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

Reading Glasses, as Inevitable as Death and Taxes. Or Are They?

“Finding a better fix for presbyopia is rapidly becoming the

Holy Grail of experimental ophthalmology, especially as

researchers and entrepreneurs begin to calculate the profits

that might accrue from curing an annoyance affecting every

single adult in the population.

But the basic disagreements as to why the process occurs

have meant that viable solutions are slow to emerge, and

are extremely controversial when they do.” New York Times

New Tactic in Physics: Hiding the Answer. Observer bias may turn out to be as much of a problem in particle physics as in the human sciences, and physicists are resorting to a version of the time-honored “double-blind” methodology to protect their objectivity. New York Times

“Cyberterrorists”? Are you listening? Here’s your roadmap. ZDNet

The Perseid meteor shower peaks on August 12 and coincides with a moonset spectacle. “This year the bright, nearly-full Moon

will outshine the Perseids most of the night, but

for an hour between moonset and sunrise on

Saturday morning, star gazers could witness a

brief but beautiful meteor shower. The setting

Moon may put on a show of its own Saturday.

Wildfires and dust storms have filled parts of

our atmosphere with aerosols. A low-hanging Moon

seen through such dusty air can take on a

beautiful pink or orange hue.”

Gender-based differences in response to stress tied to hormonal influence. Testosterone governs “fight or flight”, and oxytocin mitigates for “tend and befriend,” reports new research. USA Today

R.I.P. Sir Alec Guinness, at 86. This New York Times obituary mentions all the right things — Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Ladykillers, Tunes of Glory, Bridge on the River Kwai — as well as the Obi-Wan Kenobi roles for which most remember him most recently. I’ve cherished other aspects of his craft as well — his TV characterizations of one of my favorite characters, John Le Carre’s George Smiley; and the film version of one of my favorite novels, Joyce Carey’s The Horse’s Mouth, in which he not only nailed the central role on the head but wrote the screenplay. I wish I’d seen some of his Shakespearean stage acting.

Of Sir Alec’s acting technique, Kenneth Tynan, the late critic,

writer and director, once said:

My point is that the people

Guinness plays best are all iceberg characters, nine-tenths

concealed, whose fascination lies not in how they look but in

how their minds work. The parts he plays are, so to speak,

injected hypodermically, not tattooed all over him; the

latter is the star’s way, and Guinness shrinks from it.

Sir Alec, I’ll miss you and treasure your memory. I’m heading out to the video store…

I didn’t realize it, but my dial-up access is into the first ISP.

Anti-Breastfeeding Lobby in Force at R2K. ‘ “Breast-feeding is an immoral act,” he

deadpanned. “It leaves people with an oral

fixation. And the worst part of it is, the child

doesn’t have a choice.” ‘ Not clear if this was for real or a hoax [via Obscure Store]

Ron Reagan Less Than a Fan of George W.

“The big elephant sitting in the corner is that George W. Bush is

simply unqualified for the job. He’s probably the least qualified person ever to be nominated by

a major party. …What is his accomplishment? That he’s no longer an

obnoxious drunk?

“The defining moment for me was his Karla

Faye Tucker smirk, joking about a woman he would put to

death. No adult would ever do that. It wouldn’t even cross the

mind of a grown-up to joke about something like that.”

Washington Post

Corpse beheading not a shock to all. A man in Toldeo asked for a few minutes alone with the body of his uncle, then used a handsaw to behead the corpse and take the head home. Reportedly psychiatrically ill, he had published a flyer some time ago describing a method of resurrecting a loved one by consuming their brain.

Allegedly, William Gibson’s screenplay for Neuromancer, circa 1990. [via Null Device]

Motorola unveils Web-enabled car device. “The carmakers are betting that millions of drivers will be willing to pay as much as $30 a month for the Internet-access gadgets, which are

expected to be standard equipment in all new cars by 2004 or 2005.” Nando Times

Among the Mooks “As entertainment entrepreneurs align the fantasy

lands of rap, rock, wrestling and pornography, a

generation of fans grows ever more brutish.” It doesn’t exactly make its case; some of what this obviously scared and appalled observer finds “brutish” is just “different”, but on the other hand there’s plenty of “brutish” too. New York Times Magazine

Outrage over Holocaust remarks “A prominent religious leader in Israel has
caused outrage by referring to the six million
victims of the Holocaust as “reincarnated
sinners”.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who heads the country’s
third biggest political party, made the remarks
at a religious gathering in Jerusalem on
Saturday.”

