World’s Loneliest Bird may soon find relief.
Authorities in Michigan describe oddest case of racial harassment they’ve ever encountered.
Annals of the Age of (Online) Depravity: Man Accused of Ordering Woman to Molest Kids. “A local man is facing up to 20
years in prison for allegedly ordering a woman in Pennsylvania to
send him online pictures of her having sex with her 7-year-old
daughter and 10-year-old son, authorities said today… Searle told investigators that he might have directed his girlfriend to have sex with people
who have the same names as her children, but that he was not referring to her children, the
affidavit said.”
The world may be awe of the Sydney Olympics, but foreigners have
been left dumbfounded by our Vegemite culture, writes Paul Sheehan. Sydney Morning Herald
“The Second Coming will happen because we will make it happen…Our
intention is to clone Jesus, utilizing techniques pioneered at the Roslin Institute in
Scotland [birthplace of Dolly, the lovable sheep], by taking an incorrupt cell from
one of the many Holy Relics of Jesus’ blood and body that are preserved
throughout the world, extracting its DNA, and inserting it into an unfertilized
human egg…The fertilized egg, now the zygote of Jesus Christ, will be implanted
into the womb of a young virginal woman (who has volunteered of her own
accord), who will then bring the baby Jesus to term in a second Virgin Birth.”
Palm Virus Hits, But Don’t Worry. First real self-replicating and -propagating virus hits Palm OS. It apparently overwrites the beginning of Palm executables. It doesn’t appear to do anything particularly malicious except to reproduce itself. A technical description of the virus is available at the F-Scure virus description database and F-Secure says a fix is coming soon. ‘Til then, practice safe synch. Wired
Thousands Sign Up to Sell Votes. “Boasting of the more than 6,000 Americans who have signed up to auction off their
presidential votes to the highest bidder — illegal activity under the laws of every state in
the union — Voteauction is now detailing its plans to begin an outreach campaign.
Using its “Voter Empowerment Kits” and “Action Teams,” the company claims in a press
release that it can reach more potential customers and facilitate voter fraud without the
intervention of an online middleman.” The going rate to buy a vote appears to be around $20. Is it unscrupulous profiteering at its worst, or an anarchist goof on the system? Wired
Kraft recalls Taco Bell shells with biotech corn. “Philip Morris Cos.’ Kraft Foods unit said on Friday it is voluntarily recalling all Taco Bell Home Originals taco shells sold in U.S. grocery
stores nationwide because samples contained an unapproved variety of gene-modified corn.
Tests performed by an independent laboratory found, in certain samples, the presence of a variety of gene-modified corn that Kraft had not specified for the product and
which is not approved by U.S. regulators for use in food, Kraft said….
Kraft’s willingness to incur the expense of a recall despite no evidence the product is unsafe demonstrates U.S. companies are becoming increasingly sensitive to
consumers’ heightened awareness about food safety, said food industry consultant Willard Bishop. ” Reuters
Aryan Nations compound forfeited to satisfy $6.3m judgment against Richard Butler and his followers, about which I blinked below. They also lost the rights to continued use of the name “Aryan Nations”. AP
Environmental-Safety Tests Are ‘Falsified’. “The federal
authorities said today that
thousands of environmental safety
tests conducted at Superfund
locations, landfills and other hazardous
waste sites from 1994 to 1997 will
have to be repeated because the
company that performed the tests
falsified the results…Federal prosecutors announced today that 13 former
employees of the London-based company, Intertek Testing
Services, had been indicted by a federal grand jury in Dallas
and charged with up to 30 counts of fraud and lying to the
government. Prosecutors said that the test results were
falsified to save the company time and money….The test results mean that some sites thought to be safe
from carcinogens and other contaminants might hold harmful
materials, the federal authorities said, though they
emphasized that none of the sites so far retested had been
found to be a health hazard.” New York Times
States With No Death Penalty Share Lower Homicide Rates. “The
Times found that during the
last 20 years, the homicide
rate in states with the death
penalty has been 48 percent
to 101 percent higher than in
states without the death
penalty.” This pretty much deals a fatal blow to the argument that the death penalty is a deterrent; but you knew that already, didn’t you? New York Times
A Question on Music Piracy. “Will Napster’s novel claim that its users are protected by the
Audio Home Recording Act carry the day? Probably not, said
several lawyers and law professors who are experts in
Internet law and copyright infringement.” New York Times
As the publisher’s sampler
proclaims, “They aren’t just books — they’re `joints.’ ” Coming Soon: Paperbacks That Sound Like Hip-Hop. “The novels are geared directly and unashamedly to
black urban youths and are meant to be more than just reads.
They are the literary equivalent of hip-hop videos, using the
language and metaphor and rhythms of hip-hop, its sex and
violence, only in prose rather than lyrics and beats. Indeed,
each novel comes packaged with a Def Jam CD…” New York Times
West Nile Virus declared an epidemic in Israel. Probably spread by birds stopping over on their migration routes between Europe and Africa. 15% of tested Israeli population have antibodies against WNV, indicating a history of exposure. All wild birds tested in Israeli national parks carry the antibodies, according to health officials. NYPost
Sealed Evidence Against Clinton Called ‘Terrible
if True’. Scandal-sheet-style suggestions by a Washington Post reporter based on information from private investigators who worked on the Paula Jones case.
