphor for their fondest wishes, a world
without the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration,
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, etc. Why didn’t Al Gore make
this case, or make it better? Then again, why didn’t Al Gore do a lot of things, chief
among them: act like a human being?” New York Observer

Joe Conason: Behind Bush’s Smile Lurks a Florida Fanatic. Tom Feeney, the Speaker of the Florida House, who is attempting to ram through the Bush elector slate in Florida by legislative action, has been called the “David Duke of Florida politics,” and was dropped from Jeb Bush’s ticket as a political liability because he’s so reactionary. New York Observer

Truth Catches Up to Fiction Dept. (cont’d.): Doctors arrested in kidney-running ring. “Indian police have arrested nine people, including two
doctors, for illegally purchasing or transplanting kidneys.” The kidneys were reportedly bought from cash-strapped Indians for between $1000 and $4000. Ananova

An Amish man chose to spend three days in jail rather
than pay a fine for refusing to put an
orange “slow-moving vehicle” triangle
on his buggy because he said the sign
violates his religious beliefs.

Barbara Ehrenreich: The Civility Glut. ‘I call some corporate bureaucracy and, whether
out of loneliness or confusion, opt for “0,” — the chance to speak to an actual
human. “Kelly” or “Tracey” wants to know my account number, which I willingly
share.

“Great!” says Kelly.

Next she wants to know my zip code, and it turns out to be “Perfect!”

Or suppose I’m calling a publishing company and get an administrative
assistant with a pricey British accent. When I tell her my phone number, she
declares that it’s “brilliant!”

I should be flattered, of course, to be associated with such an admirable
collection of numbers.’ AlterNet

Politicians Who Love Global Warming (PAC money received in 2000 elections):

Environmental Working Group

The American Medical
Association approved a resolution Tuesday asking
the government to consider making the “morning-after” contraceptive available
over-the-counter.

Road rage: “What is it about getting into a car that turns a decent,
upright citizen into a raving maniac?” A recent study shows that about one-sixth of people who are not quick to anger in the rest of their lives lose it behind the wheel. One contributing factor may be deindividuation, the process preventing us from relating to the driver of another car as a person because you only get “partial status information” about them. Even trying a conciliatory gesture from inside your car stands a chance of being wildly misinterpreted by the driver you just cut off.

Culturally, anger may be sanctioned as a way of helping yourself feel better, but neurochemically there is a price — once you get angry, you tend to stay angry longer. (Some people may be particularly predisposed in this direction by low serotonin levels as well.) And the angry brain is, in a way that makes evolutionary sense, a less efficient information processor. Also see the Global Web Conference on Aggressive Driving. New Scientist

Move over Casanova. “When you’re single no one wants to know. Yet the minute
you get a partner, the others come running. Ever
wondered why?” New Scientist

Welcome to the Complete Review.This book review site, to one of whose reviews Robot Wisdom linked recently, really gets the point about being web-enabled.

The Politics of Terror. “The war in Chechnya is not over. More than a year after
the federal troops first intervened, bombs, mines and
bullets continue to kill civilians. Despite the illusion of
normalization upheld by the Russian authorities, and the
resignation of the international community, the violence
against civilians is ongoing, and has merely changed its
appearance. Data from Chechnya hospitals shows that
the undiscriminate use of force is still causing many
civilian casualties.” Médecins sans Frontières

Autopsy: Actor killed by L.A. police shot in back CNN

Texas executes 38th convict so far this year, the most in any state in one year. Two further executions are scheduled for Texas before Jan. 1, and seven have been put on the docket for 2001 already. Now, how many people are on federal death row awaiting Jan. 20th?

Abandoned Tugboat Drifts 20 Miles in Puget Sound.

Estrogen Deprivation Leads To Death Of Dopamine Cells In The Brain, a finding by Yale researchers that could have implications
for post-menopausal women. Science Daily

Emerging Disease News (cont’d.): Ebola doctor buried as Uganda despairs. “Uganda was plunged into mourning on Tuesday as the doctor who had led the country’s two-month battle against the deadly Ebola epidemic
was buried hours after he died from the virus.

