Jon Carroll, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, ponders Mondegreens.
Duh: Reasons to Live Help Prevent Suicide During Depression, says new psychiatric research. However, as a psychiatrist treating suicidal patients every day, I largely disagree with the article’s inference that treatment of a suicidally depressed patient be directed toward instilling hope. You can rarely persuade a hopeless patient that they should not be hopeless. If they were susceptible to that kind of reasoning, they wouldn’t be as desperately depressed,would they? And, more important, if you contradict their hopelessness, you’ve usually just made them feel you don’t take their complaints seriously and you’ve blown your alliance with them. One of my mentors once said that treating the suicidal means, first and foremost, paradoxically empathizing with the desireability of death.
I knew they couldn’t pull off the (derivative) public fiberglass animal art in NYC as they did in Chicago. Holland, Mich. is having difficulties too. And Toronto as well.
Steven Baum’s feeling abit peevish about some of the attributes of the weblogs he’s finding. I agree. [Ethel the Blog]
News of Palm’s next direction from the PC Expo, courtesy of Wired: “Palm, meanwhile, announced that it will support a different
module/expansion slot than those currently used by
Handspring and the soon-to-be-debuted Sony.
Palm’s official add-ons will be built around the Secure
Digital slot technology, from Toshiba, Matsushita, and
SanDisk.”
Jorn Barger, at Robot Wisdom, has been doing what he calls
Cliche Watch for awhile. He posts the links to Google searches he’s done of various phrases to elucidate their net.overuse. Search on “cliche” in the Robot Wisdom weblog page to find recent examples, which have included “half full half empty”, “in your pocket or are you just”, “ways of looking at a” (not “blackbird”), and “portrait of the artist as a” (not “young man”). A Google search of “cliche AND ‘robot wisdom’ ” lets you glimpse some of the recognized impact of Barger’s Cliche Watching.
Apparently partners.nytimes.com doesn’t work anymore. If you need to get to some of the previous New York Times links I’ve posted, reportedly you can use www10.nytimes.com. I can’t tell if these things are functional because I’m a registered NYT reader (and I don’t think, in this case, that’s such a bad thing), so they let me in on anything that redirects to nytimes.com itself. Thanks for readers informing me of links that don’t work for them…
The news doesn’t have to be logged, but I think the quote does:
“We have caught the first glimpses of our instruction book,
previously known only to God.”
–Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human
Genome Research Institute.
The Halfbakery, a repository of all things halfbaked. “Whatever you can think of.”
Supreme Court declines to hear appeal of denial of law license to white supremacist. “…(The) leader of the segregationist World Church
of the Creator was denied a law license last summer even though he
graduated from Southern Illinois University’s law school and passed the state
bar exam.
State bar officials noted that Hale had “dedicated his life to inciting racial
hatred,” and said he could not “do this as an officer of the court.”
I Was Certain, But I Was Dead Wrong. Any conviction based on the sole evidence of one eyewitness, no matter how competent and confident, can be a mistake. Commentary in the aftermath of the execution in Texas of Gary Graham.
The American Civil Liberties Union reacts to the completion of the human genome map with a warning about the urgency of legislation against genetic discrimination.
Greenpeace press release: Greenpeace Installs Webcam At The End Of France’s
Nuclear Reprocessing Discharge Pipe ‘To Open The Eyes
Of Governments’
The Register: Sony to unveil Palm-based multimedia handheld, according to the WSJ, which apparently got a sneak preview. With a slot for a memory stick and possibly a Handspring-like Springboard expansion slot for modem etc., “The Sony device will weigh a light 5.3 ounces, be narrower than the
stylish Palm V and thinner than the Palm III, and come in
black-and-white as well as color versions,” explained an unusually
gushing Journal. It also boasts a “JogDial scrolling and highlighting
button that allows users to manoeuvre the screen with one hand”.
St. Louis Riverfront Times: Not Just Another Pin-up in the Ste. Genevieve County Jail. In a bid for an interview scoop, St. Louis TV reporter Deanne Lane sent a handwritten letter and a postcard-sized color photo of herself to convicted and incarcerated serial rapist Dennis Rabbitt, now serving several consecutive life sentences after pleading guilty to sexual assaults on 14 women. “Think about it. Sending a picture of yourself to a sex offender
— what do you think he’s gonna do with it? It was just gross,”
says Rabbitt’s attorney. “Dennis thought it was ridiculous. Dennis gave
it to me. He said, ‘This is what I got. You keep it.’ He thought
it was silly. He was unimpressed.”
