Geek.com Geek News – Intel’s new Xeons. “Intel announced limited availability of its newest Xeon
processors, running at 700MHz. The chips feature L2 cache sizes
of 1MB and 2MB, and unlike the older 550MHz Xeons that use
separate L2 cache chips, the L2 caches are built directly into
the chip die.” These chips run $1,980 apiece at present. Commentators note that the chips won’t be available in any quantity until the third quarter, making this a ‘paper’ rollout to offset Intel’s other woes in the press.
Black bear kills hiker in Smoky Mountain park, apparently without provocation. [I hike in black bear territory and had become accustomed to thinking of them as inoffensive, in comparison e.g. to the acknowledged threat when hiking in grizzly country.]
Images reveal lakes, snow, geysers on Jupiter moon Io. Galileo spacecraft flyby pictures depict an impossibly harsh, impossibly beautiful landscape (right).
Northwestern scientists shed new light on neurodegenerative diseases. A roster of apparently dissimilar neurodegenerative diseases are major challenges to neuropsychiatry: Huntington’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, Creutzfelt-Jakob Disease and the other prior diseases (see below), cystic fibrosis. They all share one basic common pathway — they arise from the neurotoxic effects of the accumulation of misfolded proteins due to metabolic errors. Misfolded protein is insoluble because of its conformation change, and aggregates, and the aggregation takes down good protein with the bad in a snowballing effect. It turns out there are a class of “chaperone” molecules called heat shock proteins that function to prevent misfolding and detect already-misfolded proteins to prevent their further accumulation. Neurodegenerative diseases, new research suggests, represent the body’s losing race between the misfolding process and its supply of the protective heat shock proteins.Elucidating the role of these molecular chaperones suggests a possible avenue for prevention and remediation of this vexing class of gruesome and fatal diseases.
Four museum curators share their lists of the top ten picks for the most influential visual artworks of the past 1,000 years. It would’ve been nice if the lists were hyperlinked to web reproductions of each piece.
Political scientist Daniel Bell’s experience teaching in Singapore teaches him that classical education and multiculturalism need not conflict. I’m not sure this makes the case persuaively in a way that translates into our own culture.
Scholars search for da Vinci’s DNA. Testing DNA found in smudges and
fingerprints in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and sketches may be a useful way to distinguish da Vinci’s work from that of his apprentices. An Italian art historian in Vinci has collected dozens of fingerprints from the master’s notebooks and drawings.
“Irradiating meat is the meat industry’s answer to filthy meat processing
practices that leave meat contaminated”: The union representing federal food inspectors joined a coalition opposing food irradiation (brokered by Public Citizen and including the Center for Food Safety, the Campaign for Biodemocracy,
Friends of the Earth, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the Nuclear Information
and Resource Service, and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine). The union is concerned that irradiation is central to a meat industry initiative to police itself and displace the role of federal inspectors. “Although the meat industry claims that irradiation will make
food safer, the health impacts of eating irradiated food are uncertain. New chemicals called
unique radiolytic products are created in the irradiation process. No testing has been done
to identify these chemicals, much less to determine if they are safe for human
consumption. Evidence indicates that chromosomal damage (among other problems) could
occur as the result of consuming irradiated food. Further, meat that is treated using
irradiation often gives off a very strange odor.”
Violence Policy Center reacts to planned NRA cafe and store in Times Square, NYC: “Today’s announcement by the NRA that they are opening an NRA cafe and store in Times
Square is an amazing example of how bizarrely out of sync the organization is with
mainstream America. It will go down in history as the worst marketing decision since New
Coke. What will their sign say, ‘Over a Million Killed?’ It will quickly become a protest
Mecca in the wake of the high-profile shootings that now define our nation, each of which
will be laid at the NRA’s doorstep.” —Josh Sugarman, VPC executive director and author of the 1992 book NRA: Money, Firepower and Fear
Creative arts a vital industry in New England. The Boston Globe features a new report indicating that “The ‘creative industry’ (nonprofit institutions such as museums and libraries, individual
artists, and arts-related commercial activities) makes up
3.5 percent of New England’s total job base – more than our software or
medical technology industries. It is growing at a remarkable rate of 14
percent each year – nearly twice as fast as the average rate of job
growth in New England.” The arts, apparently, are a very good investment to stimulate employment and economic growth.
McCaffrey and his lieutenants once more firing on unarmed civilians.
Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): Family friend swiped girl’s life preserver to save himself, Mississippi police say. The seven-year-old girl drowned. Her body was recovered three days later. The survivor will stand trial for murder if he doesn’t succeed in evading his suicide watch in the county jail.
BBC: Children ‘losing sleep over internet’: “Excessive net-surfing and television is leaving
12-year-olds suffering the symptoms of
chronic sleep deprivation, say experts…Many children now have television and
computers even in their bedrooms, and are
allowed to stay up late using the internet.”
Guide climbs Everest in record 16 hours. Congratulations to 34-year-old Babu Chhiri, who in his tenth successful assault of Mt. Everest, climbed the peak in less than 16 hours! Last year, he also established a record for duration spent at the summit.
