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.

Tunku Varadarajan writes the rant about the media frenzy over Diana and her death that’s been needed ever since. “Yesterday was the third anniversary of the death, in a motor accident in Paris, of Princess Diana of

Wales. I am flooded with gloom.

The darkness of my mood, lest you misunderstand, comes not from a rekindled sense of loss. Instead, it

flows from my recollection of the vulgarity and gaudy grief that swept through our lives after the death of

that meretricious, banal and empty-headed woman.” WSJ

A lucid introduction to the philosophical discipline called model theory, one way of dissecting the nature of the relationship between language and world. Lingua Franca

Boston ‘s WCVB-TV is still on the fence about whether to carry the Dr. Laura show, which debuts in four days. And there’ll be no one more surprised than the anti-Schlessinger activists if the station breaks ranks and rejects the show. Boston Globe

Poor literal Texas, compelled to confer legal blessings on a lesbian marriage, because one of the women used to be a man. As Bexar County Clerk Gerard C. Rickoff

observed, “You are what you

are by your Creator.”

Thanks to a reader who suggested I look at this. Amazon is charging different prices on some DVDs to different consumers, or even the same consumer at different times. “Included among the determining factors, they said, was

which browser was being used, whether a consumer was a repeat or first-time customer and

which Internet service provider address a customer was using… Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith said the price differences on certain DVDs are the result of

tests that the company performs to re-evaluate various aspects of its Web site, such as the

navigation system, what the home page looks like, overall site design and product pricing.” One industry analyst described the pricing strategy as befuddling. I’ll settle for “just nuts”, not having gone to business school. Computerworld

An allegedly haunted Maryland castle was bought by a group of self-proclaimed ghost chasers who plan to monitor round-the-clock for paranormal activity, as well as rent out $250 rooms to chill-seeking guests.

R.U. Sirius on Whatever Happened to MONDO 2000’s Cyber Revolution. The mainstream overtook the fringe, in short. Wired hijacked Mondo’s constituency. But Sirius never stops waiting for resurgent glory days.

Thanks to David Brake for pointing me to the Brill’s Content “All-Star Newspaper”, a sort of news weblog. But, perhaps because of their conceit of putting the journalist’s name big and bold instead of any indication of the content of each of their items, I find it hard to read.

Reports: Saddam Hussain stricken with cancer. U.S. is skeptical of reports of his imminent death. Supposedly, he has handed over day-to-day leadership tasks to his son Qusay, the one who has personally directed the ethnic persecution of Iraqi Kurds and Shi’ites, ordering the deaths of hundreds. MSNBC

Internet music-file sharing news roundup: Scour contracts, MP3.com to be assessed damages, Napster suit appeal nears hearing.

Unfortunately, the way American courts have been ruling against

Internet technology recently doesn’t bode too well for Scour’s future,

even if it wasn’t having money problems. It’s unclear whether Napster

will be able to get Judge Patel’s harsh decision overturned on appeal,

even if the Appeals court actually listens to its arguments and allows its

evidence into the record this time (unlike Judge Patel). MP3.com is

probably going to get its hands slapped pretty harshly this week,

meaning it will have to spend even more money than it already has on

the other four settlements it worked out. Plus, I’m hoping that

MP3.com’s cave-in to the record companies that allows them to now

send spammy e-mail to MP3.com users will drive people away from the

MP3.com service completely. Put all this together with the recent

decision against DeCSS and 2600.com and you’ve got a legal climate in

America that is so anti-Internet file/knowledge sharing that even a

deaf, dumb, and blind investor knows to stay away from this for a

while. Geek.com

When it’s turned on, your cellphone is a handheld homing device, in case you didn’t know. And the ability to locate you in this way has alot of implications, from the tantalizing to the insidious. Geek.com

Evolutionary Psychology news: First, a portrait of the EP mailing list where “dangerous ideas thrive without the usual online rancor and hatred.” Salon And Randy Thornhill, whose work on the evolutionary underpinnings of rape I’ve blinked before, is too much to take for some at the Ars Electronica Next Sex symposium in Linz, Austria. Wired

Read about the aftermath when some Santa Clara County prison inmates fool with a homemade Ouija board. San Jose Mercury

The net is not the first threat to the survival of printed literature, says Tom, the Dancing Bug.

The current state of political oratory

Possibly we no longer even have the subject matter for a good speech.