Asked about the handwritten letter and the photo, Lane is
foggy on details. “I don’t recall that,” she says when asked
whether she included a photo with her letter to Rabbitt.
Norman Mailer to draw cartoons for the New York Observer. “They’re somewhere between Feiffer and Picasso,”
Observer editor-in-chief Peter Kaplan says. “There is a nuance to them that is a
little darker and a little more intense than the average
cartoon. They look like they were done by a
novelist.”
Helping Parents Choose Wrong. Op-ed piece in The New York Times by Patrick Murphy, public guardian of Cook County IL, decries the bill just passed by the New York State legislature allowing legally sanctioned abandonment of newborns:
I work at the bottom of the judicial food chain, in juvenile
court, and the clients I represent there, abused and
neglected children, have the least clout of any in the legal
system. Daily I see their lives laid waste. In some cases it is
inevitable: what some parents do to children cannot be
undone by social workers, judges and lawyers. But too often
the misused influence of politicians and interest groups is
causing unintended misery.
But IMHO his opposition is for the wrong reasons — he mainly fears the discouragement of the adoption process. I think the problem with the law is, first and foremost, that it strips away any remaining residue of responsibility, thoughtfulness or obligation from the decision to have a child. It should be thought of as one of those benchmarks by which we measure the worth of our society, like several others I can think of off the top of my head — our incarceration rate; our eagerness for state-sanctioned murder; and our glorification of the mediocre and unthinking insofar as someone like George Dubya leads the pack for President. Just for starters.
New York Times: A Magic Carpet of Cultures in London In a much more vibrant and fertile way than, say, in New York or LA, multiculturalism pervades London’s cultural life. Maybe it comes of being an erstwhile colonial power?
But unlike before, the purveyors of diversity are more than
suppliers. They choose not to be possessed but to possess,
and to move beyond becoming just another choice for the
insatiably greedy white consumer. The “ethnic minorities”
are beginning to redefine the very essence of what it means
to be a Londoner.
Seeing Drugs as a Choice or as a Brain Anomaly. Psychiatrists debate whether the brains of abusers are malfunctioning badly enough to make their actions nonvolitional. Brain changes in heavy chronic drug users are easy to demonstrate, but when do they cross the line to being considered responsible for alterations in behavior, or worthy of being called a disease? Ramifications are legal and fiscal as well as medical, of course. [New York Times]
EPIC Testimony on Use and Misuse of the Social Security Number. Mark Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, testified before a subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee on May 11.
In conclusion, there is clear authority in both legislation and judicial opinion that supports the enactment of further laws to limit the collection and use of the
Social Security Number. It is particularly important that such legislation not force consumers to make unfair or unreasonable “choices” that essentially
require trading the privacy interest in the SSN for some benefit or opportunity.
What’s News at Junkbusters. “This page is updated frequently, for the benefit of both reporters and consumers who want to keep posted on current events affecting
their privacy. ”
Wired: New York Times Site Exposes CIA Agents. “A freedom of information activist plans to publish online a classified CIA document that was pulled from The
New York Times‘ site after newspaper officials learned it exposed the identities of Iranians involved in the
1953 U.S. and British-backed coup that overthrew Iran’s elected officials.
The Times used the graphic to accompany an article detailing the coup. In a technical glitch, those who
visited the Times website on June 16 were able to read the names of the agents when they downloaded
the graphic.”
Wired: Amazon to Break Embargo on early sales of fourth Harry Potter book, slated for July 8th release and inspiring booksellers’ dreams of dollar signs and ringing cash registers.
Oh my, Dr. Laura says her feelings have been hurt by those nasty homosexuals trying to axe her upcoming TV show. “I’ve cried more at times than I would like to admit,” Schlessinger told Time magazine. “It’s been agonizing.” But she also persisted: “Not being able to relate normally to a member of the opposite sex is some kind of error. We were biologically meant
to give birth to more people.”
In Gamble, U.S. Supports Russian Germ Warfare Scientists. U.S. support is massively endowing the careers of some 2200 scientists at more than 30 institutions throughout the former Soviet Union. It might not be an oversimplification to say that we are buying them out mostly to prevent them from selling their expertise to some notorious “rogue state”.
Feed: Street Level, the brave new world of urban mapping. “New York City and Los Angeles,
already seen as the epicenters of American narcissism, are
getting to know themselves a lot better these days. With
sophisticated computer simulation and mapping projects
underway, they’ll soon know themselves down to the square
foot. Both maps will integrate aerial photos with data gathered
from city agencies, utilities, and developers, and will be
continuously updated in years hence.” Among other consequences, the maps, it is claimed, will make for “one-stop shopping” for potential terrorists.