NIH knew drug could cause fatal brain disease, newspaper reports. Before there was synthetic growth hormone, human growth hormone extracted from the pituitaries of cadavers was used to treat growth hormone deficiency from 1963 and 1985. The program was ended because of accumulating deaths from Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD), one of several gruesome incurable fatal diseases with long incubation periods (kuru, sheep scrapie and “mad cow disease”, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy [BSE] are others) thought to be caused by mysterious, minute transmissible agents called prions. A new report alleges that, despite warnings, the NIH for seven years ignored signs that a more costly extraction technique with more intensive filtering was necessary to insure the safety of the cadaveric hormone.
The editor of the Washington Times objects to the characterization that his paper is under the editorial control of owner Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church. The Washington Post had made the attribution in covering Rev. Moon’s purchase of the UPI wire service earlier this week.
Atlantic piece takes swipe at Harvard prof. Christina Hoff Sommers, who set herself up in the early ’90’s as the conservative counter to “liberal hijacking” of gender studies, defames renowned Harvard gender identity psychological theorist Carol Gilligan in the latest Atlantic. She claims the research materials for Gilligan’s prizewinning and paradigm-changing 1982 book In A Different Voice were either flawed or faked. But neither Sommers nor the Atlantic ever contacted Gilligan to check this claim, and it apparently just isn’t true, reports Alex Beam of the Boston Globe. “Didn’t the Atlantic find it strange that Gilligan isn’t quoted
defending herself against Sommers’s dramatic accusation? ‘Sommers said to me that she tried unsuccessfully to reach
Gilligan,’ reports story editor Michael Curtis. He says Sommers’s
article wasn’t subjected to the usual fact-checking scrutiny
because it was a book excerpt, not an assigned article. Gilligan
will have to defend herself in a letter to the editor, which
won’t attract quite as much attention as Sommers’s cover story.”
Perfect Sound Forever is a quirky online music magazine that’s been around since 1993. Their self-described foci include performers/artists that deserve more recognition,
exploring little-known corners of music (i.e. bootlegs, music therapy), the politics of music, the music of politics, and exposing cliches about certain bands and styles of music. Here’s a compilation of some of their interviewees’ favorite music and here’s a page of their staff’s favorite music. Discerning folks, it seems, although there are some who appear to have stopped listening in the early ’70’s [Who am I to talk??]
More passion from the impeccable Médecins Sans Frontières. Drug Companies and the Third World: A Case Study in Neglect.
“The poor have no consumer power, so the market has failed
them,” said Dr. James Orbinski, international president of
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, the medical
agency whose work in war zones and in the third world won it
the Nobel Peace Prize last year. “I’m tired of the logic that says,
‘He who can’t pay, dies.’ ” [New York Times]. The agency advised African states not to sign new drug laws. “The medical relief agency Médecins Sans Frontières on Thursday called on a group of 15
African countries not to ratify new patent laws that it says could deny poor people access to life-saving
drugs. ‘The revised arrangement relating to intellectual property reinforces the monopoly given to patent-holders
beyond existing requirements in international trade rules and would cause a major obstacle to access to
medicines,’ MSF said in a statement.”
Metafilter sent me to this compendium of Dumb Laws from the various states.
An adult adoptee stalked by her birth mother dismantles the fiction that all who were adopted at birth yearn for the passionate reunion. “To believe that blood ties alone can bind a family goes beyond
the cliché of blood being thicker than water to assume a
miracle. Sure, it’s possible that the long lost can be suddenly
found and reclaimed in a hail of tears and kisses, but it’s not
something I’d count on, no matter how many times you’ve
seen it on TV.” [My adopted daughter is two, and my wife and I have recently been preoccupied again, as we had not been since we first contemplated her arrival, with the issue of what lies ahead in her (and our) coping with her adoptive identity issues.]
Salon: Movies in heat
“Films used to erotically seduce us; now they tend to sedate instead.”
Rock’s Original Poets, Still Howling: Stephen Holden wants us to think that Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Patti Smith are a holy triumvirate analogous to Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs. [New York Times]
National Rifle Association Unleashes Attack on Gore:
“Vice President Al Gore is the type of politician where nothing is
sacred, that will say and do anything to preserve their own
political future, even if that means using fear and deceptive
means,” Mr. Watts was to say, according to an advance text of
his speech. “His party used to say, ‘There’s nothing to fear but
fear itself.’ Now the vice president has nothing to offer but fear
itself.” I blogged below one persepctive on the centrality of racism to the NRA’s thinking. In fact, the more I read about their current defiance and grandiosity, the more it stars to look as if they’re trying to appeal mostly to the radical right of the black-helicopter, New-World-Order conspiracy peranoiacs; paramilitary militias; and tax resisters.
Challenging Islamic Myth on Organ Transplants as Ailments Rise: “…religious leaders are rallying with doctors and
community outreach workers to dispel a decades-old myth
that the Koran forbids organ donation.” Because organ transplantes between relatives, and even ethnically similar people, are more successful, both medical and transplant advocates and religious leaders in the Arab-American community are trying to get their constituents to go with the Muslim dictum that ‘He who saves a life saves humanity’ rather than the one that says the a Muslim will not see Heaven if the body does not go before God whole. [New York Times]
Court Rules U.S. Cable Law Is Constitutional. The FCC does have the right to limit the number of households a cable company may reach, and to force cable companies to share their capacity with others instead of filling it entirely with their own programming. The intention is to prevent consolidation in the cable industry similar to that bedevilling the rest of the public media. Get this — Time Warner Cable had contested the FCC’s authority on the grounds that it was an infringement of free speech rights!