“In his book Baker says that the independent counsel’s office
investigated 21 women linked to Clinton… (Private) investigators hired by Jones’
legal team told NewsMax.com last year that one of the
allegations they were investigating at the close of the Jones
case involved the alleged rape of a 14-year-old girl by
then-Governor Clinton at a cocaine party…”
Why Not Sue Big Entertainment? “What Big Entertainment has done to
America’s children makes what Big Tobacco has done pale by
comparison.” Opinion piece by George Mason University professor of economics Walter Williams.
City-by-city Grid of Local Actions for the “S 26 International Day of Action”, 9/26/00, the latest planned outbreak of the anti-globalization “movement.”
I asked whether that “air rage” passenger who died after restrained by other passengers really represented a threat. People have written with what strike me as both thoughtful and kneejerk responses. The former mostly reflect on when they were perceived — or misperceived — as scary and threatening by others when they were distraught. The latter were mostly along the lines of projections of what the unfortunate young man could’ve done if not prevented — e.g., depressurize the cabin by his actions — or assumptions about what he had done — hurt other passengers. (“Shit yeah, he was dangerous!”) This all confirms my point. While, of course, neither those who wrote responses to me nor I know anything about what really happened up there, and we’re not likely to, he might still be alive (and everyone safe) if his fellow passengers had tempered reacting from their own fears with a grasp of the situation from his panic-stricken viewpoint and realized that, when someone scares us, it is often a reflection of how scared they themselves feel at the time. I just wanted to suggest that he, or someone in his position the next time, might not really need to be subdued quite so vehemently at such a time. My work with the psychiatrically ill has alot to do with sensitivity to the stigmatization and negative reactions they suffer from those around them.
Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): Baby Dies After Being Left In Car. The father says it was only when he went to pick up his 5-month old daughter at day care at the end of the day and was told she had never arrived that morning that he realized that he had forgotten to drop her off and had left her in the car all day, where she had died.
You are what you eat. “A mother’s diet in the first few days after conception could determine the health of her unborn child for life, say
British researchers. An embryo sets its growth rate according to its environment–a process known as programming. If a mother is
malnourished, for instance, the embryo grows more slowly, which leads to low birthweight. Babies that are born
small are more susceptible to diabetes, high blood pressure and strokes in later life.
Now a team led by Tom Fleming of the University of Southampton suggests that programming may take place in the
four or five days following fertilisation, before the embryo even implants in the womb.” New Scientist
Gulf War syndrome may lead to Parkinson’s; more immediately, evidence of neurological dysfunction in Gulf War veterans but not matched controls suggests the syndrome may have an organic, neurological cause rather than being merely a psychological reaction to traumatization, as has been previously claimed. The promising imaging technique, magnetic resonance spectrometry, contributes evidence.
New class of antibiotic may fight drug resistance. Or, more likely, select for bacteria resistant to them (as have all other classes of antibiotics…) Reuters
I loved this (courtesy of Random Walks). The Microsoft keyboard: 
(If you Mac users out there need an explanation of what’s funny here, write me…)
Amazon Dumps Yahoo at expiration of three-year partnership. Barnesandnoble rushes in to supplant Amazon as a Yahoo “premier merchant.” Wired
Trophy Photos Betray Israeli Police Abuse.
JERUSALEM, Sept. 18 – After they had finished pummeling their three Palestinian detainees, finished smashing them with their fists, elbows and boots, slamming their heads against a stone wall, forcing them to swallow their own blood and cursing their mothers and sisters, the young Israeli policemen did an unusual thing: Using a disposable camera, they took photographs of themselves with their victims, holding their heads by the hair like hunting trophies.
The three Palestinian detainees apparently did nothing to provoke this attack except to present their identity ards at a border checkpoint. The israeli border police apologize for the incident and underscore its rarity. Human rights workers beg to differ. But all in all, after an initial outcry there’s been remarkably little discussion or indignation in Israel about such brutalization. Washington Post
“Somehow the Bud Light ad in which a man is shot from a cannon into an elephant’s anus seems a model of tasteful cleverness by comparison”: NBC’s Summer Games Coverage “… is so packaged and overproduced as well as after-the-fact that by the time it reaches American TV screens it seems remote in the worst sense of the word. The hours and hours of features and profiles NBC has produced about participating athletes include footage from previous Olympic Games, and this blurs right into the new material, all of it becoming a seamless and wearying smear. Everything new looks old again.” Critic Tom Shales is one of my favorite curmudgeons, and I usually agree with him, as I do here. He’s got several other important complaints about the NBC coverage as well. Read on. My biggest objection is that, to judge from the NBC coverage I’ve watched, it would appear that only six or eight nations are competing. Weren’t the Olympics supposed to be about more than the superpowers? Washington Post
Free TiVo if you can write well. Geek.com
If there anyone who hasn’t yet seen this awe-inspiring photograph from the Montana wildfires, be there now. [via Robot Wisdom]
Another one of those Amazing Journey stories.