Straight to the Point: “Cuban

President Fidel Castro today called George

W. Bush and Al Gore the most “boring and

insipid” presidential candidates the United

States could possibly have.” ABC

Breathe Deep To Get High. It’s widely known that the lack of oxygen in aircraft cabins contributes to the majority of air travel

woes, including tiredness, dehydration, rapid drunkenness, and most of all, air rage. However, what

few people also realise is how dramatically this cabin environment can affect their lungs.

In commercial aircraft, air pressure is rarely equal to that at sea

level. At cruising height (generally around 10,000 meters), pressurised

cabins allow comfortable respiration, but the oxygen content is only

the equivalent of the air breathed at an altitude of 2400 meters.

There are some engineering issues behind this, but it is mostly due to

penny-pinching on the part of the airlines. Pilots are routinely

instructed to disengage some of the equipment responsible for

bringing fresh air into the aircraft, meaning that a high-proportion of the air inside the plane is being

re-breathed. Shutting off the equipment means the engines don’t have to work as hard, thus saving fuel

costs.

Beyond 2000

America’s New hangup: Cell Phone Rudeness: “…seething

bystanders have had it up to here with the constant rrring of the

brave new wireless world.” CNN

Advertise your favorite mortal sin(s).

Comparison of online Ulysses editions Jorn Barger’s labor of love is finally complete.

The Dawn of Micropower: “Small, local power plants offer a cheap way into (recently deregulated)

markets. Even if the power they produce is more costly

at source—which it often is—they do not suffer huge

transmission losses when sending it to consumers. On

top of that, the surplus heat they generate can be

employed for useful purposes, such as warming

buildings, whereas that from big generators located in

the middle of the countryside is usually wasted. The

result is that local power generation has now become

economically competitive.

A second reason for the rise of micropower is

environmentalism. Ever-higher emission standards have

made it unattractive to build new coal-fired plants in the

rich world. ” The demand for uninterruptible reliable power in the face of more frequent brownouts and blackouts will also help to make micropower attractive in the U.S. The Economist

Massachusetts man charged with stealing human corneas. He says he thought the foam package was filled with lobsters.

“Hollering fire in a crowded theater”

The FBI’s chief negotiator during the Waco siege says

critics and conspiracy theorists are sowing dangerous

discord. He dismisses the 1997 documentary “Waco: The Rules of Engagement” (which presents evidence that the government fired first) as tantamont to fiction, and he says the Danforth report exonerating the government deserves to be taken at face value. Salon

Beware of geeks bearing gifts: “Microsoft’s

decision to slash the price of the

Windows Millennium Edition

upgrade from $89 to $59 — a whopping 33 percent savings

— made headlines this week. But the public should beware

of geeks bearing gifts. Windows Me has some significant

improvements, but for most users those improvements do

not justify the pain and potential dangers they will face with

this upgrade. Microsoft can lower the price of Windows Me

and give it a few great features, but it can’t fundamentally

make Me a better operating system than Windows 95,

because of underlying technical flaws with the whole

Windows operating environment.” Salon

Philadelphia police spokespeeople call the allegations a mixture of exaggerations, half-truths and flat-out lies, but protesters’ reports of police brutality seem widespread and consistent. Salon The Philadelphia Independent Media Center (IMC)is a collective of journalists and independent media organizations continuing to cover the condition of the jailed protesters. The LA IMC is up and running with pre-convention coverage of ‘D2K.’ And the Boston IMC notes that organizing for a response to the first major Presidential debate, scheduled for Bsoton on October 3, is proceeding. And a disorganized group of hackers helped reporters cover police activity around the convention. Wired

Man says cell phone makers caused his brain tumor

Dr. Christopher Newman, a Maryland neurologist, has filed an $800 million lawsuit

against a number of cell phone makers claiming that the mobile phones that they

made caused a malignant tumor in his brain.

Massachusetts man charged with stealing human corneas. He says he thought the foam package was filled with lobsters.