Matthew Lukwiya, the medical superintendent at St Mary’s Hospital in Lacor, died on Tuesday morning despite round-the-clock efforts by doctors to save him.” Reuters

AltaVista discontinues free Internet access. “…AltaVista announced that it will terminate its free Internet
access service on December 10th…because 1stUp Corp., the
company that provided the service and infrastructure, is going out of
business.

AltaVista also stated that after a thorough investigation it was unable to
find another supplier to provide a free Internet access service. As a
result, the company has made special arrangements with MSN to offer
U.S.-based AltaVista members three free months of unlimited Internet
access, which will cost $21.95 per month thereafter. Geek.com

More on Houellebecq: “Whether by design or default, Houellebecq is an ideal
media-adapted writer for America: he is obnoxious, a
one-man circus of existential confusion, trafficking in sex,
anomie, death and crucially, contradiction – he is the very
embodiement of what he rages against. He even propositions
the Times’ writer visiting him in Dublin. She demurs, but how
– how French. (And how appropriate that his home is in the
most vulgar, over-hyped yuppie capital of Europe.)

…

The good news is that The Elementary Particles is, in one
sense, already old news. It was published two years ago in
France, and France has apparently moved on. Newswatch

Downer “To have a sane argument about drug policy, the media needs
to consider the Robert Downey, Jr.’s and Darryl Strawberry’s
of the world who repeatedly fail treatment, perhaps because
they simply aren’t ready to stop using. The treatment
providers have few answers for them other than keep
forcing them back into care, even when it clearly isn’t
helping.” Newswatch

Domestic Violence Deja Vu President Clinton: ‘ “In America today, domestic violence is the number one
health risk for women between the ages of 15 and 44 …
Every twelve seconds, another woman is beaten. That’s
nearly 900,000 victims a year.” A dreadful state of affairs, if
true. The trouble is that all three of these statements are
untrue.’ Newswatch

Courtship in the south of France 35,000 years ago “was nasty,
brutish and short. The boys would go out in groups of three and
track an unsuspecting girl across the rolling Provençal
landscape; then, when she was happily playing with a couple of
old flints they would pounce. Chat up lines were rudimentary
(Him: “Nargo!” Her: “Hama!” Him: “Yeda!”) but effective. After a
while, however, the hunter got captured by the game: intrigued
by her matted hair and eyebrows, the butchest caveman got
quite affectionate, and even parted with a juicy hunk of
marrowbone.” The Guardian

If you yawn, you’re a human dynamo. The purpose of the yawn examined. The Sunday Times of London

How ideas change. ‘If Sigmund Freud was the central
cultural figure in the first half of the
20th century (for having introduced the
concept of the ”unconscious” into everyday
life), then perhaps the dominant figure in
the second half was a retiring historian of
science named Thomas Kuhn.

Haven’t heard of him? That means you
probably didn’t go to college before, say,
1970. Don’t know his work? Of course you do. Kuhn introduced the word ”paradigm” into everyday language.’ Boston Globe

“… a triumph for global cooperation”: Ozone hole will heal, say scientists. “The hole in the Southern Hemisphere’s ozone layer will start
shrinking within a decade and should close completely in the next
50 years, according to an international panel.

Data unveiled at a conference in Argentina suggest that the global
effort to reduce the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)— the
main menace to the ozone layer — is succeeding, just three
months after Nasa revealed that the size of the ozone hole in the
Southern Hemisphere had grown to 11 million square miles and
had reached the tip of South America for the first time.” The good news is attriutable to global cooperation in reducing chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) use since a 1987 worldwide protocol was signed in Montreal. Global warming, however, will slow ozone recovery. The Times of London

“Extending hope where perhaps there should be none…” An idiot’s guide to writing? “To the cynical, reading writing about how to write may seem like chasing one’s own tail, but
to others these magazines have become the holders of Masonry secrets, month by month
decanting the distilled essence of the craft.” National Post

Clinton Creates Vast Hawaiian Coral-Reef Preserve President Clinton continues his trend of using executive order to protect large tracts of land in one fell swoop, this time creating a “Yellowstone of
the sea” protecting an expanse of Hawaii’s pristine
coral reefs larger than the states of Florida and Georgia.