Jenny Diski in The Observer: “Now I understand what Kierkegaard was on about. The
leap of faith is not
towards God, but
love and housing.”
The Sunday Times of London reviews J.G. Ballard’s new one, Super Cannes.
The
Ballardian law of the universe runs
thus: every idealistic attempt by human
society to organise itself into
progressive or “higher” forms will,
inevitably, precipitate catastrophe.
Interesting catastrophe, of course.The high-rise block degenerates into a jungle; the motorway
system (as in Crash) becomes a 70mph, high-tech killing
ground; the leisure city of the future (as in Cocaine Nights)
decays into Sodom by the Med. Plan a housing estate such as
Paulsgrove in Portsmouth and you are writing a programme for
lynch law….
An engaging feature in Ballard’s fiction is his cavalier
indifference to the laws that hobble lesser writers (who else
would introduce Elizabeth Taylor into a novel in which the hero
is called J G Ballard?).
And the Guardian-Observer’s reviewer says: “…vintage Ballard, a gripping blend of
stylised thriller and fantastic imaginings rendered in deceptively
bland, unruffled prose. One of its virtues lies simply in its
compulsive readability; as the story unfolds, the reader is
engaged at the level of pure plot…”
Lingua Franca: Celebrating Ten Years. In honor of its tenth anniversary, the “Review of Academic Life” collects ten of its “all-time favorite articles, as well as special thematic archives — labor
and tenure, post Cold-War politics, gender and sexuality, theory
and its discontents, and academic computing.
More bad news for Amazon. “The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), one of Amazon’s first
affiliates from back in 1996, severed its affiliate relationship.
Junkbusters did the same. Both cited Amazon’s new privacy policy — which outlines when customer information
can be shared but basically admits to considering customer information
as a business asset — as the reason for their departure from the affiliates
program.” Geek.com
More bad news for Amazon. “The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), one of Amazon’s first
affiliates from back in 1996, severed its affiliate relationship.
Junkbusters did the same. Both cited Amazon’s new privacy policy — which outlines when customer information
can be shared but basically admits to considering customer information
as a business asset — as the reason for their departure from the affiliates
program.” Geek.com
More bad news for Amazon. “The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), one of Amazon’s first
affiliates from back in 1996, severed its affiliate relationship.
Junkbusters did the same. Both cited Amazon’s new privacy policy — which outlines when customer information
can be shared but basically admits to considering customer information
as a business asset — as the reason for their departure from the affiliates
program.” Geek.com
Just saw Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog. Has anyone ever run across a downloadable version of the Hagekure: the way of the samurai?
Nationalgeographic.com is getting dispatches from a group of archaeologists who report they’ve discovered evidence of the Biblical flood, when the rising Mediterranean broke through to what is now the Black Sea.
Jorg Heider and his Austrian Freedom party are not the only ultra-nationalist proto-fascist force in European politics. Support is growing in Belgium for Filip Dewinter and his far Right Vlaams Blok party, “Our People First” teeshirts and all. The Times of London
A Litmus Test for Romantics. If you can’t figure out if a relationship is right, give your partner — or potential partner — a book. Do they care enough to read it? What does their reaction indicate about whether their sensibilities are on track? But be careful — they might be vetting you based on what book it is you’ve chosen for your examination… New York Times
The Observer | Life | Barbara Ellen | On sex and violence: “A recent study revealed that for many
men getting disproportionally emotional
over sport is their way of dealing with real
difficulties in their lives. Tell women
something we don’t know. Most of us
know how it feels to be emotional
wallpaper, while the man in our life
obsesses and grieves over an unfair
penalty. The same seems to be true of
men who react strongly to movies. It’s not
the case that real life isn’t good enough,
more that their real selves don’t seem
good enough. Or, for that matter, bad
enough.”
Autopsy finds passengers killed man in ‘air rage’ case: “A man who attacked other passengers and pounded on the
cockpit door during a Southwest Airlines flight in August was killed by other passengers, not by a heart attack as originally believed, an autopsy
has concluded.
However, the U.S. Attorney’s office is not filing any criminal charges, saying Jonathan Burton’s Aug. 11 death was merely an act of self-defense
by frightened passengers.” I had found the original news reports of a putative “heart attack” in a 19 year-old unlikely (although not impossible); this version strikes me as quite tragic, since my take on the young man is that he was probably acutely psychiatrically disturbed. Did he really represent a critical threat? Nando Times
More questions than answers after Internet researchers’ conference: “The Association of Internet Researchers’ inaugural conference ended Sunday with more questions than answers about the Internet’s impact on
social interactions and relationships.” Nando Times
Resistant germs thrive in day care. “For years, doctors and
parents alike have been aware that children who
attend day care centers are more likely to catch
colds and other infections due to their close
proximity to other youngsters. But now,
researchers here report that a more insidious
danger may lurk in these facilities: They can
serve as ideal breeding grounds for
antibiotic-resistant infections.” MSNBC
More bad news for Amazon. “The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), one of Amazon’s first
affiliates from back in 1996, severed its affiliate relationship.
