Tricks and Treats (James Ridgeway): ‘After surviving Gore-inspired “flash attacks” over the weekend, Ralph Nader’s campaign is

now the target of a propaganda wave. One high-profile Gore partisan this morning was spreading a nasty

rumor about the Nader machine. According to the scuttlebutt, Nader operatives had leaked information

that the consumer advocate had been secretly offered $12 million—the amount his Green Party would get

in federal matching funds if he won 5 percent of the vote next Tuesday—to take a fall against Gore in key

states. The whisperer said Nader had refused the money.’ The Village Voice

Moon and his ballet stars. “When the Rev Moon’s son died in a car crash,

the controversial religious leader formed a

dance company for the young man’s fiancée.

With money no object, it has impressed critics

around the world.” The Telegraph

White Light UV Laser Could Replace Current Lighting: “The first ultraviolet (UV) solid-state microcavity laser has been

demonstrated in prototype by scientists at the Department of Energy’s

Sandia National Laboratories, working with colleagues at Brown University.

Among their benefits, UV VCSELS (vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers)

coated with phosphors can generate the white light most prized for indoor

lighting — illumination currently provided by gas-filled fluorescent tubes

widely used in offices, schools, factories, and by incandescent bulbs used

in most homes.

Such solid-state emitters will last five to ten times longer than fluorescent

tubes, be far hardier, and perhaps most noticeably, grouped several

hundred to a postage-sized chip, will have aesthetic value: instead of a

single clunky tube, the chips will be arranged in any configuration one might

wish on ceiling, wall, or furniture.”

Steven Pinker said, “I have never met a person who is not interested in language.” Language Miniatures is a regularly-updated set of “mini-essays about human language in its endless kaleidoscope of aspects, such as the social, the mental, the historical, the structural.”

Expo Seeks Greener Pastures Did you even know there was a World’s Fair going on in Hanover, Germany this summer? A far cry from the big deal these expo’s used to be back in the 20th century. Wired

Vote Swapper Swatted Down

“Your website specifically offers to broker the exchange of votes throughout the United States of America,”

said the (letter from the California secretary of state) to site owners Jim Cody and Ted Johnson. “This activity is a corruption of the

voting process in violation of Elections Code sections 18521 and 18522 as well as Penal Code section 182,

criminal conspiracy.” Wired

Dan Hartung, in a 10-26-00 post to his weblog Lake Effect, was one of several who only grudgingly accepted my distaste for Ira Glass (grin). I’ll concede — when I ranted about Glass, I did neglect to mention that I essentially agree with Dan’s point: if you separate out Glass’ presence, This American Life can be of interest because other people do tell interesting stories. Thanks, Dan, for throwing me this bone in finishing:

Eliot, however, may enjoy this 1998 sour-grapes story of Glass’s

rejected partner from their Chicago show The Wild Room

before he was offered the chance to take his schtick national.

I actually read that story and thought about linking to it when Jorn Barger pointed to it in Robot Wisdom on 4-29-00 (probably because he follows Lynda Barry, the second of Glass’ “rejected partners” featured in the story).

While I’m thinking about it, thanks, Jorn, for the wonderful page of Blake quotations, especially your selections from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. “If others had not been foolish, we should be so.”

Don’t Vote — It Only Encourages Them:

There was an anarchist slogan in the 1960s: If voting could change anything, it would be illegal.

Some 20 years ago, my union local held an election. I read the many campaign mailings. When I

received the ballot, I voted only for those candidates who had sent no literature and of whom I

knew nothing. Unlike the others, they hadn’t proven themselves idiots…

I find two honorable arguments for not voting: the philosophical and the immediate. The first is

nearly as old as the Republic and premised on the common law. As advanced by Josiah

Warren, Lysander Spooner, Voltairine de Cleyre and Benjamin Tucker, no person can ethically

occupy a position of power over another without that person’s consent. … In 1890, De Cleyre explained her moral opposition to political office and the process of voting

thus: “A body of voters cannot give into your charge any rights but their own. By no possible

jugglery of logic can they delegate the exercise of any function which they themselves do not

control. If any individual on earth has a right to delegate his powers to whomsoever he chooses,

then every other individual has an equal right; and if each has an equal right, then none can

choose an agent for another without the other’s consent. Therefore, if the power of government

resides in the whole people and out of that whole all but one elected you as their agent, you

would still have no authority whatever to act for that one.”

…If one does not reject the state, however, the immediate argument for not voting remains: the

men on the ballot. “If the Gods had meant us to vote,” Jim Hightower has written, “they would

have given us candidates.” New York Press

Happy Halloween from the Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Support for a Moratorium in Executions Gets Stronger New York Times

The Fake to the Left: Michael Kinsley’s finger-pointing starts now

It is striking that in this election both candidates pretended to be further left than they really are. In George W. Bush’s case, it’s sort of a double-bluff: a man with no real interest in policy or ideology pretending to be a committed conservative who then pretends to be a sort of neoliberal moderate government reformer. Trouble is, the first bluff is a life strategy while the second bluff is a political convenience. Only the second bluff is likely to be discarded after the election.

In Gore’s case, there is real, traditional left-wing populism in his bloodlines (his father). But it was never a note he struck much himself until his convention acceptance speech two months ago. Throughout his career, he was almost exactly the neoliberal moderate his opponent is now pretending to be. Gore has sold this stock just as Bush was buying. One of these two has made a terrible mistake.

It’s dispiriting that both candidates chose to fake who they are, though from a liberal perspective, it’s encouraging that both candidates chose to fake left (and did so before Ralph Nader became a serious threat). But in Gore’s case, it’s also puzzling. Bush, at least, was following the conventional strategy of appealing to his party’s base during the primaries and then reaching for the center during the general election. What did Gore think he was doing by making a sharp left turn the very night of his nomination?