The Jerusalem Report is amused as Islamists attack apparent hidden anti-Islamic messages in multinational brand name advertising.
Squall: Blowing the lid on the Bilderberg conference: “You’d imagine that if the President of the World Bank, the director of the World Trade
Organisation, the Queen of the Netherlands and the head of the Xerox Corporation were
amongst the delegates at an international conference, there would be some mention of it in
the media.
But then again this is the annual meeting of the highly influential and highly secretive
Bilderberg Group, a collection of top ranking western politicians, media moguls, corporate
presidents and big bankers who meet at a different location each year to conduct
clandestine talks on the furthering of global capitalism. Every delegate, including a handful
of carefully selected journalists, are sworn to secrecy.”
Fetus Develops Taste for Food in the Womb. It appears that exposure to
flavors either through amniotic fluid or in breast milk can influence a child’s food preferences.
APB news: Satanists Suspected in Theft of General’s Skull
A satanist likely is to blame for the theft of a Civil War general’s skull from a Rochester cemetery during
this week’s summer solstice, police said today.
Fading aroma. The gene pool of wild arabica coffee plants is under threat. Over 90% of the coffee we drink is arabica, and the highland forests of Ethiopia from which it originates, and where wild coffee plants make up most of the underbrush, have lost more than half of their trees in the past 30 years. When cultivated coffee on plantations outside Ethiopia is devastated by the diseases from which they are in peril, breeders turn to the Ethiopian gene pool for help.
Fetus Develops Taste for Food in the Womb. It appears that exposure to
flavors either through amniotic fluid or in breast milk can influence a child’s food preferences.
Slate: The Sultans of Stats – A Harvard professor pooh-poohs McGwire’s records. Is he right? I’ve suspected this was true; here is the best articulation of it. “Home runs can’t be as meaningful as they once were if
Steve Finley is on pace to hit more in a season than Reggie
Jackson ever did. But it is also irrelevant. Baseball history,
even as the purists who complain about today’s cheapened
offensive statistics construct it, is little more than a record of
inflated achievement. Insane numbers don’t threaten the
integrity of baseball’s historical accomplishments. They
constitute it.”
Matthew Rossi, in the excellent and maniacal (!) Once I Noticed I Was on Fire, I Decided to Relax and Enjoy the Fall, on weblogging:
Lately, it seems as though you might as soon admit to consorting with Lucifer
as maintaining one of these sites. Everyone’s tired of it, it seems. Everyone’s
sick of the link economy, or the cookie cutter nature of 9/10’s of the content of
these ‘blogs’ as people have taken to calling them. Everyone wants to get
back to the purity of maintaining a site just for them.Well, not me, baby. Me and my diseased imagination are gonna keep on
keeping on till they pry our cold dead fingers away from the keys. Let me bare
myself to my limited readership for an instant; I am fully aware of how unique I
am, and I like it. I like that I’m smart. I like that I’m erudite. I like that I read
and think about what I read and melt my disparate reading into mental alloy. I
am, in short, not all that humble about this page, or what it is I do on it. Is it
Earth-Shattering? Nope. Does anyone care? Well, a few people do, and
they’ve been very nice about it. To everyone who has bothered to come by and
send me a nice email, I thank you kindly. Your simple generosity has been
appreciated.But I do not do this for you, and I never did. Go back in the archives and
look. I was rampaging along the edges of the sanity borderlands well before
anyone was linked to me, before anyone read a damn thing I had to say, and
I’ll be doing it as long as there’s a cheap and easy way for me to screed out
these demented babblings without having to work too hard at coding.
vnunet.com: Deserted domains to go under the
hammer. “Hundreds of thousands of domain names that have been
abandoned by their owners will be sold in an auction next
week, and there might be some real bargains on offer.
On Wednesday, US domain name registrar Network Solutions
will run the first ever auction of its kind, which will include
.com, .net and .org domains and could be the internet sale of
the century because a ceiling of just $35 has been set on
each name.”
I’m sure everyone’s heard this already, but it’s too exciting not to log. Signs of Recent Water Flow Spotted by a Mars Orbiter: “A
spacecraft orbiting Mars has
sighted grooved surface features
suggesting a relatively recent water
flow on the planet, a finding that
could redirect efforts to find
evidence of past or present life
there, experts said today.” [New York Times]
Greil Marcus profiles Sleater-Kinney, with audio clips. Courtney Love, in her recent critique of the music industry, cited them as one of the bands too good not to be heard.