Speech-making begs for large themes. The fate of nations, for instance. Some

excuse for a hint of outrage and demagoguery. It is not easy — and even harder

without PowerPoint — to make a compelling speech out of the administrative

themes of the age: health care, education, campaign-finance reform.

Of course, political discourse itself has become, in the inner circles of both

parties, almost entirely subverbal wonk talk and, in public, a list of painful and

ritualized clichés. “Twenty-first-century jobs need twenty-first-century schools . .

. Progress, not partisanship . . . Honor is not just a word but an obligation . . .

The hard right over the easy wrong . . . I remember a child . . .” New York Magazine

“Eighteen years ago, after a brutal little war, British commandos re-took the remote Falkland Islands

from the Argentine forces that had seized it.

Well… they’re back. Sort of. But undercover (or under the covers, for those preferring double

entendre) and sleeping with the enemy.” An Argentine director and his crew, posing as tourists, shot a clandestine film in Port Stanley with handheld digital video cameras, telling the story of “an Argentine man visiting

the islands with the aim of impregnating as many British women

as possible, thereby achieving the takeover that 72 days of fighting at a

combined cost of 891 lives and $2 billion could not… The director chronicles his

own (nine-day) creative commando raid into enemy territory” on his website (in Spanish). Inside

The “Lord Of The Rings trilogy will have subtitles when

elves speak in their own language, British star Ian McKellen has revealed.”

“The state of New York and billionaire cable industry

mogul Alan Gerry revealed plans yesterday to build a

performing arts center in upstate Bethel on the site of

the original Woodstock… While the design will harken back to the site’s hippie

past, unlike the original Woodstock festival, the arts

center will have toilets.” NY Daily News

GOP vice-presidential nominee Dick Cheney has accused

the Clinton administration of neglecting the military. Earlier

this year, Michael O’Hanlon argued that military readiness is

at least as good now as it was under President Reagan. Slate

“I’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday…”. Robert Cringely on how PayPal has won the battle to be the Internet’s payment system. And if you sign up on my referral, I get $5 in my PayPal account.

Space Scientists are on the Case. Law enforcement authorities have been collaborating with NASA to use image enhancement technology originally developed for the analysis of satellite video to dramatically improve the information yield from surveillance videos here on earth.

Coming back from vacation without my finger on the pulse, it’s hard to know if this is already old hat to everybody. It’s certainly important and sensational enough that it bears repeating. “The late Richard Nixon was under the influence of psychotic drugs for at least part of his presidency, to the point where his defence

secretary warned military commanders not to take his orders without

endorsement from another senior minister. The claim, supported by

the doctor who prescribed the drugs, is made in a new Nixon

biography…” They’re talking about Dilantin (phenytoin), which, to be sure, is not a “psychotic” drug (nor, more properly, an “antipsychotic”, which is what I think they were driving at) but an anti-epileptic medication that some used for mood stabilization, even though there is little evidence it is good for that and it has serious side effects, sometimes mind-altering ones. the Independent

The Emergency Email Network is a free public service that will notify you of natural disasters, other emergencies, organ and blood donation needs in your local area.

The hundred greatest pieces of 20th Century music, as NPR’s All Things Considered is profiling this year. Links to Real Audio files of the shows that have already aired. I’m listening to Louis Armstrong’s West End Blues as I type this…

Document Web Bugs Privacy Advisory: ‘The Privacy Foundation has discovered that it is possible to add

“Web bugs” to Microsoft Word documents. A “Web bug” could

allow an author to track where a document is being read and how

often. In addition, the author can watch how a “bugged” document

is passed from one person to another or from one organization to

another.’

Will Pseudo-Scandals Decide the

Election? The American Prospect

This bottom-feeding monstrosity of

a comedy

“…conjures more leering

euphemisms for male body

parts and sexual acts than any

film in recent memory.” New York Times

A fascinating-sounding new black-and-white documentary, Dark Days, just opened in New York. Stephen Holden reviews: “Most of this unforgettable

movie was filmed below

the streets of Midtown

Manhattan in a dank

Amtrak railway tunnel where a colony of around 75 homeless

put down roots, some for as long as 25 years, among the rats

and the garbage.” New York Times

Is there anyone out there not yet familiar with the Darwin Awards? “Darwin Awards celebrate Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution

by commemorating the remains of those who contribute to the

improvement of our gene pool by removing themselves from it

in really stupid ways.” One reader-submitted vignette describes “Why I’m the Last of Nine Children”.