It’s especially puzzling in a campaign where your strongest asset is record-breaking prosperity. Gore’s message was: “You’ve never had it so good, and I’m mad as hell about it.” Slate

More for Halloween: the Carfax Abbey Horror Films and Movies Database includes best-ever-horror-films lists from Entertainment Wekly, Mr. Showbiz and Hollywood.com. I’ve seen most of these; some of their choices are not that scary, some are just plain silly, and they give extremely short shrift to my real favorites, the classics of the ’30’s and ’40’s — when much eeriness was allusive and not explicit. And here’s what claims to be a compilation of links to the darkest and most gruesome sites on the web. “Hours and hours of fun for morbidity lovers.”

A rogues’ gallery of Vultures and Condors. Some only a mother could love, others oddly beautiful, many endangered.

A pathologist’s detailed description of The Routine Autopsy. “The procedure related in narrative form: a guide for screenwriters and novelists.”

Chicago News Experiment Is Calling It Quits. The high road was a dead end. New York Times

The first postmodern ironist. ‘We live in a passionless age, wrote the philosopher

Soren Kierkegaard. That is why he speaks to us

today, believes Julian Evans …There are good reasons why we…might listen

to him now, at a moment when relations between

leaders and led, corporations and consumers, press

and people have rarely looked so shaky.

Listen to this: “A revolutionary age is an age of

action; ours is the age of advertisement and

publicity. Nothing ever happens, but there is

immediate publicity everywhere. In the present age,

a rebellion is, of all things, the most unthinkable.

Such an expression of strength would seem ridiculous

to the calculating intelligence of our times.”

Or this: “In order that everything should be reduced

to the same level, it is first of all necessary to

procure a phantom, its spirit, a monstrous

abstraction, an all-embracing something which is

nothing, a mirage – and that phantom is the public.”

Both passages were written in 1847.’ New Statesman

In Rural China, a Steep Price of Poverty: Dying of AIDS. “Small

towns … scattered (throughout) central China are

experiencing an unreported, unrecognized AIDS epidemic. A

few covert studies suggest some of the towns have some of

the highest localized rates of H.I.V. infection in the world;

some say 20 percent.

The problem is that for many years large numbers of poor

farmers have illegally sold their blood to people known as

blood heads, whose unsterile collection methods have left

many infected with the virus that causes AIDS. The blood

donors get the virus not only because blood heads reuse

contaminated needles but also because donated blood is

often pooled and, after the desired elements are removed,

the remainder divided and returned to donors.” Hospitals don’t take these patients; their families turn them out; doctors trying to treat them are sometimes run out of town. While China acknowledges drug-related AIDS infections in its major cities, it denies the existence of this more pervasive and insidious epidemic and forbids media coverage of the issue. No government assistance for treatment or prevention efforts is forthcoming. Premarital blood testing still does not include HIV titers. Most patients found to be HIV-positive when tested during hospitalization are never told of the results. [Are the autocrats practicing genocide against the rural Chinese peasantry?] New York Times

New look at Martian meteorite breathes new life into ‘panspermia’ theory.

A new study in the journal Science of the infamous “Martian meteorite” raises

the possibility that life on Earth may have been “seeded” here from outer

space. Some scientists believe the meteorite, known as ALH-84001, contains

microfossils of Martian life. Now, researchers from the California Institute of

Technology are suggesting that any bacterial spores fossilized in the rock could

have theoretically survived the trip from Mars to Earth. This is because

magnetic characteristics of the rock indicate the meteorite’s inner temperature

never rose above 40 degrees Centigrade – even as it plunged through the

Earth’s atmosphere. Proponents of the panspermia theory say this supports the

idea that living organisms could have been spread throughout the universe on

vessels such as meteors.

Will it finally get some respect? “Scientists are close to deciphering the makeup of the Y

chromosome, that essential core of maleness that’s saddled

with a bad reputation, a weird past and an uncertain future.

It’s true, guys: Millions of years from now, your descendants

might not have a Y chromosome at all.” The Y chromosome is unique for how few genes it has and how specialized their function is: mostly all related to becoming male.

Would-Be U.S. Space Tourist Hopes Mir Has Time Left. Let’s say you knew that the Mir had outlived its projected lifetime three-fold already and that the Russians were debating scrapping it even despite the loss of face and the loss of $20-million-a-throw revenues from rich American cosmonaut-wannabe’s like yourself. Would you be hoping those that wanted it to stay in orbit and let you hitch a ride up to it won the debate?

Trick-or-treaters say “Hold the salt!”

Babies With Colic: “I need a little extra

help here folks, and I need it early on in infancy because I can’t quite pull it all together on

my own…”

Mapping the dark side of the web for fun and profit. Financial Times

This, from the Astronomy Picture of the Day archive, shows a variant of the Green Flash. Usually it is not the sun’s disc that turns green but, for an instant, the horizon at the point where the sun has just sunken. I saw a green flash for the first time this summer (been looking for years) during a sunset out over the Pacific.

‘Singing’ Queen Elizabeth at Center of Fishy Tale. ‘Britain’s Queen Elizabeth has been entertaining guests at her Balmoral estate

in Scotland with renditions of “Don’t Worry Be Happy” in a duet with a rubber singing fish, Britain’s

Sun tabloid said on Thursday.’ Excite via Looka!

Update on voteswapping, as I wrote about below. The Voteswap site exists. 2344 votes have been traded as of my visit to the site. “Our Goal: To maximize the percentage of the popular vote that Nader receives, yet allow Gore to win

the national election.”