“Microsoft has introduced a significant security enhancement for Outlook 98 and Outlook 2000. The Outlook 2000 E-mail Security Update and the Outlook 98
E-mail Security Update provide protection from most viruses, such as the ILOVEYOU and Melissa viruses, as well as other viruses
that spread through e-mail, or worm viruses that can replicate through Outlook. The Outlook 98/2000 E-mail Security Update puts
you back in control of your software. Once you have installed the update, mail is not sent on your behalf without your permission,
and you are protected from accidentally opening attached files that pose a security risk to your computer.
This update limits certain functionality in Outlook to provide a higher level of security; it was not created to address a security
vulnerability within Outlook. The update provides unprecedented security protection for Outlook and Microsoft encourages that all
users of Outlook 2000 and Outlook 98 install this update.”
Researchers from IBM, Compaq and AltaVista collaborated on this paper on the Connectivity of the web: “The study of the web as a graph is not only fascinating in its own right, but also yields valuable insight into web algorithms for crawling,
searching and community discovery, and the sociological phenomena which characterize its evolution. We report on experiments on local and
global properties of the web graph using two Altavista crawls each with over 200M pages and 1.5 billion links. Our study indicates that the
macroscopic structure of the web is considerably more intricate than suggested by earlier experiments on a smaller scale….
One can pass from any node of IN through SCC to any node of OUT.
Hanging off IN and OUT are TENDRILS containing nodes that are reachable from portions of IN, or that can
reach portions of OUT, without passage through SCC. It is possible for a TENDRIL hanging off from IN to
be hooked into a TENDRIL leading into OUT, forming a TUBE — a passage from a portion of IN to a portion
of OUT without touching SCC.” [Is that clear??]
A press release from the Violence Policy Center gives evidence that racism is a core value at the National Rifle Association.
NewsWatch: Mad About Media Criticism. The Center for Media and Public Affairs whines about journalists who whine about media critics.
US magazine issued a prominent retraction of its earlier story (which I blogged below) that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were disenchanted with S-c-i-e-n-t-o-l-o-g-y. “The US about-face reflects an increasingly common problem for
magazine editors in these days of steepening competition for a shrinking list of celebrities
who can actually sell newsstand copies. ‘Cruise obviously has his share of pull,’ says a
journalist who’s experienced the clout of Cruise and PMK. ‘At a magazine like US, they need
to be able to have Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman on the cover. You can tell from the size
of the correction that they were interested in keeping him happy and available to the
magazine.'” Cruise’s publicist also warned reporters calling for interviews with the star about his forthcoming M:I-2 that any question they ask about S-c-i-e-n-t-o-l-o-g-y will be the last question they get to ask. I guess S-c-i-e-n-t-o-l-o-g-y’s thugs don’t have to make US an offer it can’t refuse when Cruise’s publicists and attorneys do it for them.
Environmentalist Brower Quits Sierra Club Board. For those who follow environmental politics, the name of David Brower is among the most venerable. He led the Sierra Club in the ’50’s and ’60’s, was removed from its leadership in 1969 because of his contentiousness; remained contentious elsewhere in environmental advocacy through the ’70’s and rejoined the Sierra Club in 1983. Now he’s lambasting the Sierra Club for backing governmental proposals for usage of the Sierras, and for not coming out strongly against increased immigration to the US, which has recently been his bete noir. “I find going to the meetings is, frankly, a total waste of
time,” Brower said in a recent interview. “They practically discuss nothing
about conservation. You just get layers and layers and layers of
bureaucracy.” The Sierra Club shrugs off his criticism and his departure.
Going Cashless As Small Change Dries Up. “A strike by armored van security guards, now in its 11th day, is turning France into a cashless society.
Sales are down in small shops, waiters are losing out on their usual tips and beggars are deprived of the few coins they live off.
With the normal flow of cash between banks and shops cut off, the small change and banknotes normally used for everyday purchases
are becoming ever harder to find. Credit cards and checks are often the only way to pay for purchases.”
U.S. Surname Distribution. This site will generate a map of the US, with each state color-coded for the frequency with which a chosen surname appears in the state. Good starting point for a genealogical search. [via Robot Wisdom]
Feed explores two subtle but, it notes, far-reaching changes to the fabric of everyday life. First, Yield. Merge. Exit. Freak Out, dissecting the impact of the introduction of the new fluorescent yellow green street signs: “government-sponsored change to the visual landscape.” Then, the move to the new dollar coins : “Although the Sacagawea coin isn’t yet a
common sight, the advertising campaign
certainly is. Every bus and subway has
that creepy, deadwhitemale face of
George Washington urging us to use the
new coin, assuring us that it’s OK. But
isn’t a high-profile marketing blitz for
money itself a little odd? Why is the
government so desperate for us to adopt
this new coin? The party line is that the
Golden Dollar, while more expensive to
produce than paper money, is the better
deal in the long run since coins last around
thirty years while dollar bills are out of
circulation within a year.