Protesters “Just Do It” Again to Nike [New York Times]
Among the Deaf, Sign Language Faces a Challenge. In face of burgeoning acceptance of ASL, critics say
the overreliance on sign
language fosters a kind of false pride in deaf separatism. The consequences include needless academic impairments. [New York Times]
CBS News: Harry Potter’s Magical Print Run: 1.5M
“We have certainly never
heard of anyone else doing
such a large first print of a
book, children’s or
otherwise,” said Sarah
Odedina, editorial director of
children’s books at the
London-based publishers.
This meme is being propagated rapidly through the weblogging world (if you want to call it a meme). The do.some.good bookmarklet (linked to the left) opens browser windows for four donation sites — the
Hunger Site, Click for a Cause, The Rainforest Site,
and Clear Landmines —
with one click. Just go to each, click to donate,
and close the window. Drag the “do.some.good” link to the personal toolbar on your
browser and click on it daily to do.some.good with ease. [via Rebecca Blood]
An Apple a Day may be a better antioxidant than high-dose vitamin C.
Mean and green. Viruses given a gene for a toxin from one of the world’s deadliest spiders could replace chemical pesticides, say
researchers…When the modified baculovirus infects an
insect, the insect’s cells should start to produce the toxin, killing it faster than wild viruses.” ?Famous last words: ” Because the host dies
quickly, before much virus can replicate, the modified virus shouldn’t persist in the environment, say the
researchers.” [New Scientist]
“Left Behind”: Superficially Christian. Christian editor Michael G. Maudlin and theology professor Randall Balmer agree that this bestselling millennial pulp fiction series turns the Book of Revelation to “camp Christianity.” Along the way, they explain end-times theology to unbelievers.
Remote-Control Assassination. The improvement in precision of GPS now available to private citizens allows missile targeting of individuals by would-be assassins, says Robert Wright in Slate. Weblogger David Brake, who also knows something about location technology, thinks the Slate article isn’t worth much.
Happy Summer Solstice! At 01:48 Universal Time today the Sun reaches its northernmost point in the sky.
Nearing Diagnosis Of Alzheimer’s In Living Patients. A test for the first time promises to allow radiological visualization of Alzheimer’s plaques in living patients. Until now, the diagnosis has been presumptive until autopsy reveals the plaques.
The Nation cover story depicts David Horowitz’s Long March from Ramparts editor and major Black Panthers white liaison, to combatant against “political correctness”, to chief Republican strategist.
Aim Low by Yossi Klein Halevi. New Republic commentator argues that the prospects for Arab-Israeli peace are slim, that Assad’s death will not improve relations with Syria, and that Israel should have “a
government without great expectations, inward-looking
and aware of its limits: a government of national
humility.”
Slate: Rogue State Contest Winners
Politics makes strange bedfellows, but apparently no one can stand sleeping with Buchanan for long…
Why is the Lockerbie trial being ignored by the media?
“The Lockerbie case is probably the most interesting and
important criminal trial taking place anywhere in the world. But
you’re not likely to be reading or hearing very much about it in
the weeks and months to come.” [The Guardian]
Have you been wondering who’s driving those new PT Cruisers and VW Beetles? [US News & World Reports]
“To put your head in the sand as a governor, to my mind, that’s dereliction of duty.” A Virginia activist has filed suit to compel Gov. James Gilmore to acknowledge clandestine UFO landings and alien abductions, and to repel the space invaders with all available force.
Salon: Slaves of a different color. “In writing a book on the mixing of black
and white life throughout American history, I discovered
that white slavery did occur before the Civil War in small
but significant numbers. And in unearthing this fascinating
lost chapter in American history, I also discovered how
slavery has been partitioned into a piece of
African-American cultural property — made sacred by black
Americans, abandoned by whites. Petrified by politics and
shame, the richest and most central drama of early American
history is now playing to segregated houses.”
Good news: [Chuck Taggart at Looka! chose to cluster these three news items together and I’m taking his lead.] First, in the Louisiana case, the Supreme Court ruled that schools can’t be required to include a disclaimer mentioning creationism whenever they teach evolution. Dissenting were (of course) Rehnquist, Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Next, in the Texas case, with George Dubya weighing in on the other side, the Court ruled that school districts allowing student-led prayer are violating the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Supporters of school prayer were hoping to be allowed to continue using student pawns to attempt to circumvent government-religion separation. Dissenting? Rehnquist, Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Lastly, Bob Lucente, the NYPD officer who had called Bruce Springsteen a “fucking dirtbag” and a “floating fag,” found that his apology to those he had offended was not enough, and he handed in his badge. Law enforcement officers around the city have protestedSpringsteen’s new song “American Skin”,
which they perceive as critical of police actions in the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo, the West African
immigrant who was shot and killed during a confrontation with police.