Beautiful people ‘ruin’ lives. BBC

Beautiful people ‘ruin’ lives. BBC

Beautiful people ‘ruin’ lives. BBC

Much of the intellectual criticism of Bush during this campaign attempts to persuade readers that they should not vote for him because he is an intellectual lightweight. I’m afraid that misses the point. His appeal to a segment of the American public is precisely that he is not smart. Chuck Taggart at Looka! quotes from an essay on AlterNet by David Corn:

At one Bush rally, a senior-citizen W. enthusiast — no

names, please, she said — told me that it was obvious that Bush could

not match Gore in terms of gray matter. But that did not faze her.

“Smart people don’t have all the answers,” she said. “And if you’re not

so smart, maybe you won’t tell the rest of us what to do.” Perhaps

after the past seven years, many Americans actually are eager to have

a president they do not have to take seriously.

I think it’s more basic than that, and it certainly can’t be blamed on the Clinton legacy. This campaign has made it clear to me that a large segment of the American public are afraid of thought and complexity per se. As has been said, they’ll get the President they deserve.

U.S. Plan Would Sacrifice Baby Eagles to Hopi Ritual. “The Department of the

Interior has decided

that Hopi Indians should be

allowed to use golden eagle

hatchlings collected at a

national monument in

Arizona in an annual, ancient

rite in which the birds are

smothered…But critics say the legal reasoning used by the agency to

justify its position, detailed in a rule the agency plans to

propose next month, is so broad that it could open the way

to much wider hunting and trapping by Indians in parks from

Alaska to Florida.” New York Times

Beautiful people ‘ruin’ lives. BBC

How Nader and Gore can both win: What if frustrated Gore voters wasting their votes in states where Bush has a commanding lead “swap” votes with progressives in “swing states” where voting for Nader could lose the election for Gore? Slate

Today is the 793rd anniversary of the reputed birthday of Sufi mystic poet Jelaluddin Rumi.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

The Molecular Biology of Paradise

A mainstay of forensic science is on trial. Almost everyone accepts unquestioningly the power of fingerprint evidence in criminal investigation. Yet there appears to be no scientific justification to the assertion that each person’s fingerprints are unique. Moreover, fingerprint examiners rely on fragmentary, blurred, smeared and overlapped prints. They then proceed to

avoid statistics, rely on mere hunches,

and then …couch their conclusions in terms of absolute

certainty. The strongly held belief among FPEs that latent

fingerprints can be matched to one person alone, wrote David

Stoney in a 1997 legal practice manual, is “the product of

probabilistic intuitions widely shared among fingerprint examiners,

not of scientific research. There is no justification based on

conventional science, no theoretical model, statistics, or an

empirical validation process.”

The reliance on fingerprint evidence was nearly struck down in a recent court case, and there’s probably more to come. Lingua Franca

Gifted Children May Be Stressed Out. New research from this week’s meetings of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in New York suggests that teasing, social isolation, and other pressures take their toll on the gifted. The article appears to focus on the costs of subjecting children to “pull-out” programs as a means of providing educational enrichment. It appears to me to miss the most pervasive and insidious stress of being gifted, however. There is a great cost to “buying into” intellect or academic achievement as the sole basis of self-esteem, as most gifted children do in an “educational meritocracy” system. The effects on both identity formation and social relationships of such a stilted value system may take the better part of a lifetime to overcome, if ever.

This is from blogger.com: ‘…Odd, but true: there’s a nasty email virus circulating from the email

account ShysterAll@aol.com with a subject line “hahaha.. this is the funniest

blogger images in the world!!” There’s an attached file called blogger.exe, which

is actually the Backdoor.SubSeven virus. Don’t run this file under any

circumstances and make sure your antivirus program is up to date (though it

seems to only affect windows 98 users).’ [I don’t know about you, but I would never open any email message in whose subject line the subject and predicate don’t agree…]

Plasma magic:

“…Plasma is the height

of fashion in aerospace research.

The trouble with fashion is that it is based on the whims of

those who buy into it, and the amazing claims made for

plasmas have the insidious smell of Cold War hype about them.” New Scientist

Some details on the elaborate Microsoft hack. The Register

MIT’s Technology Review reflects on The Cell-Phone Scare and finds it irrational: “Eventually the anxiety-of-the-decade will fade, to be replaced in our minds and our newspapers by

a more up-to-date apprehension. It would be nice to think that eventually we’ll outgrow the cycle,

but I have to defer here to my late mother, who was a lay expert on anxiety. The time to really

worry, she used to say, is when things seem so good you have nothing to worry about.”

Is progression to complexity a necessary law of life itself? The Sunday Times of London

The NYT and the Washington Post Under the Microscope: A respected economist examining our fears about the coming bankruptcy of the Social Security system claims that ” the public is badly misinformed, because there is virtually no imaginable

economic scenario in which the program could not pay benefits.

The media, including the elite media, deserve much of the blame for the

public’s misperception.” Tompaine.com

Math Against Tyranny. A physicist has spent about two decades developing a formal theorem protecting the electoral college system against would-be reformers by “proving” that, “without this quirky

glitch in the system, our democracy might well have fallen apart long

ago into warring factions.” In other words, it protects us against real choice among true alternatives? [via Robot Wisdom]

“Europeans are terrified at

the prospect of a George W. Bush presidency and are

wondering if Americans have lost their good sense.

Canadians, too, are shaking in their boots. ” Thanks to a reader for pointing me to this commentary.

Several unsavory revelations about Gore’s presidential rivals hit last week and may give Gore a last-minute boost, according to this Online Journal commentary. The essayist hopes for more where this came from if the media start giving as much critical scrutiny to the other candidates as they have Gore. First, a new Rand Corp. study came out debunking the “Texas Eduational Miracle” phenomenon (based on an earlier Rand Corp. study) Dubya has been touting so highly in his campaign. Next, it is revealed that a company overseen until four months ago by Dick Cheney is under criminal investigation for fraudulent billing on federal contracts, i.e. bilking the government bigtime. And, with increasing attention to Nader’s role as a spoiler for Gore comes a proposal that he is actually more conservative than we give him credit for, according to an article by a senior fellow at the far-right National Center for Policy Analysis attempting to find a way to, as the saying goes, find a way to befriend the “enemy of my enemy.”