“The order would establish the Northwest Hawaiian Islands Coral
Reef Ecosystem Reserve covering 131,000 square miles along a
1,200 mile-long island chain northwest of the main Hawaiian
islands. The reserve would encompass about 70 percent of U.S.
coral reefs.

The area is the only home to the endangered Hawaiian monk
seal. It provides habitat to other protected species including sea
turtles and birds, and to migratory species such as humpback
whales.” Reuters

Swallowing ships. Giant bubbles of methane gas from the sea floor may suddenly engulf and sink ships at sea. Investigation reveals this may have been the fate of a trawler that disappeared in the North Sea, recently found intact and shrouded in fishing netting on the sea floor. New Scientist

We knew that cell phones may be hazardous to your health, but this is ridiculous. New Scientist

The Decade of the Brain, which ends this year, marked an acceleration of neuroscience research. This radio show, from the NPR series The Infinite Mind,
” takes a look at some of the astounding progress we’ve made in that decade, highlighting the ten most
important breakthroughs. Guests include Dr. Guy McKhann, associate director for clinical research at the
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, associate professor of
neurobiology at the Duke University Medical Center; Dr. Jeffrey Kordower, director of research at the
Center for Brain Repair at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center; and Dr. Ronald McKay, chief of
the laboratory of molecular biology at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Narration and commentary by John Hockenberry. Includes a link to the real audio recording of the program.

Michelangelo may have deliberately depicted breast cancer. “Scholars have argued for years over the unusual misshapen
appearance of the left breast of Michelangelo’s marble statue Night.
The statue, in the Medici chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo,
Florence, shows an obvious large bulge in the breast next to the
swollen nipple, causing tethering and retraction of the skin on the
opposite side.

The left breast is quite different from the right and from the breasts on
Dawn, another figure in the Medici Chapel, or in the many other
depictions of women by Michaelangelo.

Experts have agreed that its unusual appearance is intentional and not
due to an error but art historians and plastic surgeons have argued
that it reflects the artist’s supposed lack of interest in, or unfamiliarity
with, the nude female figure.

Now, Dr James Stark, a cancer specialist at the Cancer Treatment
Centers of America in Portsmouth, Virginia, and Jonathan Nelson, an
art historian at New York University, claim that Michelangelo
deliberately set out to portray a woman with breast cancer. ” Independent

Refresh: the art of the screen saver. “22 artists have created digital projects that are both works of art and
functional screen savers. All of the screen savers can be downloaded freely
from this site and enjoyed as public art.” artmuseum.net

‘In cyberspace, music is now bigger than sex… Apparently,
“MP3” has
now overtaken “sex” as the
most frequently searched term online.’ The Times of London

Mixed Message. So that awful “Grinch” movie has become a hit. And, in so doing, the message of the original Dr. Seuss story is being profoundly subverted. “For weeks now, merchandising tie-ins to the film have contributed to that acquisitiveness, emphasizing
to the public that Christmas does, indeed, come from a store.” Hartford Courant

The World Question Center: “What is Today’s Most Important Unreported Story?”. Coverage of this spinoff from John Brockman’s Edge site in the San Jose Mercury said: “Don’t assume for a second that Ted Koppel, Charlie Rose and the editorial high command
at the New York Times have a handle on all the pressing issues of the day….when
Brockman asked 100 of the world’s top thinkers to come up with pressing matters
overlooked by the media, they generated a lengthy list of profound, esoteric and
outright entertaining responses.”

The Decade of the Brain, which ends this year, marked an acceleration of neuroscience research. This radio show, from the NPR series The Infinite Mind,
” takes a look at some of the astounding progress we’ve made in that decade, highlighting the ten most
important breakthroughs. Guests include Dr. Guy McKhann, associate director for clinical research at the
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, associate professor of
neurobiology at the Duke University Medical Center; Dr. Jeffrey Kordower, director of research at the
Center for Brain Repair at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center; and Dr. Ronald McKay, chief of
the laboratory of molecular biology at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Narration and commentary by John Hockenberry. Includes a link to the real audio recording of the program.