After the venerable Tom’s Hardware Guide and others wrote of the new chip’s instability and their inability to get it to perform in benchmarking tests on any platform, Intel Admits Problems With 1.13 GHz Pentium III and recalls the chips. They’re not commenting on how many had been shipped already. Haste makes waste, and this feud with AMD to be the fastest surely makes haste.

Tne New York Times reviewer doesn’t like Margaret Atwood’s new novel, The Blind Assassin. But it’s an opportunity for the Times to pull together an anthology page of reviews of all of Atwood’s earlier work. One of her earliest, Surfacing, remains my favorite.

From the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Star TV CEO James Murdoch’s thoughts about how Anglo-American broadcasting misses the boat on how to grapple with a global market:

If I have to read another article about “Threats and Opportunities,” “Surviving in the Digital

Era,” “The New Realities of the New Economy,” or some such other angst-ridden twaddle,

I’ll just have to shoot myself. Americans are worrying about declining standards.

Europeans are worrying about their standards becoming American, and everyone is

worried about the Internet.

But the obsession with the above comes at the expense of a broader discussion that

shouldn’t be given such short shrift. Modern, so-called “Big Media” needs to grapple with

the basic worldwide demographic trends that will shape our industry, and all others, over

the next century, and indeed, well beyond it.

The pressing problem, as I would like to argue this evening, is that most media companies

have failed to understand what it means to be a global company. No where is this more

true than in the Anglo and American countries that have assumed that simply

broadcasting around the world, CNN-style, or exporting English language films, is a

sufficient global strategy.

Is there anyone out there not yet familiar with the Darwin Awards? “Darwin Awards celebrate Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution

by commemorating the remains of those who contribute to the

improvement of our gene pool by removing themselves from it

in really stupid ways.” One reader-submitted vignette describes “Why I’m the Last of Nine Children”.

Gone until September 4th. I hope everybody’s summer ends well. Please mark your calendars and come back after I return. In the meanwhile, feel free to browse some older entries from “Follow Me Here.” And please consider sending me some of the interesting links you’re finding on the web while I’m away..

Gone until September 4th. I hope everybody’s summer ends well. Please mark your calendars and come back after I return. In the meanwhile, feel free to browse some older entries from “Follow Me Here.” And please consider sending me some of the interesting links you’re finding on the web while I’m away..

Cloned Pigs Open Possibility of Organ Farms. Two scientific studies published this week report success with cloning pigs in different ways. Interest in this effort has been spurred by the potential it presents for a source of organs for human transplant, given pigs’ similarities in size and physiology with humans. Perhaps genetic engineering could create a strain of pig whose tissues lacks factors that so far stimulate rejection.

Yet another study raises alarm about this prospect. Apparently, all pig cells are infected with endogenous retroviruses which, it is revealed, might infect human cells via transplanted tissue — these porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) were recently shown to infect immunocompromised mice which received porcine grafts. Although the mice infected with the PERVs did not become ill in any way, recall that many recently emerging devastating human diseases including HIV have arisen through cross-species jumps. Viruses tolerated in one species and co-existing with their hosts can cause devastating illness in an alien species; the major protection appears to be the relative improbability of the cross-species infection. Is this a bridge we want to be building, especially given that human recipients are highly immunosuppressed to prevent transplant rejection and thus present no resistance to colonization with the alien virus? Many months ago, I posted a blink to the Campaign for Responsible Transplantation, which has raised exactly these concerns. The new study is empirical evidence that their worries are well-founded.

Eligible kids not getting child medical support

Of the 21 million kids eligible for child support enforcement services, about 3 million lack

health coverage, according to a report from a panel convened by the Depts of Health and Human Services and Labor. Reuters

Ever heard of these guys? Paul McCartney makes new Beatles record. ‘Paul McCartney has put together a new

Beatles recording titled “Free Now,” mixing out-takes from

1960s studio sessions with previously unheard cuts of Beatles guitar work, a spokesman said

Tuesday.

“It’s a new little piece of the Beatles,” McCartney said in a statement. “It’s a little side dish

that is not to be confused with my other work. It’s more underground then what you usually

hear from me, but I like to be free enough to do this sort of thing.” ‘

Immune Drugs Make U.S. Hand Transplant a Success. “A year after the world’s second hand

transplant, the patient’s new hand can sense temperature,

pressure and pain, and he can use it to write, turn the pages of a

newspaper, throw a baseball and tie shoe laces, according to a

report in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.”