Looking Glass War. It turns out that the question of why a mirror “reverses left and right but not up and down” is a disturbing philosophical quandary that preoccupies serious thinkers. Read about it here and see what you think. My take on it is that the distinction comes from the fact that our eyes are on a horizontal and not a vertical axis with each other.

The editors of Lingua Franca are offering a new book, The Sham That Shook The Academy, about one of my favorite academic hoaxes of the decade. “In May 1996 New York University physicist Alan Sokal revealed that he had tricked the editors of the

fashionable academic journal Social Text into publishing a sham essay titled “Transgressing the Boundaries:

Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The essay was a parody of postmodernist

thought intended to demonstrate how little contemporary theorists and philosophers like Jacques Derrida

understand the science they invoke and, at times, criticize. The Sokal Hoax, as the event has come to be

called, instigated a scandal both inside and outside the academy that has had an enormous impact on

scholarship and is still debated today. Collected here for the first time are the most significant articles,

essays, letters, e-mail exchanges, and forums that have responded to and tried to make sense of the Sokal

Hoax. The original essay from Social Text is included, as are news stories from the United States and

abroad. Also featured are the views of a host of prominent intellectuals such as Michael Bérubé, Stanley

Fish, George F. Will, and Stanley Aronowitz, further responses from Alan Sokal and the editors of Social

Text, and informative panel discussions.” [You can find the (quite amusing) text of the original essay here.]

“After a ten-year fight, the “abortion pill” RU486 is finally available in the US. But the pill’s supporters fear theirs

may be a pyrrhic victory, because production of a second pill that has to be taken with RU486 is now under threat. Now that the US Food and

Drug Administration has approved mifepristone, attention has turned to misoprostol, a prostaglandin pill originally

developed to treat gastric ulcers.

Supporters of RU486 told New Scientist that they fear anti-abortion campaigners will target misoprostol supply

because, although it is officially produced to treat stomach ulcers, obstetricians use it to complete the abortion

process started by RU486.” New Scientist

New Orleans Patients Exposed to Rare Brain Disease. Sterilization of surgical instruments may not have prevented the transmission of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease [an incurable “slow virus” or prion disease related to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or “mad cow disease”), scrapie and kuru] from a neurosurgical patient later found to have had the disease to patients subsequently operated on with the same instruments. If the exposed patients are infected, it’ll be a horrific way to die.

And, after mad cow, rotten duck.

The Emperor’s New Brain – George W. and the stupidity issue. Michael Kinsley: “The rule seems to be that if a

candidate can recite half a dozen policy positions by rote and

name some foreign nations and leaders, one shouldn’t point

out that he sure seems a few whereases shy of an executive

order.” Slate

New wave of exorcisms seen; some people can be convinced they witnessed a demonic possession as a child. Elizabeth Loftus is a psychological researcher hellbent on proving that “false memories” can be created convincingly. I have a quandary; I agree, but I also know her work is used in the service of denying the reality of memories of early abuse and thus maintaining one of this century’s dirtiest domestic secrets. Now I don’t fault anyone for trying to show that histrionic memories of satanic ritual abuse were made, not recovered…

British ‘addicted to curry’. “…sitting

down to eat a chicken

korma increases our heart beat by an extra

three beats a minute, a tikka masala increases

it by four and a half, and a rogan josh by

seven.” They didn’t rate the vindaloo?? BBC

Best wishes restoring, Ftrain.com.

Jungle Fever – Did two U.S. scientists start a genocidal epidemic in the Amazon? UC Santa Barbara anthropologist John Tooby (arguably the founder of evolutionary psychology) has a go at the controversy over journalist Patrick Tierney’s forthcoming book Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon, to which I’ve devoted space in “Follow Me Here…” before. Tooby’s take on it, after being involved in the academic ethics investigation of Napoleon Chagnon, one of the supposed villains of the scandal: the book should have been published in the fiction category. Tooby wonders if Tierney was knowlingly perpetrating a hoax on the publishing world. Phrases like “pattern of falsification” and “comically self-aggrandizing” pepper this essay. The scandal, the raciest issue to rock the usually sober field of anthropology (which was my undergraduate concentration in college), seems to be getting dangerously close to the slippery slope of libel and litigation. The best may be yet to come…Slate

What Global Language? Contradiction: as English is supposedly consolidating its position as the world’s lingua franca, the U.S. is becoming more polyglot. The English language is becoming more complex while at the same time most speakers’ experience of the language is being dumbed-down. Despite the self-involved certainty of those who think web-centrically, “…the globalization of English does not mean that if we who speak only English just sit

back and wait, we’ll soon be able to exchange ideas with anyone who has anything to say.

We can’t count on having much more around the world than a very basic ability to

communicate. Outside certain professional fields, if English-speaking Americans hope to

exchange ideas with people in a nuanced way, we may be well advised to do as people

elsewhere are doing: become bilingual.” A fascinating thoughtful article exploring the futures market for the English language from a variety of vantage points.

Eventualities such as “political alliances that have yet to

be formed; the probable rise of regional trading

blocs, in such places as Asia; the Arab world, and

Latin America, in which the United States and other

primarily English-speaking countries will be little

involved; the possibility that world-changing

technological innovations will arise out of nations

where English is little spoken; a backlash against

American values and culture in the Middle East or

Asia” could transform the language picture. Demographically, English will probably lose its second-place standing (after Chinese) to the South Asian linguistic group (Hindi, Urdu, etc.), and will possibly fall behind Arabic and Spanish as well. China could in one fell swoop alter the English dominance pattern by withdrawing state support for efforts to teach English to its populace, for instance if political relations between China and the US deteriorate further.