But another possible reason is that the
new coin helps to placate powerful
lobbies such as the vending, transit, and
gaming industries … The U.S. Mint
made sure that the Sacagawea had the
exact same size, weight, and
electromagnetic composition as the (Susan B. Anthony dollar coin),
saving vending and slot-machine
manufacturers hefty retrofitting costs.
Conveniently, then, the government is
able to present itself as progressive while
keeping some big, important friends
happy along the way. ”
IDÉE FIXE: Portrait Of The Blogger As A Young Man Some thoughts on where weblogging fits.
…Even if it’s true the vast majority of
blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of
people were the earth to open up and swallow
them, and even if the best are still no substitute for
the sustained attention of literary or journalistic
works, it’s also true that sustained attention is not
what Web logs are about anyway. At their most
interesting they embody something that exceeds
attention, and transforms it: They are constructed
from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly
contemporary sort of wonder. A Web log really, then, is a Wunderkammer. That is
to say, the genealogy of Web logs points not to the
world of letters but to the early history of museums
— to the “cabinet of wonders,” or Wunderkammer,
that marked the scientific landscape of Renaissance
modernity: a random collection of strange,
compelling objects, typically compiled and owned
by a learned, well-off gentleman.
There’s an informative (I hope) portrait of Jorn Barger interwoven into the article as well.
Robot wisdom? That’s as good an encapsulation as
any, and none are very good. Barger’s ideas are at
once subtle and florid, and they don’t summarize
easily. Suffice it to say that they’re as much literary
as scientific, and that they orbit a complicated
connection between artificial intelligence and the
masterworks of James Joyce. Barger discovered that
link in the midst of trying to map out a
programmable taxonomy of human emotions…
Crazy for Star Wars by Robert Wright Poking holes (big enough to require thinking about) in the logic of the need for protection against nuclear attacks from “rogue states.”
“Even
if you examine the unabridged list of rogue states—Iraq,
North Korea, Iran, Lybia, Syria, etc.—you will search in
vain for a national leader who aspires to early death.
Muammar Qaddafi, for example, may seem erratic,
but look what happened when Ronald Reagan gave him
a sanity test. American jets bombed Qaddafi’s house as
punishment for sponsoring terrorism. The question was:
Would Qaddafi a) retaliate, b) not retaliate but maintain a
conspicuous association with terrorism, or c) start
keeping a lower profile? He chose c) and thus passed the
test.” [Slate]
Fortune: A New Way to Attack Cancer. A rundown on the excitement over anti-angiogenesis agents, slanted toward those looking for investment potential.
In The Issue. Believe it or not, the editor of the conservative National Review feels he has to defend McDonald’s to be pro-American. “Clearly McDonald’s is giving
people something they want. And, one last thing in their
defense: Big Macs taste really good.”
Cola row in India: Coke and Pepsi are squaring off to carve up the huge untouched Indian soft drink market.
On guard. Chickens are the newest guards of Canada’s southern border with the U.S.
Girl dies in Colorado after controversial “rebirthing” therapy. ‘The girl … told the therapists seven times that she could not
breathe and said six times that she was going to die.
But instead of unwrapping her, the therapists said “you got to push hard if you want to be born —
or do you want to stay in there and die?”‘ … ‘According to an investigator who viewed the tape there was a 20-minute lapse between the time
the girl’s last breath could be heard to the time she was unwrapped.’
New Privacy Threat: Genealogy? Your mother’s maiden name, which you use as your super-secret password prompt — right? — can be ascertained easily.
Invasion of the ePods. “This device could revolutionize the way we think about using
the ‘Net.”
Breast cancer deaths plummet 25% in UK and US over the last decade — “…most sudden drop in mortality for a
common cancer seen anywhere in the world.”
Anthrax could be killing heroin users: “Scientists at Porton Down biological defence laboratory, in Wiltshire, have discovered signs of anthrax infection in
two victims of a disease which killed 10 Scottish heroin users in the last month. One person in Norway also died
from the same disease.
A further nine Scots are ill, and one bears the black scab typical of localised anthrax infection, the report said.”
“This is a repugnant act against human and Christian ethics,” the pastor of the local evangelical church told reporters.
For Doctors, a Chance to Spot Victims in Denial. An article in a British trauma journal instructs ER workers on recognizing injuries consistent with “shaken adult syndrome”, indicative of covert physical victimization.
Two Accused of Murder in 1963 Alabama Church Blast:
One more in a growing, and welcome, wave of current prosecutions of white suspects believed responsible for
attacks on blacks in Alabama, Mississippi and other Southern states in the 1960s.
Kalle Lasn is Mad as Heck and Isn’t Going to Take It Any More. A portrait of the culture-jamming founder of Adbusters.
Web Skews Sex Education, Psychiatrist Warns: ‘A rising tide of Internet pornography is creating a growing public health
problem in sex education, a psychiatrist said on Tuesday.
“I’m very concerned about children,” Donna Woods of the University of Michigan said, adding that
easily accessed pornography was portraying sex as a public event, disconnected from human
commitment. …”There is going to be a be a big public health issue … explaining (to children) what sex is and
isn’t,” Woods told a session at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.’