Flesh or Fiction? Special effects capabilities in modern film have reached the point where it’s becoming more and more difficult to suspend disbelief…and it’s only going to get worse. [Hartford Courant]
Disney snubbed Churchill’s plea for comic relief.
Winston Churchill’s wartime government secretly urged Walt
Disney to make an anti-Nazi cartoon based on the legend of St
George and the Dragon.Documents discovered by The Telegraph disclose that ministers
desperately wanted a popular film to be made with a strong
pro-British message which would appeal to a large audience in
an isolationist America.The papers, dated 1940, show that Noël Coward, the playwright
and actor, and officials from the Ministry of Information went to
America to try to persuade Disney to help with Britain’s
propaganda campaign. Their requests, however, were ignored
by Disney who was determined to keep America out of the war
and was anxious to protect the international market for his films.There is also speculation that he may have snubbed Britain
because he was unhappy with the way his films had been
received by the London critics. He is known to have been
particularly hurt by a suggestion by some censors that Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs was too dark a film for children and
should not be shown in cinemas.This lack of respect for his efforts was in contrast to the critical
acclaim his films received elsewhere, particularly in Germany
where even Hitler was a fan.
Moyers Challenges PBS on Public Affairs Coverage.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he told attendees of the PBS annual meeting in his keynote address. “What we do is good. It’s just not enough. We need to
respond more to the needs of America as a democratic society, not just a
consumer market. We need more hard-hitting public affairs programming on
controversial issues. We’re good, but we’re bland,” he said, adding that too
often, producers and stations are fearful of offending Congress or driving off
the corporate underwriters who sponsor shows.
Moreover, said Moyers, “With media ownership consolidating, public
television stands alone in our ability to provide independent journalism free
from corporate strings.”
Consumers of classical recordings locked in cutthroat competition. “Classical-recording consumers are becoming the new counterculture.” [Philadelphia Inquirer]
Brill’s Content: Southern Exposure “The Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger is prying open
murder cases from the ugliest days of the civil-rights era. In
the process, it has come to terms with its own role in fueling
the racism of the South.”
Satellite Events Art from the “perfect storm” 0f October 30, 1991, portrayed in the eponymous book (and forthcoming film), from The National Climatic Data Center of NOAA.
A new alternative to fans and heatsinks for cooling off your overheating CPU. It seems to have problems of its own, however. Anyone have experience with these?
How to handle telemarketers. Some of these, forwarded by a reader, seem promising:
1. If they want to loan you money, tell them you just filed for
bankruptcy and you could sure use some money.2. If they start out with, “How are you today?” say, “Why do you
want to know?” Alternately, you can tell them, “I’m so glad you
asked, because no one these days seems to care, and I have all
these problems; my arthritis is acting up, my eyelashes are sore,
my car won’t start…” When they try to get to the sell, just
keep talking about your problems.3. If they say they’re John Doe from XYZ Company, ask them to
spell their name. Then ask them to spell the company name. Then
ask them where it is located. Continue asking them personal
questions or questions about their company for as long as
necessary.4. This works great if you are male: Telemarketer: “Hi, my name
is Judy and I’m with XYZ Company…” You: (Wait for a second)
With a real husky voice ask, “What are you wearing?”5. Cry out in surprise, “Judy! Is that you? Oh my God! Judy,
how have you been?” Hopefully, this will give Judy a few brief
moments of terror as she tries to figure out where she could know
you from.6. Say “No”, over and over. Be sure to vary the sound of each
one, and keep a rhythmic tempo, even as they are trying to speak.
This is most fun if you can do it until they hang up.7. If MCI calls trying to get you to sign up for the Family and
Friends Plan, reply, in as SINISTER a voice as you can, “I don’t
have any friends…would YOU be my friend?”8. If the company cleans rugs, respond: “Can you get blood out?