Junkbusters did the same. Both cited Amazon’s new privacy policy — which outlines when customer information
can be shared but basically admits to considering customer information
as a business asset — as the reason for their departure from the affiliates
program.” Geek.com
Beyond Cyberpunk! The Web Version. The Beyond Cyberpunk hypercard stack for the Mac was the roadmap to the cyberculture of the early ’90’s. I was jealous of those using Mac OS who had access to it. Now, when Peter Sugarman and Gareth Branwyn have started porting it to the web (which didn’t even exist when this project was gestated), it’s mostly a historical document or, as they put it aptly, “an artifact from a future past.” (They promised it was a work in progress to which they would be adding, but the introductory page has a 1998 copyright, so I don’t know if it’s still being updated.)
Jerry Groopman MD reviews Frank Vertosick’s Why We Hurt: the natural history of pain. “In 1979, while training for the
Boston marathon, I ruptured a
lumbar disc. I underwent two
failed operations and was left
disabled and in severe pain. It
took many months of arduous
physical therapy to be weaned
from pain medication and to
regain the ability to move about.
To this day, if I lift something
heavy without bending correctly,
or fail to support my muscles
when sitting in a soft chair, I am
laid low by back pain. It was,
therefore, with more than
academic interest, and some
trepidation, that I read ‘Why We
Hurt. To my surprise and delight,
Dr. Frank T. Vertosick Jr., a practicing neurosurgeon,
performs a feat of literary alchemy. He transmutes the
lugubrious subject of pain into a provocative and edifying
treatise that tightly engages the reader.” New York Times
The Whole World in our Hands: “James Lovelock’s Gaia theory inspired the Green
movement. But as fossil fuels begin, literally, to cost
the earth, he argues that nuclear power could save the
planet.” Guardian
Spin Magazine’s 100 Sleaziest Moments in the History of Rock. A rather tame example:
With his moccasins, Moroccan shirts, and impressive ‘fro, hippie deity
Jimi Hendrix seemed an unlikely candidate for gangster’s paradise. But in
the fall of 1969, he and his band Gypsys, Suns & Rainbows performed at
the opening of the tiny, reputedly Mob-owned Manhattan club Salvation
as a favor to the joint’s promoter – Hendrix’s coke dealer Bobby Woods.
After the gig, he and Woods took off to score some blow, hanging out
until morning. Late that evening, Woods was found murdered – a
gangland-style hit – and Hendrix was kidnapped by goons eager to grill
him about his ties to the pusherman. Hendrix’s enraged manager, Mike
Jeffery, quickly dispatched a few of his own well-connected brutes, who
sped to the funky Woodstock-area retreat where the guitarist was being
held. Jeffery’s boys were further up the Mafia food chain than Jimi’s
oppressors, who quickly fled the scene. Though Hendrix was reportedly
amused by the charade, rumors have persisted that the Mob may have
played a role in the odd circumstances surrounding his 1970 death. So
much for flower power.
Hmmm, second Jimi Hendrix post in a week…
Manufacturer, psychiatric group accused of overdiagnosing to sell Ritalin. “The American Psychiatric Association and the makers of the drug
Ritalin are encouraging overdiagnosis of behavioral problems in children to boost sales of the drug, according to two lawsuits filed this week.
Novartis Pharmaceutical Corp. and the psychiatric association promoted the belief that a large number of children need to take Ritalin for
attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the suits filed in New Jersey and California allege.” Nando Times My take on this, in a few words, is that the lawsuit is pure litigious nonsense. The medical evidence for the reality of ADHD as a brain dysfunction is incontrovertible, as is the positive impact of medication treatments. At the same time, it is overdiagnosed, but not because of any unholy conspiracy. There is an inherent cycle of fascination with faddish diagnoses and an unfortunate capacity for self-fulfilling prophecy to shape diagnosis of psychopathology among less careful clinicians.
Windows ME Bugged by Flaw. “Microsoft’s brand-new operating system, Windows ME already has one confirmed security bug.
The vulnerability allows malicious users to remotely shut down or force a reboot if the computer is running
the WebTV for Windows application.” Wired
GAC (Generic Artificial
Consciousness)
is “the world’s
first computer program to
attempt to learn from the world
wide community how to be
artificially conscious.” The knowledge base of the community of registered users fuels its AI by contributing to a database of mindpixels — “one-bit pieces of knowledge”. Now MIT’s Media Lab has gotten into the act. Wired
When Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Jim Higgins interviewed me over the phone for his July piece on weblogs, we discovered our shared involvement in adoption. He’s pointed me to Rainbow Kids, a self-described “online international adoption publication”. The current issue has a review article on the common medical problems encountered in children being adopted from abroad; and a celebratory personal adoption story from Higgins himself on the adoption of his daughter Zoe.