I’m trying to point you to something on the net about the Seymour Hersh investigation of “Drug Czar” Gen. Barry McCaffrey’s command during the Persian Gulf War, but the search engines are not coming up with anything. Renowned investigative reporter Hersh started out to dig up dirt on McCaffrey’s war on drugs but a former colleague told him to look instead at McCaffrey’s role in Desert Storm. It appears that there were at least three incidents during which American forces under McCaffrey’s command fired on disarmed or surrendering Iraqi troops; two of the incidents appear to have been after the ceasefire. Hersh interviewed more than 200 enlisted men and officers in reaching his conclusions about the inappropriateness of attacks that McCaffrey ordered; the general ends up appearing to have been consumed with bloodlust. Overwhelming Force, a long piece reporting on this, will appear in next week’s New Yorker. I heard both Hersh and McCaffrey interviewed last night on NPR’s All Things Considered; of course McCaffrey denies the allegations, to my mind evasively and unconvincingly. Update: Here’s the text of Hersh’s article.
Another reason to cool your jets.
“X-Files” Back…with Duchovny. Fox announces that X-philes won’t be bereft; E! Online claims to have scooped everyone to the fact that Duchovny will be back for at least “a handful of episodes”; but the real news is that producer Chris Carter will have a spinoff revolving around The Lone Gunmen ready for Fox’s midseason schedule!
‘The artist formerly known as “The artist formerly known as Prince”‘ “Forget the symbol, erase the acronym. The artist formerly known as Prince
announced Tuesday that he will be, now and forever, known again as Prince.”
You Can Run, But Not Fast Enough: “A British man who has been imprisoned, shot at and robbed during a 3-1/2-year quest to become the first person
to run round the world decided on Monday to abandon plans to traverse Colombia.
‘There were tanks. Everyone seemed to be in uniform and carrying a machine gun,’ he told Reuters by telephone from Maracaibo in
western Venezuela. ‘It’s too dangerous. It’s just not worth it.'”
Ecological disaster in the Los Alamos fire? “The basic question in the Los Alamos fire is whether and
to what extent depleted uranium strewn about the Los
Alamos National Laboratory site has been sucked up
into the plume by the fire. In addition, whether the
following materials—also known to be on the site—are
in the smoke plume: lead, beryllium, arsenic,
thorium, uranium, plutonium, PCBs, barium, high
explosives.
Other questions: are the firefighters themselves
being monitored for contamination. There is no real
protection for fire fighters working in such a
volatile situation. And is the government monitoring
fall out from plume as it passes across Colorado,
Oklahoma and Texas?” With a number of links to sites covering various aspects of the fire.
A Dallas Morning News investigative report concludes that there’s been more than a decade of whittling away at the fundamental right to a trial by jury. “More and more matters once decided by juries are being
handled by judges or private arbitrators or are being banned
from the courtroom entirely. ‘The American jury is in serious
trouble,’ says Valerie Hans, a
University of Delaware
psychology professor and
recognized authority on the role
of juries in the national culture.” Trends include limiting the amount of civil jury monetary awards; the removal of entire areas of decision-making from juries; corporations that require customers to surrender their right to jury trial in future disputes as a condition of doing business; and an increase in judicial reversals of jury findings, a right judges have but have historically used only sparingly. Attacks on rule by jury arise from fears that modern lawsuits are too complex for the lay public to understand; that juries are too easily manipulated by lawyers; and that jurors are too prone to find for the “little guy” against a corporation.
“the dog trots freely in the street and sees reality …
drunks in doorways and moons on trees”
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Boston Globe film critic Michael Blowen proposes a national film registry to protect certain movies we love from being remade.
Younger authors assess Martin Amis, enfant terrible of English letters whom nearly all of them love to hate. I’m not too proud to admit I love and devour his work. Amis’ “much-hyped” autobiography is imminent.
Enjoy the Show. Test Will Follow. Awhile ago I logged the arrival of the play Copenhagen, about Werner Heisenberg. And several days ago I logged an essay about the literary abuses of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Now the New York Times does man-on-the-street interviews with theater patrons to see what they understand of the physics behind the play. As suggested the other day, without understanding quantum physics, Heisenberg uncertainty becomes just a metaphor, and an overused one at that. If all you’re saying is that the observer affects the process observed, why try so hard?
One reader of this blog wrote to say that this discussion of the uncertainty principle reminds him of a pet peeve he has about the frequent use of “one-dimensional” in literary criticism. From his understanding of geometry, he’s sure the writers mean to say two-dimensional, as in lacking depth. That one doesn’t bother me as much as the misuse of the uncertainty principle does, because to speak of “dimensions” isn’t necessarily using (misusing) a geometric metaphor; the word has a commonsense meaning as well. A character, or a plotline, may well be only one-dimensional in that common sense of the word, e.g. reduced to only one conflict.
I haven’t been much interested in city planning and I know next to nothing about architecture, but this essay was fascinating and worthwhile (I did grow up in New York, though…) New
York to Architecture: Drop Dead! “A new proposal to overhaul the city’s
zoning laws is now forcing New Yorkers to confront these
fundamental questions. Titled the Uniform Bulk Program, the
proposal amounts to the architectural manifesto of the Giuliani
administration — a major statement on the most famous skyline
in the universe.” Three major provisions — a height limit on new buildings, a requirement that buildings extend out to the street (effectively reversing the mandate in previous zoning regulations that plazas and parks be included in development plans as a “trade” for height), and the establishment of a review board under the control of a political appointee — will “turn the city planning chairman into the design czar of New York, with sweeping powers to define the cityscape for years to come.” When does government regulation of architecture become akin to trampling on constitutionally guaranteed free expression?