And even with its spread would come an accentuation of communication difficulties among disparate English-speakers. Witness the need for subtitles for Americans to understand the recent Scottish films My Name is Joe and Trainspotting [both highly recommended, IMHO]. The Atlantic

San Francisco anti-SUV activist Robert Lind stalks “these gas-guzzling SUVs being used by people who don’t really need them” and slaps bumper stickers on them pointing their owners to his website, where they hear about the harm Lind claims their vehicles are doing to the environment and receive helpful hints aboout how to remove the bumper stickers. “If you ‘tag’ ANY of the three trucks I own, you will wake up in the hospital” is one response he receives on the site’s bulletin board. [via Spike Report]

Desert of Memory. “Paul Bowles, the American writer, composer, and expatriate, died eleven months ago in

Tangier, the northern Moroccan city where he had lived for more than half a century.

Bowles was controversial in Morocco, and his death was a major news event there; yet the

Moroccan response to Bowles has not made it into American accounts. Next to nothing has

been written here about the last decades of Bowles’s life, nor about his often tense

residence in Morocco, where he had as many enemies as friends. Even with various articles

and memorials planned to commemorate the first anniversary of Bowles’s death — a two-day

tribute is planned at New York City’s 92nd Street Y on October 29 and 30 — it’s safe to wager

that his fans will be fed the tired and typical version of Bowles’s life abroad.” This essay by a professor of literature at Northwestern looks at the complicated legacy both in Morocco and the West of the “expatriate’s expatriate.” Bowles’ own Moroccan stories and the Arabic tales he brought to Western readers were a predilection of mine long before the film of The Sheltering Sky revived interest in him in the last decade of his life. Feed

Jonathan Yardley used to be a bibliophile, he says. But it seems that, with the thrill of progress he finds inevitable, he won’t bemoan the passing of the bookstore. Publishing on demand will get stories and information to readers so much “easier, faster and cheaper” that the death knell tolls. Me, I think the reports of the death of conventional books and bookselling are greatly exaggerated (to coin a phrase). Washington Post

Stone Age ‘Atlantis’ Found in North Sea. More evidence of catastrophic primeval sea level changes. I previously blogged the work of the National Geographic expedition claiming to have found archaeological validation of the Great Deluge in the Mideast. National Geographic

Being there. Tele-immersion could profoundly alter long-distance communication, allowing a new kind of intermingled presence of people geographically separated. Despite Jaron Lanier’s current skepticism about cybertechnological advances, a recent experiment was the culmination of a three-year National Tele-Immersion Initiative project he directed. It seems a natural next extension of his pioneering work in VR. Plans include building in haptics — touch simulation — to allow a fuller simulation of tele-presence at a distance. Consider, first, the demand for bandwidth expansion this would stimulate if realized. And some of the novel uses to which it might be put.

The fast-food

chain McDonalds showed interest at one early workshop… McDonalds envisioned fitting tele-immersion booths in

its restaurants so people away from home could have dinner

with their family. “The technology for that is not that far off”… The gaming industry is another potential user.

Players could tele-immerse themselves in a virtual reality

environment, chasing monsters or firing phasers at each other.

[And then there’s another, even more obvious, use about which many will likely soon be, if not already, salivating…] New Scientist

US concern over new Palestinian ‘alliance’. Seeming new coordination of plans between Yasser Arafat loyalists and more radical Palestinian groups to direct the uprising in the West Bank and Gaza has reportedly involved the release by Palestinian civil authorities of dozens of jailed Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants. BBC [Change of heart, failure of will, or loss of control by Arafat vis a vis his peacemaking role?]

Court orders Texas death-row inmate resentenced. Til now, I hadn’t heard of much, if any, effective judicial review of the seemingly rampant abuses associated with Texas capital sentencing. Nando Times

Now Jupiter’s got a great white spot Three giant storms on Jupiter have merged to form a massive

storm half the size of the planet’s famous Great Red Spot.

Observations of the new “great white spot” could reveal if this

was how the Red Spot formed… New Scientist

Fast-Forward Election: the way the debates were meant to be watched.

That

little FF button liberated me. No longer am I

enslaved by the spin doctors and news

analysts. No longer do I have to listen to the

what Bush and Gore actually say. In

fast-forward, it’s the more basic stuff of life.

You know, the nervous twitches, subliminal

thoughts and repetitious grimaces.

Sped up, Gore, with his quick and jutting

movements, is a cross between Max

Headroom and the Tin Man. He’s a twitchy

Vulcan struggling with “technical difficulties.”

Bush’s perpetually droopy grin shows a

conniving boy caught with his hand in the

cookie jar. He’s a used car salesman, asking

us: “Hey folks, what do I have to do to get

you to vote for me today?”

In double time, their running mates are also

transparently clear. Joseph Lieberman,

whose mouth moves but little else, is a

sappy ventriloquist’s dummy. Dick Cheney,

folded hands and sideways glances, is a

plotting old woman. Getting It

U.S. learns of terrorist plans; analyst quits over Cole warning. “During a hearing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, senators said that a Pentagon intelligence expert on terrorism in the Persian Gulf warned of

possible terrorist attacks on U.S. forces there before the bombing of the USS Cole, but that higher-ups failed to pass the information to military

commanders.

The intelligence official, whose name was not disclosed, resigned in protest the day after the Cole attack.” Nando Times

Poor sportsmanship via viral transmission?

Ford shows off newest bells, whistles for safety, “(including) a tiny video camera in the rearview mirror linked to a cell phone and a crash sensor. If the car is in a wreck, its computer

sends out an alert routed to the nearest emergency dispatcher.