I was two weeks into fatherhood before I remembered that all babies were not Chinese. That’s
because I spent the first two weeks of February in a southeast China hotel with my wife Karen
and our new daughter Zoe, and 10 other American families and their new Chinese daughters. If
you want to imagine the atmosphere, think of your freshman year in a college dorm, only you’re
married, your dorm is as swanky as the Pfister Hotel, you’ve just been handed a tiny 10-month-old
swaddled in three hand-knit sweaters (even though it’s 60 degrees outside), and you’re surrounded
by 1.6 million Chinese people, many of whom haven’t seen an American in person before…
[So far in browsing their site though, I can’t find anything approximating our experience of adopting our daughter from the exotic state of …Maine.]
” I am Pilot Professr Y and we need you to
Save Earth! As you know, On September 1, 2020, Earth was surrounded by a sphere of
undetermined substance letting nothing through but light. The newly-established
World Government may have a hard time coping. We are here to help.
We are calling for Pilots to fly remote-control probes in order to map the beautiful yet
ominous macro-crystalline structure of the sphere. With this accomplished, we may
be able to produce a resonance pattern to crack the sphere and Save Earth! Watch
out for static though.”
Reintroducing Ursus arctos horribilis: parts of the West are bracing for a second coming as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to return endangered grizzlies to the Bitterroot Wilderness in Montana. This is becoming the latest touchstone in that particular brand of political polarization endemic to the American West, characterized as a struggle over “who owns the land”. The Atlantic
Background piece on Spain’s longstanding Basque conflict and dimming hopes for a resolution after a long hot summer of conflict between ETA and Spanish authorities. Chicago Tribune
“Any time now, the Internet will start demanding information…or else. Shouldn’t you be afraid?” New Scientist
Paddling with Supertankers: latest dispatch from two Britons travelling from London to Sydney via bicycle and sea kayak. Now crossing to Sumatra. Adventure-mag.com
2600: The Hacker Quarterly has been enjoined by the court from posting links to places where you can get DeCSS. But they say: “Looking for a copy of DeCSS?
The easiest way is to go to Disney’s search engine and search
for DeCSS. They will then LINK you to thousands of sites,
something we’re no longer allowed to do. It’s possible we may
not even be allowed to tell you this! You can still access our old
list of mirror sites sans the links.”
Berlin outlaws neo-Nazi rock music company. “The sinister Blood and Honour group, Europe’s largest distributor of neo-Nazi rock music, was outlawed by the German
Government yesterday in its latest attack on underground far-right culture.” The Times of London
Satellite Catholics enter world of Fantasy. “A mistake at a satellite television company in Luxembourg led to two hours of the soundtrack from The Fantasy Channel,
broadcaster of pornographic films, being broadcast over pictures from a Vatican celebration of the year 2000.
In an equally confusing switch, viewers of The Fantasy Channel, expecting to hear Stacey doing her best, were treated to the
sounds coming from The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.” The Times of London
‘Ego-Surfing’ derides valid, prudent activity. In defense of searching the web for your own online presence. Online Journalism Review And egosurf.com, which facilitates the process.
The Sorrow, the Pity, and the Angry Professor: The essay considers a “Chomskyite leftist” who rails against what he considers the devil’s pact between the U.S. government and a “cadre of Jewish spokespeople” to exploit the public’s lurid fascination with the Holocaust for personal and political advantage, whether it is the enormous fees garnered by reparations lawyers or the State Dept’s justification of a double standard in foreign policy.
Flap over gay male blood donation. The FDA defeated a proposal to loosen the ban on blood donation by gay men by only one vote. An opinion piece by the editor of the reactionary Washington Times shrilly spins the kneejerk reaction that even considering the proposal was playing election year politics, pandering to the self-esteem of the gay constituency at the expense of the safety of the nation’s blood supply. What do others think?
Feed Daily: More about the subliminal campaigning flap.”The gag’s only good ’til the
next PR blunder in the Bush campaign sweeps
it aside, but, oddly enough, it touches upon
issues that have gotten a lot of play recently
among cognitive scientists. In fact, W’s
apparent inability to pronounce “subliminal” —
he garbled the word four times during a news
conference this week, adding an “able” at the
end — hasn’t prevented the candidate from
straying into murky waters in regards to the
science behind subliminal advertising.”
One Man’s Rage Against Bad Thinking. Recently-noticed late Australian philosopher of science David Stove said we lost faith in science because of our revulsion at the cocky certainty of 19th century Victorian scientific triumphalism, and because we have never been able to metabolize the quantum mechanical impeachment of Newtonian physics. Rationalist Stove intended to heal the plague of scientific relativism that has ensued. He was particularly concerned with what he considered the deplorable inconsistencies of modern evolutionary science and what he called the “slander on our race” of assuming that natural selection explains anything about the human race.