The Entman-Rojecki Index of Race and the Media
“To introduce their new book
The Black Image in the
White Mind: Media and
Race in America, Robert
M. Entman and Andrew
Rojecki present some of
the statistical evidence of
how the mass media treat
racial differences.” For example:
1. While Black actors are now more numerous in
film, it’s an open question as to how well they’re
being represented. In the top movies of 1996:Black female movie characters shown using vulgar
profanity: 89%.White female movie characters shown using vulgar
profanity: 17%.Black female movie characters shown being physically
violent: 56%.White female movie characters shown being physically
violent: 11%.Black female movie characters shown being restrained:
55%.White female movie characters shown being restrained:
6%.
Maggot Therapy (Larva Therapy) Project Home Page. From a UC Irvine assistant professor of medicine and pathology who offers mail order maggots to start your own project.
My Pickle..er..oops, I mean My Guestbook. Most fun guestbook I’ve ever run across.
Some people will be very disappointed by this: Vatican Discloses ‘Third Secret’ of Fatima. Shortly after this week’s beatification of two of the child witnesses to the 1917 apparition of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, a representative of the Pope disclosed that the so-called third secret is interpreted as a reference to the 1981 assassination attempt against the Pope. While the first two alleged predictions of the Virgin were made public (they are interpreted as referring to the course of the World Wars and the rise and fall of Communism), the third was sent in a sealed envelope to the Vatican and remained a secret since the apparition. Theories about what it prophesized have been rife, and the basis of all sorts of arcane conspiracy scenarios involving the Vatican. A very popular notion is that it spoke of a deep rift in the Roman Catholic Church and rival papacies, which some believe exist today. Fatima fanatics have resorted to desperate acts at times to attempt to compel the Vatican to reveal the third secret, and the prophetic significance of the Fatima apparition has far outstripped the devotional importance of the shrine, e.g. in its becoming an ideological touchstone for anti-Communist fervency during the cold war. It remains to be seen if third secret devotees accept the Vatican announcement or see it as a conspiratorial cover-up. Others may be let down.
Couldn’t some of the hackers out there make this happen more often?
“People who lose their language ability because of brain damage
develop an extraordinary gift for spotting liars, scientists have
discovered.
Stroke victims who have suffered damage to the brain’s language
centres learn how to detect the subtle facial expressions that can
indicate when a person is lying. Tests on a group of aphasics –
people who cannot converse after brain damage – showed they could
detect liars nearly threequarters of the time, compared with a 50:50
success rate for undamaged people. One aphasic who had recently
suffered brain damage performed no better than healthy subjects,
indicating that the ability is learnt through experience.” [Nature via The Independent]
New Scientist: Killing off an archetype “Is our perception of infanticide all wrong? Step-parents are no more likely than biological parents to
murder their children, according to Swedish researchers. This
flies in the face of Canadian findings from over a decade ago,
which indicated that having a step-parent is the single
greatest risk factor for being maltreated as a child.”
“Go ahead. Make my day.”
‘(Clint) Eastwood, whose Mission Ranch Hotel in Carmel,
Calif., has been sued for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, is striking back
with a Washington lobbying campaign for new legislation to
modify the law. “I figure I won’t back down because of all these
people … who can’t defend themselves,” says the 69-year-old
Mr. Eastwood. Well, “I can, and they will be seeing me for a
long, long time.” ‘ [Wall Street Journal]
Some say macabre tour in Salem, Massachusetts, goes too far
“People say tourism is the answer here,” Councilor Regina Flynn told The Salem Evening News. “On the other hand, it’s what kind of tourism do
you want?” This city which capitalizes heavily on its infamous witch trial history goes just nuts with gloom and grue, especially around Halloween, but is denying a license to a proposal to give tourists tours by hearse of gory landmarks including the sites of some recent murders.
Lego Links up with Spielberg: he lends his name to Lego Studios’ new digital movie-making kit for kids, and will judge the results. Kids build “stories” with Lego movie sets and bricks, film them with an included movie camera, dump the film into their USB port, and use a movie editing suite to do stop-action animation, add sound effects and dialog, and make credits and titles. Completed films are uploaded to a chld’s personal page at a Lego Studios website for possible nomination for a “junior Oscar.”
Alternative therapy at state expense: Study looks at Medicaid coverage of nonconventional care for children: A study by a University of Michigan family practitioner shows that 3/4 of the states reimburse for some alternative medical treatments given to children covered by their Medicaid programs. “The percentage of states that have agreed to pay for such services ranges from 74 percent for chiropractic down to 11
percent for naturopathy. Several states allow children to see an alternative practitioner as their primary care physician, or to
see alternative providers under Medicaid’s preventive screening, immunization, vision, dental and hearing program. Terrence Steyer, M.D., a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and lecturer in the U-M Departments of Family Medicine and
Internal Medicine, conducted the survey of 46 state Medicaid programs to get a sense of how far the current trend toward
alternative medicine had extended into state-funded pediatric care…. Alternative medicine is usually defined as care not generally taught at American medical schools nor provided at U.S.
hospitals. It spans the spectrum from vitamins and herbal supplements to acupuncture and hypnosis.”