Anarchism, the Creed That Won’t Stay Dead. ‘The protests have often been condemned in the mainstream

news media as imbecilic and chaotic, all action and no

theory. But that is also an anarchist trait. Its adherents have

long been dismissed as uneducated and unwashed.

Anarchism’s most memorable slogan, coined by Enrico

Malatesta of Italy, is “propaganda by deed.”

“With the decline of socialism, you have seen anarchism go

through a revival as an easy way to oppose global

capitalism,” said Paul Avrich, a leading historian of anarchism

who teaches at Queens College in New York.’ New York Times

Flu vaccine shortage prompts US to test half-doses

NASA satellites monitor western wildfires from space

As soot-covered firefighters face the billowing roar and crackle of the convulsing

flames on Earth, NASA’s Earth Probe satellite hangs in the silence of space

monitoring the plumes of smoke 740 km below.

Every few hours, a global map of smoke and other aerosols detected by Earth

Probe are updated at the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) web site.

Better Living Standards, Childhood Leukemia Linked

“Leukemia cases among young British children

are increasing and doctors suspect improved living standards

could be the cause.

Youngsters are exposed to fewer common infections than they used to be so their immune

systems are weaker and not as good at combating illnesses, British researchers said Friday.”

Humphrey Bogart And Marilyn Monroe, Sort Of

“A futuristic mafia drama set on a spaceship

and starring celluloid greats Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe

would be the greatest movie ever, according to a survey by

online retailer Amazon.co.uk.”

POPULATION: 1 Old Rancher and The Manson Family

“Thirty years ago, a census taker had a brush with weirdness on the Spahn Ranch.”

Eight blacklisted Hollywood writers finally get screen credits for their work.

Parental Discretion: “A simple question no one seems to want to ask: If Dick

Cheney loves and is proud of his openly lesbian

daughter, why is he supporting a man who wants her to

live under the threat of criminal sanction? It’s no secret

that Governor George W. Bush has publicly supported

Texas’s still-extant gays-only sodomy law, which makes

private, consensual sex between gay adults a crime.

Does Cheney agree with his running mate’s position?” The New Republic

Aim 7 million cameras at a vacuous event, and it’s still

vacuous.

I couldn’t believe how pitiful it was. Bo Derek honored to be reading scripted comments at the Republican convention, and tongue tripping over some token Spanish. And, no less pitiful, this National Review columnist complaining that the celebrity decks are stacked so far to the left that poor old Bo just won’t be enough to sway the tide:

Sadly, this isn’t going to be enough, and even more sadly, this matters. In

our tranquil, ill-educated times, showbiz sets not only the cultural, but the

political agenda. The drip, drip, drip of a predominantly liberal message

in the movies, TV, and the other entertainment media is bound to wear

through to the ballot box. We saw this in Britain, where a hostile cultural

scene proved to be the harbinger of the crushing Conservative defeat in

the 1997 election. Writing in the London Sunday Times the following

year, the newspaper’s then-resident leftist, the writer Robert Harris, noted

— with, probably, some satisfaction — that he couldn’t think of one

single “important” British writer or, for that matter, a film director, theater

director, composer (“apart from Lord Lloyd Webber”), actor, or painter

who was a Conservative.

As Mr. Harris went on to point out, “the entertainment and fashion

industries are now two of the biggest economic sectors in the world.

Never have we lived in a time more conscious of style, and never in

democratic history has it been less stylish to be on the right.”

Now, he was writing in a British context, but, like it or not, it’s not too

difficult to see the same process gathering pace over here. It’s not going

to be easy to reverse. On this battlefield, the Right are simply too few.

Eugene Kennedy’s long investigative report Mike Barnicle and American Twilight

on the Boston Globe‘s poorly justified firing of the outspoken commentator two years ago. Barnicle was by many accounts the most popular Globe columnist, offending many by tweaking their political correctness left and right. Kennedy feels it was one particular Globe editor’s self-serving hypocrisy that brought Barnicle down over a non-issue without an adequate opportunity to defend himself. It deserves looking at again since the Globe just did something seemingly similar to Jeff Jacoby, their only columnist with conservative credentials.