That dispatcher would get data from the car regarding the position the vehicle came to rest in, the severity of the crash, the number of people in

the car, the number wearing seat belts and even a rough estimate of injuries. The camera would transmit two photos of the interior – one taken

just before the crash and one taken just after – so doctors would know what kind of injuries were suffered.” Some privacy advocates have expressed concerns about a camera taking pictures of you every few minutes… AP

Protesters storm Justice Department entrance:

“More than 100

protesters stormed the entrance of the U.S.

Justice Department building Wednesday

afternoon to demand the prosecution of a

police officer who killed a college student.” CNN

“All of these people are here for poetry? If you locked me in a room full of poets, I’d be looking for any way to get out.” CSM

Silly New-Age Pseudo Science Gets a Sound Thrashing. A review of “veteran

science writer and playful gadfly” Martin Gardner’s Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? ‘Most of the essays…are “attacks on far-out cases of

pseudoscience.” Gardner’s targets are generally not the religious notions or

superstitions of people swept along by their ancient cultures but phony science

promulgated by, and believed in, by people who should know better. Thus he does

not attack the pious millions who, in Brazil, are devoted to the cult of the Virgin

Mary that they celebrate in Belen on the Amazon every October. Rather, he

skewers such “preposterous” claims that “positions of stars correlate with character

and future events.” ‘ LA Times

Prostitution and the sex discrepancy in reported number of sexual partners: “One of the most reliable and perplexing findings from surveys of sexual behavior is that men report substantially more sexual partners

than women do….We find that prostitute women are underrepresented in the national surveys. Once their

undersampling and very high numbers of sexual partners are factored in, the discrepancy disappears. Prostitution’s role in the discrepancy

is not readily apparent because men are reluctant to acknowledge that their reported partners include prostitutes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [Is this restating the obvious?]

Children With Mental Problems Not Getting the Care They Need. Federal health officials, mental health experts and mental health advocacy groups agree. The problem is multifactorial, involving families’ lack of resources or adequate insurance, shortages of qualified professionals, and the complexities and fragmentation of the care delivery system. Last month’s conference on the issue convened by US Surgeon General David Satcher is expected to result in a national action plan by the end of this year. Journal of the American Medical Association

My infatuation with Phil Agre‘s work only begins with the Red Rock Eaters’ mailing list, to items from which I often link. If you read my blog, you may find something of use or of interest on this list of his recent or forthcoming work (the annotations are his, not mine):

Life after cyberspace, EASST Review 18(2),

1999, pages 3-5.

Yesterday’s tomorrow, Times Literary Supplement,

3 July 1998, pages 3-4.

The Internet and

public discourse, First Monday 3(3), 1998.

Advice for undergraduates considering graduate

school A brief how-to, perhaps ten pages, for undergraduates who

think they might want to go to graduate school. I originally wrote it for

students in my own department, but over time I have extended it in response

to comments from people in other fields. It emphasizes the value of getting

involved in research and is especially intended for sophomores and juniors.

Designing effective action alerts for the

Internet This is a guide to designing political action alerts. It

also suggests what kinds of badly designed action alerts you should refrain

from forwarding to others.

Find your voice Writing for a webzine: how to

build a public voice on the Internet that communicates your values in a way

that people can understand.

Hosting a speaker A guide for graduate

students concerning the practicalities of playing host to a visiting

speaker, for example in a weekly seminar series.

How to help someone use a computer

A short set of practical guidelines on helping people use computers without

oppressing them. I learned most of these ideas from teachers of young

children, but they apply equally well to anyone.

Information and institutional change

This is an annotated syllabus for an upper-division undergraduate class

that I taught at UCLA in the spring of 2000 on the role of information

and information technology in the process of institutional change.

The literature on institutions My

research takes an institutional perspective on the place of information

technology in people’s lives, and this article summarizes the literature

in sociology and and political science about the concept of an institution.

Networking on the network A detailed

guide to professional networking both on and off the Internet. Although

written principally for advanced graduate students and others in academia,

the underlying principles apply widely.

Cyberspace as American culture, to appear in Science

as Culture.

Designing a wired life, paper prepared for the WebNet

2000 Conference.

Growing a democratic culture: John Commons on the

wiring of civil society, to appear in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins,

eds, Democracy and New Media, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.

Hazards of design: Ethnomethodology and the ritual

order of computing, submitted to Mind, Culture, and Activity.

Imagining the wired university, paper presented

at the Symposium on the Future of the University, University of Newcastle,

September 2000.

Portents of planning: A critical reading of the first

paragraph of Miller, Galanter, and Pribram’s Plans and the Structure of

Behavior, paper presented at the Conference on Narrative in the Human

Sciences University of Iowa, July 1990.

Writing and representation, to appear in Michael Mateas

and Phoebe Sengers, eds, Narrative Intelligence, Amsterdam: John

Benjamins, 2001.

I guess I expected that a number of you would react with surprise (or alarm??) to my Ira Glass blink below. To each her own, of course…

Evidence of ‘life after death’. Several people have blogged this link but, oh man, is it wishful thinking to think that this study is anything of the kind! At least there’s nothing to suggest differently in this BBC coverage; I’d love to read the research paper to see if it’s more convincing. I’ll post a blink to it if I can find it. In the meanwhile, here’s a piece by the lead researcher, Sam Parnia, on near-death experiences.

Air travelers face blood-clot dangers. “Economy-class syndrome” is a new focus of concern after an otherwise-healthy 28 year-old British air traveller collapsed and died from pulmonary complications of a deep venous thrombosis (DVT) after a flight back from Sydney.

People at risk include older fliers, those who are

overweight and pregnant women.

To lower risk, doctors suggest an aspirin before

flying to thin the blood, lots of water while in flight to

stay hydrated and exercise.