Cannes Do or Die?
The first lady of film festivals ain’t no Sundance. Or is it that film festivals ain’t what they used to be? Or is it that film ain’t what it used to be?
Prosecutorial and journalistic difficulties in “shaken baby” cases: “Shaken baby cases are amongst the most difficult to prosecute.
There are usually no witnesses to the crime, the determination
of time of death must often be based on statements made by
potential suspects, and the conviction frequently rests on the
persuasiveness of dueling expert witnesses.
Media coverage of these cases also rarely illuminates the key
question: How much doubt do experts have about the diagnosis
and timing of death? In coverage of the court room, defense and
prosecution experts are given equal weight – but journalists
rarely go to outside sources to determine which position
represents the medical mainstream.
As a result, public opinion can be swayed by arguments that are
considered specious by most experts.” [Newswatch]
Physicist Group Says Missile Defense Tests Fall ´Far Short´. Apart from politically-based misgivings about an anti-missile defense system, there’s the unanswered question of its technical feasibility.
The world’s largest professional association of physicists says the Pentagon’s test program is an inadequate basis for an informed decision about whether the proposed weapon can actually shoot down enemy warheads. Interception tests do not take into account at all the offensive countermeasures an attacker would take to overwhelm or confuse a missile defense system. President Clinton plans to decide after the next round of testing in June whether the $60 billion program should be given the green light. The American Physical Society’s statement is available at the group’s website. The Pentagon, of course, rejects the group’s criticism.
And China has weighed in on the proposed weapon. Its “chief arms negotiator said today that the American proposal to build an antimissile defensive shield posed an unacceptable threat to China’s security and could force Beijing to significantly expand its own nuclear forces in response.” [New York Times]
The editor of Newswatch explores the journalistic invocations of Heisenberg uncertainty.
“one of those very rare technology changes that bring really interesting
potential in several dimensions”: a unanimous May 11 decision by the FCC opens the way to the use of ultrawide band wireless technology that makes leaps in data transmission rates and also relieves pressure on the crowded wireless spectrum by operating in frequency ranges already occupied without causing interference. “The technology allows a range of science fiction-like applications. Initially, the services were created as radar tools, which can see
through walls when traditional radar is blocked. That could allow such things as devices allowing firefighters to see who or what is in
burning buildings or helping rescue workers find earthquake victims trapped underneath rubble.
It also acts as a positioning device far more accurate than ordinary global positioning services. Time Domain has signed a deal with
a golf company that plans to use the technology to give golfers exact measurements from tee to hole. That
application could be used to keep track of children in crowds or find lost pets”
“I only wish I lived there there because I could put it on my
headed notepaper.”
Nature Makes the Man.
“Two studies published on Friday confirm that sex-reassignment surgery for boys born with deformed sex organs is misguided and possibly cruel.
The studies of 25 genetically male children raised as girls because of genital deformities showed all of them
retained strong male characteristics, despite hormone and other treatments. Most reassigned themselves to
be males when they got older, the researchers at Johns Hopkins University said.” But anyone who’s tried to raise a boy in a more gender-neutral way has already known that maleness is “built in”!
Keep cell phones out of reach of nematodes as well as children, new study warns.
To our great societal shame IMHO, a new study shows that medical bills accounted for
40% of bankruptcy filings
last year. About 500,000 Americans filed for bankruptcy protection in 1999 largely because of heavy medical expenses, according to the study,
which is to be published next month in a finance journal, Norton’s Bankruptcy Adviser.
Mirrors Help Deter Suicide Leaps? Rising numbers of Japanese suicides (attributable to the economic downturn in what many consider one of the world’s most stressful societies) are a headache for Japanese railway companies, since leaping in front of trains is a favored way to go. ‘East Japan Railway Co, which reported 212 suicides at its stations last year, will set up large, adult-sized mirrors opposite platforms
hoping this will deter potential leapers.
“Specialists say it makes it difficult for a person to jump if they think someone is looking, say from the opposite platforms,” said a
spokesman for JR East.
“We hope the mirrors will serve a similar effect,” he said. “When a train stops after someone has jumped, we get many angry complaints from other passengers,” he said.’
A letter to the British Medical Journal warns that natural remedies can be harmful.
Certainly a few
treatments such as kava (Piper methysticum), which is rich in coumarins which interfere with warfarin, have been mentioned in the BMJ
in the past year.In our practice we have seen a case of severe dyspepsia caused by zinc, which had been bought by mail after hair analysis by mail, being
taken at six times the recommended daily allowance; a patient with blood pressure that was difficult to control because of ginseng; a
patient with severe headaches on waking caused by evening primrose oil; and a patient with myopathy caused by creatine, to mention
only a few. These conditions necessitated an endoscopy, a medical referral, and a computed axial tomography scan, as well as numerous
blood tests. The aetiology was only ascertained by direct questioning. All cases resolved when the patients stopped taking the substance.