Can you get out GOAT blood? How about HUMAN blood?”9. Ask him/her to marry you. When they get all flustered, tell
them that you could not just give your credit card number to a
complete stranger.10. Tell the telemarketer that you work for the same company,
they often can’t sell to their fellow employees.11. Answer the phone. As soon as you realize it is a
telemarketer, set the receiver down, shout or scream “Oh my
God!!!” and then hang-up.12. Tell the telemarketer you are busy at the moment and ask them
if they will give you their HOME phone number, you will call them
back. When the telemarketer explains that they cannot give out
their HOME number, you say “I guess you don’t want anyone
bothering you at home, right?” The telemarketer will agree and
you say, “Now you know how I feel!” Hang up.13. Ask them to repeat everything they say, several times.
14. Tell them it is dinner time, BUT ask if they would please
hold. Put them on your speaker phone while you continue to eat at
your leisure. Smack your food loudly and continue with your
dinner conversation.15. Tell the telemarketer you are on “home incarceration” and ask
if they could bring you some beer.16. Tell the telemarketer, “Okay, I will listen to you. But I
should probably tell you, I’m not wearing any clothes.”17. Insist that the caller is really your buddy Leon, playing a
joke. “Come on Leon, cut it out! Seriously, Leon, how’s your
momma?”18. Tell them you are hard of hearing and that they need to
speakup… louder… louder… louder…19. Tell them to talk VERY SLOWLY, because you want to write
DOWN EVERY WORD
There’s a crop of interesting articles in this week’s Science Times I’ve just gotten to:
Health Sleuths Assess Homocysteine as Culprit. Elevated homocysteine levels are a new focus of concern as a cause of heart attack and other maladies. B-vitamin supplements are the major way of lowering it, as well as reducing stress.
Two Stars Collide; a New Star Is Born. 
Scientists at the first symposium on interstellar collisions report on detecting the aftemath of two- and even three-star collisions.
Mr. Mom Dies; 2 Hatchlings Live. Had been set to become the first weedy sea dragon to give birth in captivity.
Genetic Analysis Yields Intimations of a Primordial Commune: “Everything about the
origin of life on earth is a
mystery, and it seems the
more that is known, the
more acute the puzzles
get…The best efforts of chemists to
reconstruct molecules typical of life in the laboratory have
shown only that it is a problem of fiendish difficulty. The
genesis of life on earth, some time in the fiery last days of
the Hadean, remains an unyielding problem.”
Will the Web Make Us Better Patients? Two doctors discuss the problems and promise of patients’ coming for medical care armed with information from the ‘net. [Slate]
The relativistic heavy-ion collider has begun working and we’re still here. This newest and biggest particle accelerator in the world has been aiming gold ions at each other. The thought is that the quarks and gluons that make up the protons and neutrons in the gold nuclei will be freed for a fleeting moment to exist in a plasma simulating the conditions in the universe in the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang. The problem is that some credible critics feared that this might create a mini-black hole that would suck up all surrounding matter, perhaps destroying the earth. Others felt a new form of matter made up of strange quarks might begin converting all the other matter nearby to its type, sort of like Vonnegut’s Ice-9. Some physicists feared that such an energetic collision might even cause a decay in the fabric of empty space itself which would propagate outward at the speed of light until it changed the entire universe. Brookhaven National Laboratory actually convened a committee to consider such speculative disaster scenarios, which concluded that “…the candidate mechanisms for catastrophic
scenarios at RHIC are firmly excluded by existing empirical evidence, compelling theoretical arguments, or both. Accordingly, we see no reason
to delay the commissioning of RHIC on their account.” Many people have been reminded of the concerns in 1945 that the first fission bomb explosion might set the whole atmosphere on fire. Put yourself in the head of the scientist at the moment her/his finger is poised on the final button to initiate any of these experiments…
The Science of Sex. It makes good evolutionary sense that we find more symmetric faces more appealing. [Nerve]
“In 1916, as the
American daily
newspaper hit its
media peak, a
philosophical
cockroach
named archy
transmigrated
onto the pages of
the New York
Sun. Today, as
the Web hits its
own media peak,
archy’s cousin,
bernie, has
e-mailed his way
into
eXaminer.com”: bernie – the world’s first
cockroach in
cyberspace.
The Science of Sex. It makes good evolutionary sense that we find more symmetric faces more appealing. [Nerve]
Navy sonar may have killed whales in Bahamas. [AP via Robot Wisdom]
Dumb and Dumber. To judge from the new crop of men’s magazines, it’s getting harder and harder to be a man’s body even vaguely connected to a brain. Dreck sells, says Andrew Sullivan in The New Republic.