A Bush Family Slip-Up. “The official story is that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has stayed out of his
state’s electoral fray. But his father thinks otherwise.” Consortium News

Australian humpback whales adopt new love song . ‘Male humpbacks migrating along the east coast have stunned scientists by
abandoning their signature mating song and adopting a new tune from a
small group of visiting Indian Ocean whales.

“There has been a cultural takeover by the west coast whales,” marine
scientist Michael Noad told Reuters today.

“What is staggering is that all the males have switched to the new song
which was brought over by a few ambassadors from the west coast,” said
Noad, co-author of a report on the musical revolution in the latest
issue of scientific journal Nature
.’ Environmental News Network

Review: Beethoven’s Hair
by Russell Martin. “Sometimes the truth really is stranger than fiction. More conspiring.
And more filled with coincidence than would be credible in a work
constructed purely through imagination. Russell Martin’s striking
Beethoven’s Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific
Mystery Solved
is like that.”

Do Remarkable Female Mutants Walk Among Us? . “Most people are trichromats, with retinas having three kinds of color sensors, called cone photopigments — those for red, green, and blue. The 8 percent of men who are color-blind typically have the cone photopigment for blue but are either missing one of the other colors, or the men have them, in effect, for two cone photopigment, for a color between red and green.

The theoretical possibility of this secret sorority — genetics dictates
that tetrachromats would all be female — has intrigued scientists since
it was broached in 1948. Now two scientists, working separately, plan to
search systematically for tetrachromats to determine once and for all
whether they exist and whether they see more colors than the rest of us
do.

Besides the philosophical interest in learning something new about perception, the brain, and the evolution of our species, finding a tetrachromat would also offer a practical reward. It would prove that the human nervous system can adapt to new capabilities. Flexibility matters greatly in a number of scenarios envisaged for gene therapy. For example, if someone with four kinds of color photopigments cannot see more colors than others, it would imply that the human nervous system cannot easily take advantage of genetic interventions.

For years now, scientists have known that some fraction of women have four different cone photopigments in their retinas. The question still remains, however, whether any of these females have the neural circuitry that enables them to enjoy a different — surely richer — visual experience than the common run of humanity sees. “If we could identify these tetrachromats, it would speak directly to the ability of the brain to organize itself to take advantage of novel stimuli,” says Dr. Neitz. “It would make us a lot more optimistic about doing a gene therapy for color blindness.”

Red Herring

In much of
the world, democracy
is still a ‘low-tech, old-economy business: ballots are
marked by hand —
with crosses or
stamps or fingerprints — and then counted by hand,
with an assortment of officials supposed to
guarantee impartiality looking on.

If manual counting is “subjective,” as George W. Bush
suggested this week, then global democracy is
overwhelmingly a subjective thing. ‘ New York Times

Carl Hiaasen writes in the Miami Herald about Rioting by GOP tourists “imported and paid for by the Republican Party
and the Bush-Cheney campaign” during the presidential vote recount — “It’s a page right out of the old Richard Nixon
playbook, the type of stunt favored by G. Gordon Liddy and the other dirty
tricksters.

The difference is, Liddy was smarter about covering his tracks.”

Will Irian Jaya be the next East Timor? International Herald Tribune

Two Men Shoot First, Figure It Out Later. One of these 20-year-olds in rural Manitoba brought home a bullet-proof vest and asked his roommate to shoot him in the chest, first with a .22 and then — pleased with the results — a 12-gauge shotgun. Luckily, they decided on the insurance policy of stuffing a phone book inside the vest for the second shot, and the target suffered only bruising and cracked ribs. Might’ve been a candidate for the Darwin Awards otherwise…

Criticism on the Job is a Pain in the Posterior…

“This month, things should get interesting.” Adbusters: Jamming Harper’s. The irreverent and profound social gadflies at Adbusters have made a cause celebre out of buzzing around Lewis Lapham’s ears since 1995, when they first took him to task for accepting Philip Morris’ ad support on a monthly basis in Harper’s, “a progressive voice of record.” Lapham fired back one volley over their bow but has consistently refused to be drawn into further debate. Now they’ve bought ad space in Harper’s for their anti-Philip Morris ad asking Why Are You Buying Your Food from a Tobacco Company?” “Now, we’re eager to find out: Will Philip Morris tolerate this
intrusion onto their traditional turf? Will they threaten to pull
their ads? Will the cozy, decades-long relationship between Harper’s and Philip Morris suddenly turn sour?”