We suspect that these cases represent the tip of the iceberg.Caution should be exercised in condoning the use of any supplement or herbal preparation without checking with a pharmacist or reliable
source. Many herbal remedies are dangerous to patients with epilepsy or diabetes and to those taking warfarin; they also have the
propensity to cause illness in those who are otherwise healthy and not taking drugs.
By coincidence, just today, I discovered that the troubling cognitive dysfunction I’ve seen in a hospitalized patient of mine is probably attributable not to her psychiatric condition, nor her serious medical conditions, but to poisoning with dietary supplements she had been taking unbeknownst to her doctors.
Another letter to the editor of the British Medical Journal proposes a peer-reviewed, not-for-profit, global medical knowledge database.
Realistically it is practical for a clinician to question, search, select, acquire the paper(s) and appraise them, and act only three or four
times a year. Importantly, the knowledge acquired remains inaccessible to any other professional. If we could share these appraisals on a
web based (and CD Rom) database we could avoid a massive duplication of effort. We could also make access to the knowledge much
faster.The global medical knowledge database will match each clinical query as closely as possible with both answered and unanswered
questions. If there is an answer the software will display it automatically, in the form of a critically appraised topic. If the question is
unanswered the doctor will be able to see whether someone is trying to answer it (and could offer to help). If the question is not on the
database then the doctor will be prompted to post it.
I know that I, in the course of my medical practice, do several dozen literature searches a year to answer clinical dilemmas I face. The gathered citations remain on a hard drive of a machine at the hospital, and my synthesis and conclusions remain in my head. Occasionally I summarize them for a small community of medical peers on a mailing list in my subspecialty. But, I agree, it would be powerful and not that much extra work for each of us to make the results of these queries accessible to one another worldwide.
I’m honored to have been noticed by at least a couple of my favorite weblogs today. Both Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom and Chuck Taggart’s Looka pointed to “Follow Me Here…” As you know if you’ve been reading awhile, I’ve always wondered if anyone’s out there. It’ll be interesting watching my own reaction to knowing I’m writing for more of an audience. To start with, no more blatant plagiarism from other weblogs [grin], ‘cuz you might notice! One immediate reaction I have — if they like me, it means they value content over style (the apparent polarities in the perennial weblog aesthetic debate).
New security flaw in Internet Explorer for Windows: cookies stored by IE are readable anywhere. IE for the Mac does not appear to be affected, and Netscape is unaffected. I use Netscape, but I’m already being inconvenienced by some sites (e.g. Blogger) disabling their “remember me” features which work via storing cookies. Now I have to log back into Blogger anytime I want to work on my log. The workaround in IE for Windows is to disable Javascript, says Peacefire.
Chernobyl’s effects linger on. “Levels of radioactivity from the Chernobyl explosion in 1986 remain unexpectedly high in some parts of northern Europe, researchers
have found.
They say restrictions on some foods in both the United Kingdom and the former Soviet Union will have to remain in place for up to 50
years.
They found that the environment is not cleaning itself as fast as previously thought, and that radioactivity can be released to the soil
again after it has been absorbed.”
Battlefield Earth: Film Dogged by Links to Scientology Founder: “Controversy has swirled around the film because it is based
on the 1982 novel by L. Ron Hubbard, who founded the
Church of Scientology, and because the film was the pet
project of Mr. Travolta, who has made no secret of his
dedication to Scientology. Could this be a sneaky attempt to
lure unsuspecting moviegoers into Scientology?” [New York Times]
Battlefield Earth: Earth Capitulates in 9 Minutes to Mean Entrepreneurs From Space. “It may be a bit
early to make such
judgments, but
Battlefield Earth may well turn out to be the worst movie
of this century.” [New York Times review by the discerning Elvis Mitchell]
Non-partisan group urges caution on death penalty
A newly formed group including both supporters and opponents of the death penalty, the National Committee to
Prevent Wrongful Executions, is encouraging restraint in the use of the death penalty and urging other states to consider adopting an Illinois-style moratorium on executions.
Schizophrenic Yale law professor won’t stand trial in fiancée’s slaying. This is indeed a very tragic one, but unfortunately discouraging relapses are not uncommon in dealing with major mental illness: He was once celebrated for succeeding as a Yale Law School graduate and faculty member despite his schizophrenia, but at some point he stopped taking his medication and began to deteriorate. His fiancee stayed home from work that day to try and help, but the prospect of a crisis intervention apparently drove him to murder her, thinking she was ‘”a nonhuman impostor” conspiring to
hospitalize him for torture, experimentation and death’, according to psychiatric reports. Even the prosecution’s psychiatric expert conceded the merits of his insanity plea. [Nando Times]
Microsoft asks Slashdot to remove posts revealing copyrighted material. After Microsoft reportedly reneged on a commitment to publish its proprietary extensions to the open source Kerberos security technology (which authenticates logins to Unix systems), a public message on Slashdot by some open source types including one of the co-developers of the Kerberos standard accused Microsoft of abusing the protocol and preventing the interoperability of its “branded” systems with other Unix systems. They published Microsoft’s data specification as well as ways to circumvent its control….Later in the day, Slashdot went down as a result of a distributed denial-of-service attack.