According to Stove, theories of helplessness gain a
hearing because the “human race is mad.” But Stove
is no defender of an intellectual elite. He exhibits his
greatest antipathy toward the allegedly learned few.
In a volume called The Plato Cult (three pieces
from which are included among Roger Kimball’s
selections), Stove cites a host of philosophers, from
Plato to Foucault, to illustrate the “spectacle of
nightmare irrationality” that is characteristic of our
intellectual heritage. The “cult of Plato,” which was
an integral part of the Renaissance revival,
encapsulates the tendency to treat great minds with
religious reverence. What we need is a “nosology”
of intellectual error, a classification of the diseases
that have afflicted the human mind at least since
Plato.Stove does not hope to uncover the single root of all
these diseases, which are too numerous and varied
even to list exhaustively. And he has no hope for the
ultimate victory of reason: Irrationality will always
win out, because there are simply too many ways to
go wrong.
The Weekly Standard
“There’s (an) aspect of the Gore
candidacy that has gotten me thinking. If elected, the Vice President will be the first
Harvard graduate since J.F.K. to be sworn in as Chief Magistrate, a circumstance
that gives rise to reflections on Harvard then versus Harvard now …The spectacle of the national brow being lowered and lowered, to the point of
near-Neanderthalism, thanks to the ministrations and calculations of three decades’
worth of graduates of its elitest educational institution is a sorry sight indeed.” New York Observer
Monty Python’s Terry Jones: “Gladiatorial shows were not an aberration.
Gladiators were right at the centre of Roman
civilisation. Brutal murders, put on in public arenas
at public expense, were not seen as decadent – on
the contrary, they were staged as an antidote to decadence.
The Romans believed that it was beneficial to
watch people being killed. Not just good
entertainment, but morally valuable. It made
people into better Romans.” The Times of London
Are the Republicans using subliminal advertising? ‘The Republican National
Committee’s prescription-drug
advertisement flashes the word
“rats,” a fragment of the word
“bureaucrats,” for one-thirtieth of
a second, in huge white
capital letters, larger than any
other word on the commercial.
The advertisement continues, “The Gore prescription plan:
bureaucrats decide.” The man
who produced the ad for the RNC
denied responsibility. It was
“purely accidental,” he said. “We
don’t play ball that way. I’m
not that clever.” Other admakers
said it would be “virtually
impossible” for the placement of
the frame to be accidental.’ New York Times via Slate
Another pricing glitch at Amazon, this time more egregious. DVD boxed sets were mistakenly priced at enormous discounts — some >75% off list. When Amazon discovered their mistake, they asked customers to pay the higher price or cancel their orders. “This is the last time I will do business with Amazon. There are too many other places online that don’t pull stunts like that,” was one (representative??) customer response. Amazon had similar difficulties last month in its toy store, which led to complaints to the FTC and the Better Business Bureau about what some construed as deceptive advertising and unfair treatment. Then there’s the “price-testing” debacle of last week, also in the DVD store. Lo! how the mighty have fallen — Amazon’s fate as the online retailer the public loves to hate seems sealed.CNET
Get Off the Lists! The Center for Democracy and Technology runs this “Opt-Out!” site collecting links and information to get you off telephone solicitation, spam and junk-mailing lists.
If you use Eudora for email, an upgrade to ver. 5 will get you MoodWatch ‘Research has shown that “people behaved irresponsibly more often in email
than they did in face to face conversations.” But you already knew that, right? MoodWatch won’t stop you from acting irresponsibly in email, it will just let you
know when you might be about to send a message you’ll regret.’ [via Memepool]
Olympics: We Know the Winners. Now, Let the Games Begin.
“In a
study released on Aug. 28, Andrew Bernard, of the Tuck
School of Business at Dartmouth College, and Meghan R.
Busse, of the Yale School of Management, examined Summer
Olympics medal counts for the last 40 years to see what
factors determine how many medals each nation wins…. Like so many paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, the formula
discovered by Mr. Bernard and Ms. Busse is beautiful in its
simplicity.
Just two factors account for 95 percent of a nation’s
predicted medal count: the number of medals it won at a
previous Olympics, and the overall size of its economy.” New York Times
Scientists try to foresee marriage breakdowns: “A pair of university researchers announced Monday that they can scientifically and mathematically predict
how likely and how soon a newly married couple will untie the knot…The complicated mathematical formula includes numbers of thoughts of divorce, amount of perspiration
measured by skin conductivity levels, humor during the discussion, marriage length, amount of anger and
something called ‘facial action units’ — or frowns, smiles and grimaces caught on tape.” St. Louis Post
Unborn child ‘can detect language’, child psychologists find. http://www.telegraph.co.uk
Study: Addiction possible after few cigarettes. “Scientists have
confirmed a suspicion held by some
smokers but never proven: It could
take just a few cigarettes to become
addicted. Some 12- and 13-year-olds
showed evidence of addiction within
days of their first cigarette, according
to research reported this week in the
British Medical Association journal
Tobacco Control.” Chicago Tribune
Cultivate excitement, fight boredom, improve self-esteem, duck blame, simplify complications, act out childhood frustrations, facilitate affiliation and social cohesion: find an enemy now! Observer
Scenes from the Apocalypse: Fuel Protests Spread Across Europe, Pumps Run Dry Reuters
Finally, one of life’s most ticklish questions answered. New Scientist
‘Che’ Photographer in Anti-Commercial Fight: ‘When I saw this, I felt indignant because it’s a lack of respect. Even though it has been
used in hundreds of things, T- shirts, flags … they had never linked his image with an
alcoholic drink,” he said, calling Guevara “the greatest person in history after Jesus Christ.” ‘ Reuters
It’s in the air: The debate over whether pheromones influence our behaviour has been fired up by the discovery of what may be a
working gene for a pheromone receptor.