Author George Saunders defends like. ‘There’s an Orwell essay that I love, called “Politics
and the English Language,” in which he says that
language is inherently political. So something like
“like” is a sort of indicator of a larger societal
dysfunction. What “like” does is allow you to join
two thoughts that are grammatically distinct but
associatively linked, without having to go to great
lengths to make the connection. It’s kind of an
impressionistic device. You can say, “The truck was
going so fast, like, I just went, like: Slow down,
jerk?” I’m sure we stumbled across that sort of
device because we needed it. It’s meaningful.’ [Atlantic]
Public Citizen: did you think the high price of gasoline at the pump was just higher costs being passed on to the consumer??
A plea to let corporations accelerate efforts to buy the rights to attach their names to public edifices and institutions.
One third of Eritreans face humanitarian crisis – UN. “I believe nobody is entirely ready to deal with this scale of disaster, which has grew dramatically in the last 30 to 45 days,” says Carol Bellamy, head of the UN’s children’s agency.
Navy sends agents into gay bars. Washington Post: “Navy investigators are routinely
sending informants and undercover agents into
Washington area gay bars to identify military
personnel among the clients, and then using
sting operations to catch some of them in drug
trafficking, according to Navy officials and
testimony in a recent military court proceeding.”
Number of US Nuclear Targets Has Grown Since 1993. Like I said, if you think the arms race is over, think again. [Manchester Guardian via Common Dreams]
Sovereign Bank Coming To Massachusetts. Thirty years ago I opened a bank account at Harvard Trust Co. when I moved to the Boston area. When it conglomerated with other Massachusetts banks, I had a “Bay Bank Harvard Trust” account. Then they dropped the affiliates’ autonomy and it became a “Bay Bank” account. About two or three years ago, the Bank of Boston bought Bay Bank and my new cards and checks said “BankBoston.” Last month, after Fleet bought BankBoston, they gave me Fleet accounts and cards. And now it appears that, to avoid anti-trust implications, they’re forcing me to become a Sovereign Bank customer. All this without lifting a finger in thirty years.
The sniffing detective. The effort to develop an “electronic nose” that could hone in on the time of death of a decomposing body (by analyzing the chemicals it produces over time) includes getting a graduate student to spend successive nights in a morgue taking vapor samples near corpses. A forensic entomologist objects, saying his approach — analyzing developmental stage of the insect populations that populate a decomposing body — is more accurate. [New Scientist]
Medical Records Sent To Wrong Place. This is probably so common it shouldn’t even be a news item anymore, unfortunately.
RadioShack to Co-Sponsor Moon Mission. “With a new age of commercial space exploration on the horizon, U.S. electronics
retailer RadioShack Corp. hopes to bolster its image and sales by going to the moon.
RadioShack said on Thursday it will co-sponsor the first commercial lunar landing, a robot probe for ancient
ice… “
Neurosurgeons ‘fear risky surgery’. Patients are losing out as neurosurgeons, faced with burgeoning numbers of lawsuits, curtail chancy practices.
The Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Why didn’t the NYPD stop the Central Park wolf pack? “With Amadou Diallo, the
cops went too far. In
Central Park, not far enough. But guess what? It’s the same
problem.” The author makes a case that the problem is the NYPD’s contempt for the people of the city, leading it to be both tough on suspected ‘perps’ and soft on victims; and that this attitude trickels down from above, ultimately from Giuliani. There’s also the possibility that this is payback for recent protests of police brutality including, of course, the flap over the new Springsteen song “American Skin (41 Shots)”. [Salon] But let’s get more basic — is why the police didn’t stop this even the right question to ask? Giuliani actually tried to softpeddle the events (until the rising tide of public outcry against the police flipped him to a get-tough ‘spin’) by saying that there wasn’t any more violence at this year’s Puerto Rican Day parade than there was last year, and one of his police spokespeople said something along the lines of: what’s the big deal, this happens in New Orleans every year at Mardi Gras? It’s unbelievable to me that we have come to the point of living in the kind of world where bystanders are going to be savaged at a public celebration unless they have police protection.
Software that can spy on you.
“Why did Mattel include technology that can encrypt and send data to and from your PC in its children’s CD-ROMs?” [Salon, via Robot Wisdom]
Complete list: “100 Funniest Films” as chosen by a panel of 1,800 people in the
industry for the American Film Institute. Here are the top ten:
1. “Some Like It Hot,” 1959
2. “Tootsie,” 1982
3. “Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
the Bomb,” 19644. “Annie Hall,” 1977
5. “Duck Soup,” 1933
6. “Blazing Saddles,” 1974
7. “M*A*S*H,” 1970
8. “It Happened One Night,” 1934
9. “The Graduate,” 1967
10. “Airplane!,” 1980
The Y2K MacArthur Fellowship winners announced. Links to biographical sketches of the award winners.