Charles Taylor Interviewed. “Depending on your philosophical perspective, Charles Taylor is either the philosopher of
the self par excellence or the thinker who writes about everything else but the self. His
comprehensive conception of identity incorporates philosophical, historical, political,
sociological, anthropological, psychological, religious and aesthetic elements, stepping
across the boundaries that standardly separate philosophy from other disciplines.” Taylor finds that modern Western secular society is a stark forbidding place for a self to be. The Philosophers’ Magazine on the Internet

Lie Test: Bush 57, Gore 23: A portable polygraph meant for consumer use, claiming around 80% accurate detection of lies, was used by Time magazine reporters during the three Presidential debates. The Handy Truster, based on voice analysis technology originally developed for the Israeli military, said that Bush told 57 lies and Gore 23 during the three debates. Its manufacturers ‘…recommend using the product only as
a “decision-support tool” and strongly suggest that people use their common sense in
analyzing the results.’ [But if common sense were at play in the Presidential election process, we wouldn’t need a decision-support toll in the first place, right?] Wired

No Running, No Jumping: Christina Hoff Sommers, in her recent The War Against Boys, describes the public education system’s intolerance of “youthful male exuberance” and finds “misguided feminism” behind it. Discipline and medication are two of the inappropriate responses to this thinly-veiled notion that there is something wrong with being a boy. The educational system may be failing our sons. Hoff Sommers’ concerns counterbalance the notion of a “girl crisis” that has been

seized upon by feminists and promoted by leading academic experts.
Sommers examines the work of some of the “experts” and finds that it
is girls who are outperforming boys academically. Under the guise of
helping girls, many schools have adopted policies that penalize boys,
often for simply being masculine. Sommers says that boys need help,
but not the sort they’ve been getting. They need help catching up with
girls academically, they do not need to be rescued from masculinity.

Here’re the results of a Google search on coverage and discussion of the issues she raises. Dr. Carol Gilligan, professor of gender studies at the Harvard School of Education, whose research findings are directly criticized by Sommers, leads off a hefty set of responses in the Atlantic‘s letters column.

More on The Physics of Gridlock by Stephen Budiansky. If we accept that the gas dynamics model of traffic flow that various physicists have worked out is as good a simulation as they claim it is, spontaneous “sludging” of flow may be unavoidable and irremediable barring Orwellian control of the volume, speed and spacing of vehicular traffic. Atlantic

Art, Science and Postmodern Society. Arthur Pontynen, an art historian at the University of Wisconsin: “The tragedy is that American culture is increasingly Postmodernist, whether we identify ourselves as pragmatists or as persons of faith, as
defenders of tradition or as progressives. To ask about the practical value of the fine arts is to trivialize them as thoroughly as the rabid academic
deconstructionists who argue that standards and canons are simply tools of oppression and that all art is ultimately political. Both sides seek to
subsume art to base political purposes.

The Right wants to use art to “remoralize” the society, and the Left wants to use it for social therapy, to encourage “oppressed” groups. Moreover,
the assumption that sensible people called moderates avoid the extremes of both Left and Right offers no relief. The mean resulting from two
incoherent starting points is not golden; it has all the translucence of mud. …Whereas the Right and Left
both wish to censor art, moderate opponents of censorship trivialize art, by claiming that movies, books, and the like cannot harm people. If they
can do no harm, however, how can they do any good? Thus, opponents of censorship ironically trivialize the arts through the very arguments by
which they hope to protect them.