Machine Rages Against Rage Against the Machine Reuters

Although pundits have praised it as a courageous stab at bigotry, Franklin Foer says that Gore’s choice of Lieberman is safe, not bold, because “the more traditionally

Jewish you are, the less anti-Semitism you’re likely to

incur. ” He argues that there have historically been two strains of hatred for Jews in America. The first is an “elite bigotry” toward the unassimilated immigrants focusing on Jewish “clannishness, bad manners, and resistance to modernity.” The second strain is by contrast the “populist and envious” hatred of assimilated Jews who had shed the religious strictures and customs that had kept them separate and targeted them for their “secularism, capitalism, rootlessness, and disproportionate influence,” threatening community and tradition through financial or cultural power. The second strain, Foer states, is the one largely in sway today, especially among the economically displaced — he cites the demagoguery of America’s most prominent anti-Semite, Patrick Buchanan, as illustrative — and the one which Lieberman’s orthodoxy greatly deflects. He also says that Lieberman’s moral stringency undermines “another pocket of extant American anti-Semitism…, the anti-Semitism of Al

Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan and those who see Jews

as imperialists abroad and class oppressors at home.” Bizarrely, though, Foer labels this “the anti-Semitism of the left” because it appears to be informed by the rhetoric of class struggle, as if it might characterize most leftists… The New Republic

Greed in Research Dept. (1): Feds: Med Trials Need Disclosure: “Patients enrolled in clinical trials sponsored by drug companies should be notified that the sponsors have

financial interests in the outcome of the study, representatives from institutional review boards at various

universities said at a Department of Health and Human Services meeting on Tuesday.

One IRB representative suggested that it would make a difference in patients’ expectations if they knew

that they are not just participating in medical research but also in a commercial venture.” Wired

Greed in Research Dept. (2): Britain Endorses Embryo Cloning. Britain’s chief scientist Liam Donaldson called for an expansion in “therapeutic cloning” research to tap the exctiing therapeutic potential of embryonal stem cells. Opponents — including anti-abortion groups — favor development of uses for adult stem cells. Conceding other less rabid critics’ concerns, Donaldson suggested that implantation of clones into a human uterus for the purpose of gestation and delivery — so-called reproductive cloning — should remain a criminal offense. The push to loosen stringent British restrictions will allow British scientists to compete on a more equal footing, they claim, with less restrictive overseas endeavors. Wired

Arafat reconsidering Palestinian independence on eve of negotiations. Urged by the U.S. directly and through Arab proxies who may be included in the next round of summit meetings.

‘Unsafe’ levels of dioxin in gourmet ice cream; more dioxin in Ben & Jerry’s than gasoline refinery effluent, researchers report. “Levels of dioxin in a sample serving of Ben & Jerry’s brand ice cream are approximately 2,200 times greater than the level of

dioxin allowed in a “serving” of wastewater discharged into San Francisco Bay from the Tosco Refinery, according to a study

presented at the Dioxins 2000 conference today in Monterrey, California.”

Deep sleep may be key to youth, study says. Promoting deep stages of sleep, a reversal of age-related sleep changes, may delay hormonal mediators of aging Nando Times

Politics and the Novel: a symposium. “We asked a

number of writers to consider the following questions:

Which novel (or novels) prompted (or deepened) your own political

awakening? How old were you when you read it and what effect did it have

upon you? Do you think the novel today is able to embrace or sustain a

deliberately political purpose consistent with a writer’s aesthetic or artistic

obligations? Which two or three political novels (past or present) do you

regard as exemplary, and why?” LA Times

So film critic Stanley Kauffmann loves an old foreign film only to find that he panned it in a review forty years ago. Reflecting on the critic’s changes of heart, he finds himself in good company.

The plain,

discomfiting fact is that every one of us who has

watched plays and films or read books or listened to

music or looked at painting and architecture is, in some

measure, self-deceived. Filed away in the recesses of

our minds are thousands of opinions that we have

accumulated through our lives, and they make us think

that we know what we think on all those subjects. We

do not. All we know is what we once thought, and any

earlier view of a work, if tested, might be hugely

different from what we would think now.

The New Republic

‘”There’s a thin line between a surgeon and a serial killer”.

Frantic Russian Effort to Rescue Crew of Sub. I can’t imagine many more gruesome ways of dying. One almost hopes no one is conscious on the sub to anticipate their impending freezing and suffocation. New York Times

Road Warriors With Laptops. Using bumper-to-bumper traffic constructively.