While pheromones are common in insects and lower mammals, which use them for everything from attracting mates
to marking trails, whether such chemical signals affect humans has long been contentious. New Scientist
What’s so special about the Harvest Moon?
Aryan Nations leader: We’re staying in Idaho. Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations lose a landmark $6.3 million damage judgment to a family assaulted by his henchmen, represented by attorney Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery AL. Dees intends to seize every asset of the racist sect, including its right to use its name. One twist on this is that the sect has apparently recently been bankrolled by two Silicon Valley multimillionaires who now live in Idaho. There’s some speculation that they will bail Butler out by paying off this judgment. With this decision, Dees and the SPLC extend an impressive streak of winning ruinous judgments against hate groups. (Hint: the work of the SPLC depends on your contributions…) Nando Times
All in a day’s work: After you’ve finished responding to these ten most vexing unanswered questions in contemporary physics New York Times, try your hand at these seven major unsolved mathematical posers. The solution to each of the latter is worth $1 million US. Here’s an example:
It is Saturday evening and you arrive at a big party. Feeling shy, you wonder whether you already know anyone in the room.
Your host proposes that you must certainly know Rose, the lady in the corner next to the dessert tray. In a fraction of a
second you are able to cast a glance and verify that your host is correct. However, in the absence of such a suggestion, you are
obliged to make a tour of the whole room, checking out each person one by one, to see if there is anyone you recognize. This is
an example of the general phenomenon that generating a solution to a problem often takes far longer than verifying that a
given solution is correct. Similarly, if someone tells you that the number 13,717,421 can be written as the product of two
smaller numbers, you might not know whether to believe him, but if he tells you that it can be factored as 3607 times 3803
then you can easily check that it is true using a hand calculator. One of the outstanding problems in logic and computer science
is determining whether questions exist whose answer can be quickly checked (for example by computer), but which require a
much longer time to solve from scratch (without knowing the answer). There certainly seem to be many such questions. But so
far no one has proved that any of them really does require a long time to solve; it may be that we simply have not yet
discovered how to solve them quickly. Stephen Cook formulated the P versus NP problem in 1971.
Put that chip where the sun don’t shine. Life imitating — not art but — paranoid fantasy. Many patients with paranoid delusions feel there are covert implants in their bodies monitoring them and causing their distressing symptoms such as auditory hallucinations. Now it’s coming true. I’ve had two patients this week in great distress about this news. Salon [I haven’t been sharing with them some of the more conspiratorial potential trends I’ve been blinking in this weblog, like Carnivore or tracking you by your cellphone…]
A roundup of recent pertinent science news from New Scientist: First, global warming trends have roused fears that malaria is headed for higher latitudes. A new computer model appears to set our minds at ease.
Second, a surprise success in reprogramming cells
brings brain repair a step closer. Scientists have found that it is relatively easy to coax brain tissue to revert to stem cell status. Reimplanting such tissue could help patients regenerate brain matter lost or damaged, for example, in Parkinson’s Disease or after a stroke.
Next, accumulating evidence suggests that the first stars after the big bang at the dawn of the universe were monsters pumping out millions of times the energy of the largest stars in today’s universe, and suffering violent spectacular deaths. These stars may have briefly pumped out more energy than 100 billion galaxies in going supernova! Their brief and violent lifecycle may have been responsible for the generation of most of the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in the modern universe.
Finally, CERN scientists think they have spotted the
Higgs particle, the most sought-after prize in
particle physics — the
elusive particle that gives matter its mass. New Scientist
Reverent 4-CD boxed set released by family to coincide with 30th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix‘s death. Reuters
An apple a day may keep the dentist away; but, if you do have to go, don’t let the dentist rinse your mouth out. Reuters; New Scientist
There’s an AvantGo Client for Blogger! Now I can post blinks from my Palm~! Why would I want to? Simple, silly: because I can, of course.
“In 32 years I’ve never seen anything like
this,”… the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration director in Colombia, told
reporters.