“That’s American twilight: Being found half guilty in the half light that’s too dim to

illuminate the whole truth, the truth that is complex while accusations are simple and

live forever on the Internet. Dusk is a great equalizer, right and wrong, honor and

dishonor, they look the same after sundown.” Jim Romenesko’s Media News

Tensions Cool in Philadelphia Streets. No ‘days of rage’ for Philadelphia 2000, says the mainstream press (it would be interesting to hear the perspective of the demonstrators). The police commissioner said: “They were folks who came here hell-bent on causing disruption. The Philadelphia Police Department is in control of the situation. Make no mistake about that.” The nascent new movement — energetic and focused, spontaneous and decentralized — touted in the aftermath of the WTO and IMF showings does not appear much in evidence. In fact, some protesters were quoted explaining that the protests had petered out because “their leaders” had been jailed early on. Strategists of the movement have offered that they will be targeting the Democratic convention in more force, because the Democrats are more prone to listen and be influenced by their agenda. Meanwhile, the one moment of any controversy on the convention floor almost seemed more than what fizzled on outside.

Judge Sets FBI Email Scanning Disclosure. The judge has granted the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s request for expedited processing of its Freedom of Information Act inquiry into the inner workings of ‘Carnivore’, after Janet Reno had decreed that the details would only be revealed to a “group of experts.” EPIC and ACLU say the tremendous potential for violation of constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure mitigates for full and open disclosure of how Carnivore works. Once installed at an ISP site by court order, it “sniffs” or scans all traffic through the site, although the FBI assures us that only data related to criminal activity is filtered in and reviewed. How good are the FBI’s programmers at writing ‘perfect’ search filters? how invested?

Giant Trap Set for Monster in Lake. Scientists hope to net Nessie’s Norwegian cousin Selma.

Web Site Asks for Donated DNA Samples, appeals to donors’ altruism to help it build a DNA database it hopes will allow correlation between medical conditions and genetic loci. ‘The privately held company will use the data to “offer several products and services” to

other firms and research facilities, another section of the Web site explains. Among other

revenue-generating projects, the firm intends to “provide aggregate health and genetic

information to outside research facilities,” and to “sell and/or lease clinically useful genetic

associations to public and private research and product development institutions.” ‘

Fidgeting is neat

What to Do About All the Uncompassionate Conservatives? “Reject immediately this absurd notion that the

Republican convention lacks drama. For starters, there’s the extremely

dramatic ideological cosmetology. The Republicans want to show they

are compassionate conservatives, but that means they have to do

something with all the folks who are … you know … uncompassionate

conservatives.” Washington Post

Acme Klein Bottle:

“These are the finest closed,

non-orientable, boundary-free

manifolds sold anywhere in our three

spatial dimensions.”

CNET.com page of downloads of Napster alternatives

J.S. Bach, Man of the Ear: On the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, an attempt to grapple with how challenging it is to listen to his work.

Woven of independent and self-sufficient

musical lines that interact with split-second imitations and

sinuous counterpoint, his multiple-voiced works unsettle the mind

because, even at their simplest, there seems to be more

happening than can be comprehended through mere listening. His

fugues make us want to reach for the remote and stop time, so as

to untangle and hold up for scrutiny the passing show of musical

logic.

What happens to Bach’s music between the notes on the page

and what we hear remains enigmatic. There have been periodic

attempts to define the larger, sociological resonance of his

music, attempts to answer the question, “How do we as a society

hear Bach?”

…All of this lies to the side of the most troubling and most

rewarding aspect of Bach’s music: that its complexity still

terrifies us like no other body of composition. Bach remains the

intimidating composer par excellence. His contrapuntal

complexity has become synonymous with the very definition of

profundity in music. Composers seeking to demonstrate depth in

their work–from Beethoven to Liszt to Shostakovich–turn to the

fugue, a highly ordered work of multiple interacting lines of

counterpoint, as if it were the only form adequate to express the

most serious imagination.

Washington Post

Australia’s monetary policy body plagued by gnomes blocking front steps of building where it meets monthly.

It’s going to be a little harder to be a big man on the stock exchange floor.

Presumed twin removed from 4-month-old boy’s belly, Cairo newspaper reports.