“Get out of the seat periodically, maybe every half

hour, and walk around…(W)hile in the seat, massage

the feet upward, massage the calves, and massage the

lower thighs.” MSNBC

Emerging disease news: Ebola may shut off immune defenses. Researchers report the identification of a protein that Ebola uses to antagonize the body’s secretion of interferon, necessary in orchestrating the immune response against the invading virus. MSNBC

Ira Glass is coming to San Diego to give a lecture, so here’s this puff piece in a local paper about how he’s the hippest thing on National Public Radio. According to him. Trying to be ironic about it doesn’t make a hipper-than-thou attitude any less execrable. It would only be a slight exaggeration if I said I never move faster than when I reach to retune the radio when he comes on. And I wrote to my local NPR station to tell them I wasn’t going to contribute to them anymore as long as their fundraisers featured his smug, self-satisfied pitches with their vicious undertones of humiliation to less with-it listeners. The station manager tried to tell me I don’t have a sense of humor (which I found very funny).

Not happy with one definition? OneLook® Dictionaries lets you look up a word in hundreds of online dictionaries with several clicks. Over in the left column, I’ve added a lookup box that gets you there too.

Japan’s new ‘salaryman’ Kintaro: think Dilbert gone ballistic. Christian Science Monitor

Physicians’ Attitudes About Involvement in Lethal Injection for Capital Punishment

The majority of 482 physicians surveyed approved of most aspects of participation in executions disallowed by the American Medical Association, “indicating that they believed it is acceptable in

some circumstances for physicians to kill individuals against their

wishes. It is possible that the lack of stigmatization by colleagues

allows physicians to engage in such practices.” Archives of Internal Medicine

Chameleons suck. New Scientist

Today’s the day the swallows leave San Juan Capistrano. Until March 19th…

Nader supporters urge at least some to vote for Gore. A group calling itself “Nader’s Raiders for Gore” accuses Nader of going back on a pledge to campaign only in those states where a vote for him would not hurt Gore’s chances. ‘”It is now clear that you might well give the White House to

Bush. As a result, you would set back significantly the social

progress to which you have devoted your entire, astonishing

career,” the group wrote Friday in its open letter to the

consumer advocate.’ The appeal has been rejected by Nader’s press secretary. “Greens for Gore” has taken a similar stance. “If the last minute exit or public opinion polls in your state

show Gore or Bush clearly projected to win, then vote Nader. If

it is too close or undecided at that point, then vote for Al

Gore.” I’ve previously blinked Nader advisor Steve Cobble’s “Your Vote Doesn’t Matter,” suggesting that progressives vote for Nader in states where (and only where) one of the major candidates has locked in the electoral college votes already. Singer Ani Difranco, a Nader supporter, has written an open letter urging Oregonians to vote for Gore.

An article in The New Republic suggests that Nader may actually be seeking a Gore defeat by working so hard for swing state votes. The theory is that a Bush presidency would galvanize the progressive movement. [The last time I remember anyone reasoning like that was when people jokingly suggsted we might bring on the Revolution by electing George Wallace!]

These CNN maps show the status of the races for each state’s electoral votes. They will be updated regularly until Election Day, and can help you decide whether, and how, to waste your very own vote. Here are the current “tossup” states:

Chemtrails? I stumbled onto this site which suggests that, if you’re among those noticing more contrails these days, some of them may represent secret government experimental spraying campaigns over populated areas, which are making numbers of people feel ill.

These I feel are in fact the deployment and

experiments with military countermeasures against Bio-Warfare.

Another probably smaller percentage still are weather control

experiments. Both of these programs have been outlined in the

defense budget proposals and have been funded by DARPA as has

been established by our research and that of other independent

researchers. I feel what we are seeing here are the deployment of

both the Oily Water detergent based bio-warfare countermeasures,

and the antigen producing spores being developed by MaxGen under

DARPA contract.

It is these programs and their unforeseen or possibly considered

acceptable effects that are causing the wide spread suffering felt by a

certain percentage of the population.

Bye-bye, Barry McCaffrey. Ariana Huffington bids a fond farewell as another drug czar bites the dust. Only this one left a legacy of the U.S. boondoggle involvement in the Colombian “interdiction”, which may be stacking up to be our biggest and most ill-advised foreign misadventure since Indochina. Salon

New battleground: resistance moves into cyberspace. The Lebanese Daily Star reports on Hezbollah accusations of an Israeli denial of service attack on Hezbollah’s website after the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers on October 7th. Noting that a large number of these increased “hits” came from North American sites, the Hezbollah webmaster concluded, “It’s obvious that the Americans are conspiring with Israel to cripple our site.” (It’s obvious he doesn’t understand distributed denial of service attacks.) The article includes links to mirrors of the Hezbollah site in case it’s down. [via The Web Today]

Al Gore knows that some of you peek behind the scenes of his campaign. Read the HTML code of this page from his official campaign website and see a special message for you. [via Memepool]

Nader supporters urge at least some to vote for Gore. A group calling itself “Nader’s Raiders for Gore” accuses Nader of going back on a pledge to campaign only in those states where a vote for him would not hurt Gore’s chances. ‘”It is now clear that you might well give the White House to

Bush. As a result, you would set back significantly the social

progress to which you have devoted your entire, astonishing

career,” the group wrote Friday in its open letter to the

consumer advocate.’ The appeal has been rejected by Nader’s press secretary. “Greens for Gore” has taken a similar stance. “If the last minute exit or public opinion polls in your state

show Gore or Bush clearly projected to win, then vote Nader. If

it is too close or undecided at that point, then vote for Al

Gore.” I’ve previously blinked Nader advisor Steve Cobble’s “Your Vote Doesn’t Matter,” suggesting that progressives vote for Nader in states where (and only where) one of the major candidates has locked in the electoral college votes already. Singer Ani Difranco, a Nader supporter, has written an open letter urging Oregonians to vote for Gore.