“This is huge,” he said. “We’re talking about being able to load up to 200 tons of cocaine in this submarine.” My first question was, how is it going to get launched, given that it was being built in a brick warehouse on the outskirts of Bogota, 7500 feet or so above sea level? Reportedly, it was to be trucked to the sea in three sections to be assembled there. ABC
Escaping the Matrix: This author actually appears to think he’s the first one to realize that the media-shaped consensus version of political reality is an illusion that doesn’t make sense. “I also perceived important
patterns that others seemed to have missed. When I started tracing
historical forces, and began to interpret present-day events from a
historical perspective, I could see the same old dynamics at work
and found a meaning in unfolding events far different from what
official pronouncements proclaimed.” The patterns he proclaims he’s noticed amount to:
Now, let’s not, for the moment, quibble over whether you agree or not with this author’s political analysis. What’s impressed me is why Whole Earth (a journal which, after all, has been around since then, and to which I’ve been a subscriber from its first issue) would publish a piece that does nothing but summarize every truism of the last thirty years’ progressive thinking as if it were newly discovered revelation. What am I missing here? I suppose it should be sufficient warning whenever someone trumpets that he “perceived important patterns that others seemed to have missed” in the first paragraph…
There’s an AvantGo Client for Blogger! Now I can post blinks from my Palm~! Why would I want to? Simple, silly: because I can, of course.
TV Golf, Botching the Birdies: “The Buick Open golf tournament was in Michigan, so why was the silvery song of a canyon wren — a bird never seen east of Texas — heard on the TV broadcast?” Washington Post
Running in the genes. As the Olympics nears, the nature vs. nurture debate gets applied to black runners’ prowess. The Times
Strangelove syndrome gives hands a life of their own. A fascinating and rare neurological syndrome may shed light on the neural basis of free will. Forty cases of anarchic hand syndrome, nicknamed Strangelove syndrome after the unforgettable struggles of the Peter Sellers character in Kubrick’s 1963 film to control a wayward hand, have been described. Seemingly caused by damage to a frontal region called the supplemental motor area, most sufferers are at war with the affected limb, slapping, scolding or binding it. Although the concept of free will is a dicey one without a precise neurological basis, one way to conceptualize this syndrome is that a secondary, competing center of will takes over control of the hand. Other neurological syndromes result from “neglect”, in which damage to certain brain areas makes patients lose awareness of the fact (“deny”) that a certain part of their body belongs to them, with predictable results. But, in anarchic hand syndrome, in contrast, ‘ “the patients are aware of the bizarre and
potentially hazardous behaviours of their hand
but have great difficulty inhibiting it,” said
Professor Della Salla. “They often refer to the
feeling that one of their hands behaves as if it
has its own will but never deny that this
capricious hand is part of their own body.” ‘ Let me suggest another way to cut this cake. Might anarchic hand syndrome be a particularly dramatic challenge to the mistaken notion, or convenient fiction, we have of thinking that organisms have a unity of purpose in the first place? The Times; BBC Here‘s the result of a Google search on anarchic hand syndrome — not much. [Searching on Strangelove syndrome comes up with more hits, but they have nothing to do with neurology. Kubrick’s film seems to have become an icon for deepseated public fears of unbalanced military professionals and doomsday scenarios.]
Spiking the Gun Myth. The New York Times reviews Daniel Bellesiles’ Arming America, which deflates the myths evoked by current gun advocates about the early role of the gun in American life. Excerpt from the book:
The gun is so central to American
identity that the nation’s history has
been meticulously reconstructed to
promote the necessity of a heavily
armed American public. In the classic
telling, arms ownership has always
been near universal, and American
liberty was won and maintained by
the actions of privately armed
citizens. The gun culture has been
read from the present into the past.
Franklin Orth, executive vice
president of the NRA, told a Senate
subcommittee in 1968, ‘There is a
very special relationship between a
man and his gun — an atavistic
relation with its deep roots in
prehistory, when the primitive man’s
personal weapon, so often his only
effective defense and food provider,
was nearly as precious to him as his
own limbs.’ What, then, of the man
who does not have such a special
relationship with his gun? What kind
of man is he? And even more
frightening, what if we discover that
early American men did not have that
special bond with their guns?”
Judge orders pregnant women kept in custody, citing danger to fetus. The 8-and-a-1/2-month-pregnant woman, a member of a fundamentalist sect, is suspected of concealing the death of her last child through neglect. ‘The judge said he could sense what the child would say to him.
“I want to live. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die like my brother, Jeremiah, did,” Nasif said, according to Gerald FitzGerald, a prosecutor who
attended the closed hearing.’ The ACLU opposes the detention, citing the deprivation of the woman’s right to privacy. “The law does not require parents to undergo medical procedures to benefit their born children,” said ACLU attorney Sarah Wunsch. “It certainly
cannot force a pregnant woman to be treated on behalf of her fetus.” Nando Times
Cray for sale on eBay: “There is a Cray Y-MP C90 supercomputer for sale on eBay. The current
bid as this is written is US$44,500.69. The system features 16
processors, 4 GB of main memory, 4 GB of solid state storage, and 130
GB of RAIDed hard drive space. The original price in 1991 was $10
million.” Geek.com
NewsWatch is back, with a long article about the Renata Adler — Judge Sirica flap.