The Call From the Wild . Stories of cell phone calls saving lives in the wilderness are becoming common, yet using a cell phone in the backcountry risks raising the hackles of other climbers or backpackers. Objections arise from the aesthetic violation of the isolation of the wilderness, the perception that having a cell phone facilitates a backcountry traveller taking more risks than is prudent, and the wastefulness of unnecessary search and rescue missions “resulting from frightened people giving in to the temptation to call when they get tired or lost, instead of relying on themselves.” Washington Post

Cold War Oncology – Bismuth-213, part of the decay chain from uranium-233 left over from weapons-grade uranium stockpiles at Oak Ridge TN, may be a boon to cancer chemotherapy.

Planet lovers campaign to save Pluto Express – NASA’s first unmanned expedition to Pluto and the Kuiper disc is threatened with cancellation, partly because of the two failed missions to Mars. The Planetary Society wants its 10,000 members to lobby Congress to preserve the Pluto trip.

The letter carrier wants to know your email address. If you sign up for this service the U.S. Postal Service wants to offer, your existing email address will be cross-referenced in a giant USPO database with your street address. Anyone could send you an email if all they know about you is your snailmail address. Think about the spam possibilities! ZDNet

Please Change Beliefs is conceptual artist Jenny Holzer’s May ’99 web installation. Holzer’s subversive aphorisms are playing a prominent part at the anti-Republican demonstrations in Philadelphia, acording to news sources. Artcyclopedia

World War II prisoner emerges. He is presumed to be a Hungarian thought to have died in WWII but in reality incarcerated in a Russian mental hospital for the 55 years since. Piecing together the story is complicated, however, since he is confused and does not recall who he is or what happened to him. This man never learned Russian and can barely speak his native Hungarian; he has had no one to speak to since another prisoner’s release twenty years ago. BBC

Sounds like a plot from one of those tacky Indian films…

National Abortion Rights Action League’s factsheet on the record of Republican vice-presidential nominee Dick Cheney: “During his ten years in the U.S. House of Representatives, former

Rep. Cheney cast 27 votes on abortion and reproductive rights. Of

that number, 26 were anti-choice votes.” The details follow.

Fusing Beauty and Terror, Reverence and Desecration: The Fallen Concorde. “Critic’s notebook” commentary in the New York Times. Abit over-the-top but has a useful punchline. “The Concorde crash,

in other words, ought to shock people out of retro ways of

thinking in all spheres of culture.”

Asylum Plea by Chinese Sect’s Leader Perplexes the U.S.. We either deny asylum and turn a religious leader over to persecution, or we grant it and tell the Chinese we harbor elements they find offensive. Complicating the matter further, China has accused him of criminal activities. The U.S. and China have no extradition treaty, so it appears to be a matter of U.S. discretion. New York Times

Break all the rules. In the last year, researchers have begun to suspect that the speed of light has slowed since the big bang.

One argument in support of a changing light speed is the fact that temperature

and density are relatively uniform across the Universe. There’s no way such far-flung corners of space can be causally

connected unless light once travelled faster than it does now.

Now theoreticians argue that, if this is true, it requires that electric charge must have appeared out of nowhere.

…If the speed of light isn’t

constant, then charge conservation–another central tenet of physics–will be violated. One way to understand their proof is to think of

light as a wave of oscillating electromagnetic fields with an associated electric current shuttling charge back and forth. If the speed of

the wave falls, the associated current will deposit charge faster than it picks it up, resulting in a net creation of positive charge.

If the speed of light were falling gradually as the universe expands, we would expect to see evidence of the violation of charge conservation, which we don’t. But, if the decrease in the speed of light occurred rapidly in the first seconds after the big bang and has stayed constant since then, it might account for another vexing problem in cosmology — the apparent asymmetry the universe has in terms of favoring matter over antimatter. New Scientist

Break all the rules. In the last year, researchers have begun to suspect that the speed of light has slowed since the big bang.

One argument in support of a changing light speed is the fact that temperature

and density are relatively uniform across the Universe. There’s no way such far-flung corners of space can be causally

connected unless light once travelled faster than it does now.

Now theoreticians argue that, if this is true, it requires that electric charge must have appeared out of nowhere.