“If you’re in the office or your apartment, there are at

least 15 things you could be doing, but in the car, there’s

nothing else to do but focus on the call. Plus you’re moving

forward. Mentally, it puts me in the zone, and I can really

concentrate on the phone.” New York Times

Seeing Pessimism’s Place in a Smiley-Faced World. Some psychologists have ‘had enough of the “tyranny of the positive attitude” which prescribes cheerfulness and optimism as a formula for

success, resilience and good health, and equates negativity

with failure, vulnerability and general unhealthiness…While positive thinking has its advantages, they argue, a

little whining now and then is not such a bad thing.

Pessimism, in some circumstances, may have its place. And

the unrelieved pressure to be upbeat, they assert, may gloss

over individual needs and differences, and may make some

people feel worse instead of better.’ New York TimesI’m reminded of what Douglas Adams said:

For a moment, he felt good about this.

A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it.

Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling

good about it and, satisfied, drove on into the night.

(So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish)

Hate Sites Bash Lieberman. Not being a devotee of hate sites, I was waiting with curiosity for someone to look into the extent of their reaction. It was a good bet that Sen. Liebeman’s selection would draw the recrement out into the open. Not that anti-Semites’ bias will affect the election, as it’s likely they wouldn’t’ve voted for the Gore ticket no matter who held the second spot…although a reader points out that the Democrats will have to contend not only with the brand of anti-Semitism espoused by ultra-right-wing crazies but the more significant issue of black anti-Semitism, which seems never to go away. For example, Dallas NAACP President Lee Alcorn’s reactions to the vice-presidential selection recently earned him a suspension and repudiation by national NAACP leadership. Wired, Washington Post

Death Row Roll Call has a calendar of the executions scheduled for the current month. Death penalty opponents or those concerned about a particular death sentence can click on the name of a condemned prisoner to send letters to the pertinent governor requesting a stay of execution. The Nation

Boom Box. Buy TiVo or ReplayTV (the set-top “black boxes” with hard drives that promise the ultimate in TV-viewing convenience) and destroy the mass-marketing economy, the author begins by saying, because they perfect the promise of the VCR to allow time-shifting and skipping commercials. (By the way, if you’re buying one of these, Replay has a true instantaneous 30-second skip button, the length of a typical commercial, while TiVo just has fast-, faster- and fastest-forward so you still waste your time being exposed to a subliminal version of the advertising content. The mass marketers got to TiVo in time, but not to Replay.) But then he goes wrong and focuses for the rest of the article on the way these boxes spy on you, collecting a precise profile of your viewing tastes — not hour-by-hour so much as second-by-second. In fact, the set-top boxes themselves are being sold at an enormous loss with the real profit coming from TiVO’s and Replay’s data-mining. And he doesn’t bat an eye at the privacy implications of this; his point is that it will destroy the mass-market economy, both promising and requiring true targeted niche advertising and “boutique” marketing.

Here’s where I think the yarn he spins is built on a specious premise. It’s likely you won’t be able to opt out of having your demographics reported back, and certainly most Americans are not concerned enough (about their privacy and the battle for their minds waged by advertisers and the commercial concerns they represent) to resist buying these things if they make TV viewing so much more convenient. So predictions of their massive penetration into viewers’ households over the next decade are probably accurate. (I won’t be buying one — unless someone figures a way to opt out iof, or hack out, the bidirectionality — because (a) my family and I are just not that interested in convenient TV viewing, and we don’t believe there’s ever going to be worthwhile content as long as the point of programming remains selling advertising time; (b) we won’t collaborate so readily in becoming passive consumer pawns (hell, we won’t even use a supermarket discount card because we realize that it’s not the savings, stupid, the real point of them is to track your buying habits); and (c) we can effectively program a VCR.) However, why count on the fact that a viewer will wait around looking at a commercial interruption to their favorite show long enough to even find out it targets their interests? Data indicate that 88% of commercials are killed right now by current users of these boxes, and I wouldn’t expect that to change. And there doesn’t appear to be anything about the technology that requires a bidirectional connection; sooner or later someone will begin selling a passive equivalent that connects downstream of your cable box and doesn’t upload data, just to make a good old-fashioned hardware profit as a new improved successor to the VCR. Finally, if mass-advertising on TV is dead in the water in the absence of perfect targeted niche advertising, it won’t mean the end of mass-marketing and the mass marketers as much as just a shift in their advertising media, much as big tobacco has survived after the ban on TV ads. This technology, if it kills anything, is more likely to be the death knell of the networks than the mass marketing economy. Sunday New York Times Magazine

‘Clueless’ at Sea… Again

Dead in the water. Catastrophic die-offs of native lobsters after New York began insecticide spraying to prevent West Nile virus outbreak. New Scientist

San Franciscans fight plan for glitzy museum. “…a kitschy, Las Vegas-style tourist trap…”

Visitors. New York artists salivate over the London art scene, by comparison.