Postmodernism is so rampant a cultural contagion that it destroys not only our cultural health but our ability even to perceive our decline…By arguing that all statements are
political and therefore equally meaningful (and meaningless), Postmodernism undermines our ability to draw distinctions and, of particular note here,
to make value judgments.” American Outlook

Neurotransplantation of fetal tissue into patients with Huntington’s Disease showed evidence of significant benefit, in two studies from the University of South Florida and McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. ‘ “Everybody said ten years ago that this was outlandish — you
can’t transplant cells into a toxic brain (because) those new cells
will die,” Dr. Ole Isacson…, who helped direct the (McLean) study,
said in a statement.’ While excitement in neurotransplantation to combat a range of degenerative nervous system diseases continues, ethical concerns about using fetal tissues will probably limit the applicability of this technique in our abortion-polarized society. Fortunately, recent studies have shown that stem cells derived from adult bone marrow may be able to do the same trick, differentiating into healthy neural tissue.

Research to Develop Anti-Cancer Vaccine is Promising. Argentinian scientists have succeeded in ridding mice of tumor cells by injecting them with immune cells from healthy mice who had previously been provoked into an immune response against specially-treated colon cancer cells. Interestingly, promoting the rejection of the tumors in the recipient, ill mice worked regardless of what type of tumor they had.

“For the moment, this is just an experiment on animals which has
provided biological proof of a very important concept — that one
could imagine a single type of vaccine against cancer, against
different sorts of tumors,” Osvaldo Podhajcer, who led the team of
eight Argentine researchers and one British scientist, said on
Thursday.

Human trials could start soon.

Far Right Watch: Skinheads Sentenced for Temple Bomb in Reno. The five, self-professed white supremacists ages 19-26, received prison terms of up to 15 years in a plea bargain. Not succeeding in breaking a window of the synagogue before they tossed their molotov cocktail, they had only succeeded in scorching the sidewalk outside. AP

It is Cantwell in disputed Senate race in Washington State, and the U.S. Senate is 50-50. Reuters

“It covers everything except the exceptions and the exceptions
cover everything.” Enforcement of a law making English the official language of Utah was blocked by the courts today.

Ecomafia Dumping on Italy. Organized crime’s interest in trafficking in nuclear and radioactive materials is gaining rapidly on its involvement in the illegal arms and drug trade. An Italian environmental agency warns that Italy is sitting on a “radioactive waste bomb”; around 5,000 tons of radioactive metal waste originating in Eastern Europe finds its way into the country annually, most of it passed off as innocuous scrap metal. In 1998, the accidental smelting of radioactive metal scrap by a Spanish foundry spread a plume of cesium-137 across five European countries.
Wired

The Oddness of Oz: “The year 2000 is the centenary of a famous and much-loved but essentially very odd
children’s classic: L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Those who recall the story only from
childhood reading, or from the MGM film, have perhaps never realized how strange the
original book and its sequels are. New York Review of Books

A New Star in the Sky: “Something in the heavens is growing brighter and it will
soon become one of the more eye-catching stars in the
night sky. No, it’s not a supernova. It’s the International
Space Station.”

Code breakers believe Poe puzzle solved after 150 years. The second of two coded messages left by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841 in a magazine where he was an editor, which he challenged his readers to decipher, has finally been decoded. The deciphered message is such a saccharin, trite passage that doubts are raised if it was even penned by Poe.

If you’ve ever thought that the man in your life was only half-listening, a new study shows your hunch correct.

Leaked Report Says Chernobyl Replacements a Hazard: Soviet-designed nuclear power reactors
at Khmelnytsky and Rivne, which are already 80 percent
complete and sit on seismic fault zones, are “highly hazardous” according to a Vienna University report for the Austrian government. Greenpeace leaked the report to the media in the week preceding the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s pending decision about funding the Ukraine’s completion of the new facilities. The Ukraine says it will not take the Chernobyl plant offline unless it gets this funding for replacement energy generating needs; Greenpeace maintains Chernobyl should be replaced by conventional, nonnuclear power generation sources.

Possible Vaccine To Fight Ebola succesfully protects laboratory monkeys, “raising doctors’ hopes of developing a means of inoculating people against the
terrifying disease.”

Search for Another Earth Quietly Underway. “After a five-year search that has turned up more than 40 giant, inhospitable planets around
other stars, the hunt is quietly underway to discover another place like home. And while no
scientist can say for sure that any such planet exists, optimism is high that another Earth will
be found within the decade, possibly much sooner.”

FBI Probed Groucho for Marxist Ties. For those of you old enough to remember, shades of the Firesign Theater.