…If the speed of light isn’t

constant, then charge conservation–another central tenet of physics–will be violated. One way to understand their proof is to think of

light as a wave of oscillating electromagnetic fields with an associated electric current shuttling charge back and forth. If the speed of

the wave falls, the associated current will deposit charge faster than it picks it up, resulting in a net creation of positive charge.

If the speed of light were falling gradually as the universe expands, we would expect to see evidence of the violation of charge conservation, which we don’t. But, if the decrease in the speed of light occurred rapidly in the first seconds after the big bang and has stayed constant since then, it might account for another vexing problem in cosmology — the apparent asymmetry the universe has in terms of favoring matter over antimatter. New Scientist

Break all the rules. In the last year, researchers have begun to suspect that the speed of light has slowed since the big bang.

One argument in support of a changing light speed is the fact that temperature

and density are relatively uniform across the Universe. There’s no way such far-flung corners of space can be causally

connected unless light once travelled faster than it does now.

Now theoreticians argue that, if this is true, it requires that electric charge must have appeared out of nowhere.

…If the speed of light isn’t

constant, then charge conservation–another central tenet of physics–will be violated. One way to understand their proof is to think of

light as a wave of oscillating electromagnetic fields with an associated electric current shuttling charge back and forth. If the speed of

the wave falls, the associated current will deposit charge faster than it picks it up, resulting in a net creation of positive charge.

If the speed of light were falling gradually as the universe expands, we would expect to see evidence of the violation of charge conservation, which we don’t. But, if the decrease in the speed of light occurred rapidly in the first seconds after the big bang and has stayed constant since then, it might account for another vexing problem in cosmology — the apparent asymmetry the universe has in terms of favoring matter over antimatter. New Scientist

Sting Stung by Abu-Jamal Claims. The pop artist gave a large check to the widow of the police officer Mumia Abu-Jamal has been convicted of killing after learning that his name has been used in support of Abu-Jamal without his consent, as a result of his opposition to the death penalty and work on behalf of Amnesty International. On the other hand, is it possible that he’s repudiating Abu-Jamal after police groups have called for boycotts of his recent tours and refused to work overtime duties at his shows; as with Springsteen, gearing up to attack him as a highly visible figurehead of anti-police sentiment?

Ladies in waiting. A mathematician argues that women should have twice as many public toilets as men. New Scientist

Break all the rules. In the last year, researchers have begun to suspect that the speed of light has slowed since the big bang.

One argument in support of a changing light speed is the fact that temperature

and density are relatively uniform across the Universe. There’s no way such far-flung corners of space can be causally

connected unless light once travelled faster than it does now.

Now theoreticians argue that, if this is true, it requires that electric charge must have appeared out of nowhere.

…If the speed of light isn’t

constant, then charge conservation–another central tenet of physics–will be violated. One way to understand their proof is to think of

light as a wave of oscillating electromagnetic fields with an associated electric current shuttling charge back and forth. If the speed of

the wave falls, the associated current will deposit charge faster than it picks it up, resulting in a net creation of positive charge.

If the speed of light were falling gradually as the universe expands, we would expect to see evidence of the violation of charge conservation, which we don’t. But, if the decrease in the speed of light occurred rapidly in the first seconds after the big bang and has stayed constant since then, it might account for another vexing problem in cosmology — the apparent asymmetry the universe has in terms of favoring matter over antimatter. New Scientist

Dancing with Death: “In the craziest of crazes, to pounding music,

Brazilian teenagers line up in nightclubs to

beat each other senseless in choreographed

fights: 60 children have been murdered in four

years.” The Irish Times

Isolated Bhutan turns on TV (7/22/2000). The San Jose Mercury goes for the one-year followup on the King of Bhutan’s June 1999 decision to allow television and the internet. And it isn’t a pretty sight.

They may have ‘made his day’, but is it festival material??? Nando Times

Court blocks ABC’s Kevorkian interview

A state appellate court has blocked ABC’s planned prison interview with

Jack Kevorkian, the assisted-suicide advocate jailed for helping a terminally ill man take his own life in 1998…

During the last two years, the state Department of Corrections has tightened restrictions on media access to prisoners and now bars all

televised interviews with inmates. ABC, backed by various news organizations, argued the restrictions violate the First Amendment.