“In a twist of ethical irony, media

custodian Steven Brill’s Web venture

Contentville has repelled many writers,

editors and academics since it debuted

July 5. Writers are claiming that Brill is

selling their copyrighted articles by

licensing them through little-known

library archiving companies that now

want a piece of the e-commerce booty.

The e-commerce site — also funded by

Microsoft, NBC, CBS and Primedia —

promises that readers will rejoice at its

menu of books, articles, TV transcripts

and old speeches, for sale starting at $2.95

each. But creators and publishers are

accusing Brill of turning a blind eye as

partners EBSCO (magazine articles) and

Bell & Howell (dissertations) seemingly

stretched the terms of licensing clauses…” Feed

First draft of McCain’s R2K speech:

“Dick, I remember after your second — maybe your third —

heart attack, I remember visiting you in the convalescent

center. You looked so sickly my friend, like you weren’t

going to make it, and I remember we had a real

heart-to-heart. In addition to talking with you about your

DUI conviction, your five military deferments during the

Vietnam War, and your votes against outlawing cop-killer

bullets and plastic guns, we talked about how much you

love your country, and in particular how much you love its

oil.

America, Dick, needs you.” Salon

Review: The many meanings of ‘Nymphomania’. A social history of the concept. Have we managed to immprove on Kinsey’s quip: “A nymphomaniac is someone who has more sex

than you do” ? CNN.com

Rights for People, Not for Cultures. Should cultures have an intrinsic right to survive? What does cultural survival mean, in fact?

Play about my life is stupid, says Hawking. The cosmologist has attacked the forthcoming

play God and Stephen Hawking as “deeply offensive,

stupid and worthless.”

Rethinking the Dancing Mania. Thoughtful essay by Australian sociologist on the dancing frenzies that swept Europe during the Middle Ages. Psychopathology? Mass hysteria? Deviant religious sects? Ergot poisoning? Skeptical Inquirer

Self-destruct: Many difficult diseases with which modern medicine grapples are autoimmune. It’s been fruitful to seek infections that may precipitate the autoimmune attack on a body’s organs. Now it appears that “infection with a rotavirus, the commonest cause of

gastro-enteritis in children, may lead to childhood diabetes.

Although this suggests that rotavirus vaccines could help

prevent diabetes, it also raises fears that the vaccines

themselves could trigger the disease.” New Scientist

A game of polo with a headless goat, kiss-the-girl-or-get-horsewhipped, and other excitements. The Sunday Times of London

Give It Away. “…while the U.S. media

represent France as silly, U.S. academics seek out

those French thinkers who seem to fit the bill.

As a result, some of the most interesting scholars

in France today you never hear about at all.” David Graeber, a Yale anthropologist, profiles the Maussians. In These Times

Decline and Fall (cont’d.): The Taste of Fear. Village Voice profile of the new phenomenon of “surfing” atop New York City subway trains. So far in 2000, three deaths and two critically injuries are identified with the practice.

Ripples and Puddles (Hans Moravec): “Like little ripples on the surface of a deep,

turbulent pool, calculation and other kinds of

procedural thought are possible only when the

turbulence is quelled. Humans achieve quiescence

imperfectly by intense concentration. Much easier

to discard the pesky abyss altogether: ripples are

safer in a shallow pan. Numbers are better

manipulated as calculus stones or abacus beads

than in human memory.” Edge

The Jedediahs vs. the Daves: Does Irony Illuminate Or Corrupt? Stop me if I get too ironic; I agree with this essayist that most irony-mongers use it to convey an insupportable superiority, an attempt at a wink of the eye at an audience only too happy to share in the knowing joke. New York Times

“The police are everywhere,” said one Los Angeles resident.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever seen the LAPD walking the beat.” Reuters

Peruvian Plant Extracts Active Against TB, Other Diseases. A medical research team from Washington University, two Peruvian universities, and the GD Searle pharmaceutical company collaborating wiht the Aguaruna, an indigenous people of Peru, have found that extracts from more than 40% of plants identified by the Aguaruna as having healing properties were active in pharmacological assays. Searle will develop drugs from the medicinal plants under study.