An article in The New Republic suggests that Nader may actually be seeking a Gore defeat by working so hard for swing state votes. The theory is that a Bush presidency would galvanize the progressive movement. [The last time I remember anyone reasoning like that was when people jokingly suggsted we might bring on the Revolution by electing George Wallace!]

These CNN maps show the status of the races for each state’s electoral votes. They will be updated regularly until Election Day, and can help you decide whether, and how, to waste your very own vote. Here are the current “tossup” states:

John Horgan on his book, The End of Science: “(I) thought it might be useful for me to

present a succinct summary of my

end-of-science argument as well as a

rebuttal of 10 common

counter-arguments.” An interview by John Brockman.

“I believe that this map of reality that scientists

have constructed, and this narrative of

creation, from the big bang through the

present, is essentially true. It will thus be as

viable 100 or even 1,000 years from now as it is

today. I also believe that, given how far

science has already come, and given the limits

constraining further research, science will be

hard-pressed to make any truly profound

additions to the knowledge it has already

generated. Further research may yield no more

great revelations or revolutions but only

incremental returns.”

Horgan feels that scientists have turned from true science, in which investigation converges on the truth, to what he calls ironic science, ” a speculative, non-empirical mode that… resembles

literature or philosophy or theology in that it

offers points of view, opinions, which are, at

best, ‘interesting,’ which provoke further

comment” but are no longer empirically proveable. As examples, he cites superstring theory, the Gaia hypothesis, parallel universe theories in cosmology, and almost the whole of psychology and the social sciences. “Some observers say all these untestable,

far-fetched theories are signs of science’s

vitality and boundless possibilities. I see them

as signs of science’s desperation and terminal

illness.”

[Personally, I think Horgan’s faith in empiricism and “capital-T” truth is naive.The objection to his thesis he dismisses least convincingly is the charge that it is itself ironic science. The “end of science” is not upon us, because “science” as he envisions it never really existed in the first place. I often find this shortcoming in science writers who don’t do, or haven’t done, science themselves. Having invested so much in their career choice, their faith must be unassailable to avoid painful self-doubt.] The Edge

Loch Ness webcams, both surface and underwater (although when I went to the site, the surface camera wasn’t working). Park this in the corner of your screen and do some monster spotting.

Gendercide Watch, a fascinating resource confronting historical and contemporary gender-selective mass killings around the world, whether against

women (the Nanjing massacre, female infanticide) or men (slaughters in Rwanda and Colombia).

There is no new new thing. USA Today

Hacker Site Raises GM’s Hackles. After 2600‘s recent high-profile loss in the court case brought by the MPAA over its posting of links to DeCSS (which defeats the copy-protection scheme on DVD’s), it is again courting legal danger by registering unflattering domain names referring to large corporations. General Motors demands that the magazine turn over the rights to fuckGeneralMotors.com on trademark infringement grounds. 2600 defends its actions on free speech grounds. It has also registered FuckNBC.com and VerizonReallySucks.com. Interestingly, Verizon, which has recently been going after unauthorized uses of its name on the web, decided that the 2600-registered domain did not violate fair use principles. I’m not a lawyer but it’s hard to see how GM or anyone else could make a case that these infringe on their trademark rights, any more than, say, a book about a company that uses that company’s name in its title. Wired

The rule of opinion and the fate of ideas: “What are the prospects of science in a society that is steeped in a democratic

ethos, professes to admire science, and expects great things of scientists,

but which, notwithstanding a massive educational system, comprehends

science rather poorly?”

The news, as I see it, is bad. To put it plainly, despite

three centuries of co-evolution, despite frequent episodes of mutual

encouragement and support, the culture of modern democracy and that of

modern science are in many ways incongruent. Orthodox history of science

regards certain developments as the most sweeping and fateful of triumphs:

the Copernican Revolution that culminated in Newton’s synthesis, the

Darwinian revelation that humanity is an adventitious consequence of the

convolution of biology and history, the relentless explication of biological

process, including those of the human organism, in terms of chemistry and

physics.

The depressing, though often unspoken, truth is that these are regarded as

sovereign insights only within the relatively tiny community of the scientifically

well-educated. In the larger society, even Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and

Newton are more accepted than understood. It is hardly necessary to remark

that Darwin, as a historical figure and as the symbol of an idea, is widely

reviled. The ongoing revolution in genetics and molecular biology, while

doubtless deserving of intelligent ethical scrutiny, has often been received with

what amounts to superstitious terror.

Annals of the Age of Depravity: Woman Suspected of Flushing Infant Down Toilet Reuters

Ignore the undecided — “Voters who haven’t made

up their minds yet are a

little like the O.J. jury —

they’re clearly not paying

attention and shouldn’t be

trusted with an important

decision.” It’s inconceivable to me, and to this columnist, that those who remain undecided until the last minute are intelligently deliberating about differences between the candidates. Instead, the campaign is shaped by and the candidates held hostage to the least discerning of voters, drawing the candidates to migrate their position toward the middle rather than play to their differences. Salon

A Minor Political Screed ‘The following piece came to (a Slashdot poster) as a personal letter from

David Brin. David is a prominent scientist and author of best-selling novels like

The Postman, who has shared entertaining and provocative views with us in the past. His letter

struck us as so biting and timely that we asked permission to post it before the whole Slashdot

community, in order to provoke your rambunctious discussion. David graciously agreed, on

condition that you all remember, it was written first of all as a private person sharing his

“cranky political opinions” with a few friends. “It goes over the top in a few places,” he

warned. “First draft expressions of outrage tend to be that way.” So as friends, let’s not get too

vexed with him. Above all David is interesting, as usual….’

Will this be the winter sensation after you stow your Razor when the snow flies?