Department spokesman Matt Davis said ABC’s interview proposal, which called for Walters and 10 other people to be admitted to the prison for

nine hours, demonstrated the possible disruptiveness of media access to prisons.

Nando Times

Ibuprofen reduces amyloid found in Alzheimer’s; may eventually find use to prevent the disease, a new study shows in a mouse model. There’s been evidence before; for example, it’s been observed that people who have been on chronic anti-inflammatory medication, e.g. for rheumatoid arthritis, have a lower rate of the dementing disease. However, many neurologists pooh pooh the idea.

New Scientist‘s coverage of the Concorde disaster notes that a 1996 study commissioned by the FAA advised of the Concorde’s vulnerability to the type of fuel tank fire that was probably involved in the current crash.

Billionaires for Bush (or Gore): Return on Investment [via RobotWisdom]

New Greenhouse Gas Identified, Potent and Rare (but Expanding). Trifluoromethyl sulfur pentafluoride (SF5 CF3) so far occurs in the atmosphere in a concentration of one part in ten trillion, but its concentration appears to be steadily rising and it traps heat more effectively than all other known greenhouse gases. What’s more, once produced, it probably takes over 1,000 years to break down. Its source is a mystery. Speculation hinges upon a secret military or industrial use or an inadvertent byproduct of some industrial process. The similar gas SF6 is used in electronics and weaponry production. New York Times

To Texas Farmers’ Burdens, Add the Grasshopper At least two of the ten plagues of the Old Testament story of Exodus — drought and “locusts” — have come back to bite George W.’s homeground this summer. Are we headed for the death of the firstborn? New York Times

San Diego District Attorney Offering Free DNA Testing

“The San Diego County district

attorney has begun a policy of offering free DNA testing

to prison inmates who say they were wrongly convicted and

would be exonerated by this increasingly common scientific

method.” This is the first time a DA’s office is volunteering the service, at $3000-5000 per test. They say that recent high-visibility accusations of prosecutorial misconduct against them have absolutely nothing to do with the offer. New York Times

Could a virus make you fat? A commn virus that causes respiratory symptoms also interferes with metabolism and causes fatty weight gain. In animal studies, infected animals fed the same as controls gain much more body fat; and in humans, 30% of obese people as compared with 5% of lean people show signs of having been infected with this virus. Could we give a childhood inoculation against obesity one day? BBC

Webmonkey’s MP3 Overview

I’ve been saying all week with relief that at least it’s not another Bush-Quayle ticket. Now: How Dick Cheney Is Like Dan Quayle by Timothy Noah Slate

The new issue of the Journal of Mundane Behavior is out, and has several worthwhile articles (and one impenetrable one which I’m not blinking). First, Validating Your Merit in Letters of Application for Employment: “We

find and describe five supporting sources that letter writers use to convince readers of their merit:

Self-report, important others, objective indicators, achievements, and previous roles and experiences.

The idea of introducing evidence to convince target people (e.g., potential employers) can be generalized

to any context in which actors seek to convince a judgmental audience about self-presentation claims.

This idea, which we label ‘self-validation,’ suggests that the ‘truth’ in self-presentation and in

applications for employment is not as clear as may be thought.” This could actually be useful in thinking about how to write these letters.

Tilting at Windmills Why physicians need to learn to be more mundane with their patients. We psychiatrists already understand this as the essence and the privilege of the way we interact with and help our patients. Journal of Mundane Behavior

The mundane and the limits of the human. About storytelling and its relationship with the mundane.

A useful way to think of the mundane is as a story that, we assume, does not need to be told. If something is mundane, we

assume, it is something with which everybody is so well acquainted that relating these details is not only boring but redundant.

The assumption that the mundane does not bear examining is the same assumption as that of a story that does not need telling.

But it is precisely these stories that we assume are so self-evident they don’t need to be told that play crucial roles in

determining who we are and, more crucially, what we exclude, silence and ignore in order to maintain this determination.