Man Given Wish to Die When Eye Blink Fails

A British judge has granted a 19 y.o. man severely

disabled with motor neuron disease his wish to die when he loses his final means of

communicating by blinking his left eye, newspapers said Friday. Reuters

‘Clueless’ at Sea… Again

Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): Road rage taken to new a level (8/10/2000). On a back road near St. Paul MN, a man gave the finger to an erratic driver who swerved to hit him when he passed the weaving car. He was followed home and, with a ring on the doorbell half an hour later, had a cup of acid thrown in his face. Police still seek the monster who did this. [via Obscure Store]

Reno to commission outside review of

FBI’s e-mail surveillance software . “The Justice

Department will contract a major university to conduct an independent analysis of the FBI’s

“Carnivore” e-mail surveillance system, Attorney General Janet Reno said Thursday.” UCSD is being considered. Nando Times

Netscape 6 preview release 2 is out. I can’t get bookmarks to work right. Netscape plans one more beta release this year before releasing the final by the

end of the year. Wired

A brief guide to post-’60’s American fiction: The introductory chapter to The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors.

Anne Applebaum, a London political columnist working on a history of Soviet concentration camps, writes about Russia’s Dying Democracy

But if

there was any silver lining to the chaos and corruption of the

Yeltsin years, it was that at least something resembling a free

press together with what was starting to look like democratic

political parties remained in their wake. Now, although some

elements of informal civil society are still intact …, the press is less and less free and the

democratic politicians are vanishing fast. Why destroy them?

Couldn’t economic reform have been carried out within the

framework of democracy?

Clearly, Putin thinks not. And the dangers are clear. While some

in the West will applaud any attempt to force through some

economic reform, Putin’s elimination of his potential opponents

leaves open not only the possibility of a relatively benign, even

“progressive” dictatorship, but for far less benign future

dictatorships led, perhaps, by Putin’s assassin, or by his

bodyguard, or whoever. When the palace coup happens, nobody

will be around to object.

Slate

The fight to free the West Memphis 3: “Six years after the conviction of three young men in the

‘Paradise Lost’ triple homicide, a burgeoning movement

insists they’re innocent.” I was convinced after I saw the first film several years ago…Salon

Vegetarian Mothers Have More Girls. “A British study of how diet affects the health of

new mothers and their babies produced the surprise finding that

vegetarian women are more likely to have girls, one of the report’s

authors said on Tuesday.”

Top 10 Morose Records of all time, by NME. Joy Division have two albums on the list.

Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): Chrome Wheels May Have Led to Family’s Killing. “An Arizona teenager has been

charged with the brutal killing of a woman and her two young

children — a crime that may have been committed for the chrome

wheels from the victim’s Ford Thunderbird. Police say the killings appear to have been the result of a carjacking on Friday in the parking lot of

the family’s Tucson apartment complex. The mother’s body was found in the lot at about 4:30

p.m.; the (6- and 7-year-old) children’s bodies were discovered about a half-hour later… a

short drive away.”

Oh, what a pity: Lilly Set Back by Appeals Court Ruling on Prozac. The company’s proprietary rights protecting it against generic competitors are not extended through 2003 as it had hoped. Competing versions might appear in the marketplace as soon as Feb. 2001.

What’s at Stake in the Verizon Strike? Does organized labor have a place in the “new economy”? Slate

Pinochet Ruled No Longer Immune From Prosecution. Despite this unprecedented ruling, Pinochet is still a long way from being prosecuted and the country is gearing up for a fight about whether his health shold preclude his standing trial or even being examined for fitness to stand trial in the first place. The decision pits the administration of President Ricardo Lagos — the first Socialist in power since Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973 — against the hierarchical military, not in the least because it clears the way for many other prosecution of Pinochet-era officers. The court ruled that the “Desaparecidos” of the junta era be considerd kidnappped and that, since the kidnappings are still in progress, the crimes are exempt from the amnesty Pinochet declared on political crimes during the early years of his rule. The military warns that vulnerability to prosecution may dissuade them from coming forward with any information they may have on the Disappeareds, as they had previously promised to do. Could we be heading for another right-wing overthrow of a democratic Socialist Chilean government? New York Times

Why It Sounded So Familiar . Former Clinton speechwriter says Bush echoes both themes and specific language from Clinton speeches. Washington Post

Armed Occupation at Vodka Plant.