Considers the fascinating comeuppance anthropologist Elizabeth Bohannon (Shakespeare in the Bush) received when she explored her hypothesis of the universal resonance of Hamlet by telling the story to a group of elders of the Tiv, a West African tribe that had never heard of Shakespeare. Journal of Mundane Behavior

(Sort of) New Hacker Resource site: ‘Hacker News Network announced earlier this week that it will be merging its

website with the websites of its “parents,” L0pht Heavy Industries and @stake. All

three groups focused on improving knowledge about computer and Internet security,

and now the three related websites will consolidate to offer news analysis (currently

covered by Hacker News Network), security advisories, white papers, and tools

(currently offered by the L0pht), and comprehensive security services (from

@stake).’ Geek News

Boy says in court that family dog did rape him. In 1994, the then-7-y.o. boy’s mother was jailed for allegedly ramming an object into his rectum after he was incontinent of feces. She insisted that she didn’t do it and that her son had been raped by the family’s pit bull. Now, seven years later, the victim, who is now 14, says that that’s exactly what happened [via Romanesko’s Obscure Store].

Doctors back ‘controversial’ operation. Reports indicate that some severely emphysematous patients may benefit, counterintuitively, from surgery removing part of their lungs. BBC

Herbal supplement warning issued. A Maryland dermatologist, in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, warns that the lack of regulation of “natural” herbal remedies means they could contain a number of animal tissues that could spread BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), or “mad cow disease.”

West Nile virus found in Massachusetts, where I live. I logged below the news about the likely spread of the virus this summer, and I’d just been thinking aobut this when I got a mosquito bite earlier this week. Nando Times

Engaged. A new publicly accessible Well conference on weblogs and weblogging.

Lego Cthulu

Web Site Posts Secret CIA Briefing Papers “A secret CIA overview of the U.S. intelligence community prepared for visiting Japanese intelligence officials has been posted on an Internet site frequented by activists opposed to government secrecy, prompting security concerns among intelligence officials and their overseers on Capitol Hill. The CIA briefing, containing some sensitive information about budget trends and so-called “hard” intelligence target countries, appeared a week ago on Cryptome, an Internet site maintained by John Young.” Washington Post

Medicine Merchants: How Companies Stall Generics and Keep Themselves Healthy. “That is not what Congress envisioned in 1984 when it passed

a law intended to keep drug prices down by speeding up the

entry of generic drugs. The Drug Price Competition and

Patent Term Restoration Act was intended to foster

competition between brand and generic companies, and it

has. It was not supposed to prompt rivals to join hands in

keeping drugs off the market. ” New York Times

The First Church of the Last Laugh. “The world’s oldest religion, the world’s largest church. You may already be a member. To find out press here…”

Rabbi’s Comment on Senator Sparks Probe In a way, the infamous Jewish Defense League rears its ugly head again. “A rabbi from New York is

under investigation after he allegedly made death threats against

U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman during a cable television show,

officials said today.” The rabbi said that Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, is a traitor for not supporting release for Jonathan Pollard, serving a life sentence for spying for Israel.

Man Sues Over Arrest for Taping Police Chief. Are police in the course of their official duties protected by a right to privacy against their conversations being taped? A taper was wrongly arrested, a judge said, and the charge thrown out of court. Now the taper is bringing suit for wrongful arrest.

State Trooper Dies Of Hepatitis C, 19 years after he received an infected needle stick while while assisting in a drug arrest as a rookie.

Paper chase. Crime investigations hinging on the source of paper used for a ransom note, or identifying a page fraudulently inserted into a document, etc., are about to receive new assistance. A new technique efficiently utilizes mass spectrometry of trace elements found in a paper sample to reveal its unique chemical fingerprint. New Scientist

The Village Voice: Features: Protest 2000. Keynote article of a special, fat Voice section introduces the anti-globalization movement that flexed its muscle at the recent WTO and IMF meetings, and of which we’re about to hear alot more at the conventions. And here’s how to act up yourself.

Back from the brink. Keith Jarrett’s recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome, and how it has changed his music. The Guardian

Outtakes: the rise of provisional history. Atlantic

Have they found the lost Leonardo? Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) may have built a wall covering up a fresco by da Vinci to paint his own, cherished fresco in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. Leonardo was reputedly experimenting with his materials when he painted this ‘missing’ fresco, so not much of it may survive. Thermographic evidence may be brought to bear to ascertain its exact nature and location. If it appears to be intact, should the Vasari be razed to access it?