Two rival directors

backed by armed guards occupied different

wings of the company that makes

Stolichnaya vodka today, in a dispute for

control over one of Russia’s most

renowned distilleries. ABC News

The Surrealist Compliment Generator, e.g.: “An ocean-going tin of crosseyed mussels could never match the melodious burblings of

your sister’s husband.”

Democrats’ lecture to Hollywood angers industry leaders. The “Responsible Entertainment” provision in the “Valuing Our Families” section of the Democratic Platform, asking Hollywood to tone down its product, is another example of how the Democrats strategy to beat the Republicans is apparently to be better Republicans.

Alot that’s of interest in the New York Times tonight, as you’ll see from the blinks below. Jorn Barger is suggesting that unregistered users may have to use “http://channel.nytimes.com…” instead of “…www10.nytimes…” Since I’m registered with ’em, there’s no way for me to tell if “www10” is still working. Can somebody please let me know? Thanks…

Coke Wars, Texas Style

IBM’s Linux-powered wristwatch PDA: “…no ordinary wristwatches, however. On one hand, they’re bulkier, and the

rechargeable lithium-polymer battery lasts only two to four days. Yet the watches have as much

memory and storage space as an older desktop computer. In two years, IBM expects battery life to

improve to last several months…

About two-dozen of the prototypes have been created so far. The watches run on an ARM-based

EP7211 processor made by Cirrus Logic and have 8MB of memory to run programs and 8MB of flash

memory to substitute for a hard disk. The watches also include an infrared and wireless radio

connection and a touch-screen display. The watch can tell time and has a calendar and to-do list that

can remind the wearer of appointments…” A photo is here.

How Culture Molds Habits of Thought. Richard Nisbett’s work indicates that culture shapes not only the content of thought but manner of thinking — degree of tolerance for ambiguity, distribution of attention among foreground and context, linearity, categorization, induction vs. deduction, etc. While there is a long and venerable (although not mainstream) tradition of speculation that this is true, Nisbett’s work is apparently the first based on tighly-controlled empirical investigation. This New York Times article highlights one interesting implication —

When it came to interpreting events in the social world, the

Asians seemed similarly sensitive to context, and quicker

than the Americans to detect when people’s behavior was

determined by situational pressures.

Psychologists have long documented what they call the

fundamental attribution error, the tendency for people to

explain human behavior in terms of the traits of individual

actors, even when powerful situational forces are at work.

Told that a man has been instructed to give a speech

endorsing a particular presidential candidate, for example,

most people will still believe that the speaker believes what

he is saying.

Yet Asians, according to Dr. Nisbett and his colleagues, may

in some situations be less susceptible to such errors,

indicating that they do not describe a universal way of

thinking, but merely the way that Americans think.

Think, for example, about McCain’s endorsement of George W. last week at the convention.

A Nuclear War Feared Possible Over Kashmir Secret U.S. intelligence estimates after the Kargil incident lie behind President Clinton’s recent pronouncements that the Indian subcontinent is “the most dangerous place in the world.” Kargil showed that the bilateral presence of nuclear armaments has not acted as a deterrent against new conflicts. Analysts also warn that the expected expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal if the U.S. builds the National Missile Defense would add further momentum to the Indian-Pakistani arms race. The continuing demonstration of American contempt for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty also cripples U.S. plausibility in asking, as Clinton did when he recently addressed the Indian parliament, that the combatants abandon their nuclear arsenals. We’ve also lost leverage over Pakistan and probably nadvertently fueled its nuclear ambitions by failing to resume economic and military

assistance to Pakistan that Congress cut off in 1990 because

of the Pakistani nuclear program, according to former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Robert Oakley. It appears that each country could deliver in the vicinity of twenty-five atomic weapons to the other’s population centers by bomber and/or missile. New York Times

Palm Introduces New Models. Hoping to become the must-have style accessory for the less-geeky fashion-conscious… New York Times

Big Apple Circus Cries Foul as Ringling Bros. Introduces a Competing Holiday Show

The skinny on the West Nile virus, and what to expect from it: ‘…the current frenzied focus on

West Nile will ebb eventually, and it will be added to the

growing list of diseases on the fringe – never as familiar as

flu or rabies or even meningitis, but something always to

consider when a bird dies, or an old man spikes a fever in

the summertime.

“It will become one of the diseases in America that we have

to watch for. And we should be getting

ready for the next one.” ‘ New York Times