[American Prospect]: Harvey Blume, “Neuro-Narrative,” May 22, 2000. I thought it was only because of my own involvement with neuroscience that I’ve been noticing fiction pivoting around characters with such conditions as Tourette’s disorder, autism, and temporal lobe epilepsy. But this essayist argues that, reflective of an emerging new worldview, “neurology and neuroscience have in recent years become major forces in American arts and media, charting new narrative pathways. If noted at all, this development
has been written off as only another example of our
culture’s hunger for varieties of victimhood.”
Review of Daniel Pick’s Svengali’s Web: the alien enchanter in modern culture:
The intricate complicity between symptoms and cures – and
between what people are considered to be suffering from and
what they claim to be suffering from – has made the history of
medicine, in its broadest sense, of so much recent interest. Part
of the fascination (so to speak) of mesmerism and hypnosis –
and of the history that is so well told in Svengali’s Web – is that,
as potential cures for a wide range of miseries, they were so
quickly seen to be at once remarkable breakthroughs, and
disreputable, if not criminal activities.
The reviewer wonders what it is about psychoanalysis that keeps it from being another form of hypnosis, if indeed it is not; and whether hypnosis shows that seducing and being seduced are the only things we are truly free to do, “making a mockery of our ideas of freedom.”
The impossible world of DI John Rebus. A London Review of Books essay surveys Ian Rankin’s appealing, encyclopedic series of crime novels featuring a gritty Scottish detective.
The sheer
range of subjects treated in the novels is one of the keys to their
interest. John Rebus, born in irritation at the self-ghettoising of
the literary novel, grew into a highly effective tool for describing
and engaging with modern Scotland. Rankin does not indulge
any temptation to play formal games with his character. There is
no ludic or ironic component to the series, just as there is none
to Rebus himself; the books do not experiment with the
crime-novel form, and do not make any kind of distancing or
Post-Modern gestures towards it. A writer who began by trying
to write a book his father might want to read found himself, after
the publication of Dead Souls, occupying eight of the top ten
positions in the Scottish bestseller list.
Memorable journalistic bloopers submitted by readers to Jim Romenesko’s Media News.
Two-faced kitten dies unexpectedly in Pennsylvania. “Image, the…kitten that received
a good prognosis for survival even though he
was born with two sets of eyes, two mouths
and two noses, died yesterday morning in his
quilt-lined bed…Aside from his
facial features, the rest of the kitten seemed
normal. The two mouths opened in unison but
were attached to one esophagus. Image has one
head, two ears and one set of lungs.” 
The kitten was too young for its four eyes to have yet opened, rendering moot the fascinating question of how it would have seen the world.
Flawed process leads to executions in Texas despite Bush’s vows of confidence in the system. The Chicago Tribune conducted the first comprehensive investigation of all 131 executions in Texas under Bush’s tenure and concludes that scandalous flaws undermine the process of capital convictions there. As a psychiatrist, I’m particularly appalled by the abuse of psychiatric expert testimony:
In at least 29 cases, the prosecution presented
damaging testimony from a psychiatrist who,
based upon a hypothetical question describing
the defendant’s past, predicted the defendant
would commit future violence. In most of
these cases, the psychiatrist offered this
opinion without ever examining the
defendant. Although this kind of testimony is
sometimes used in other states, the American
Psychiatric Association has condemned it as
unethical and untrustworthy.
Other failings included representation in one-third of the cases by an attorney later disbarred, suspended or otherwise sanctioned; and the frequent use of jailhouse informants (“a form of testimony so unreliable
that some states warn jurors to view it with
skepticism. The prevalent use of jailhouse
informants in capital cases was one of the
central problems Gov. George Ryan cited when
he declared the moratorium in Illinois”). Witnesses, experts and lawyers on whose contributions capital convictions have turned have included
a forensic scientist who was
temporarily released from a psychiatric ward
to provide incriminating testimony in a capital
case; a pathologist who has admitted faking
autopsies; a psychiatrist, nicknamed “Dr.
Death,” who was expelled from the American
Psychiatric Association; a judge on the state’s
highest criminal court who has been
reprimanded for lying about his background;
and a defense attorney infamous for sleeping
during trials.
This all ought to be disturbing regardless of whether one supports the death penalty or not in the abstract. Let’s elect George W. to the presidency just to get him out of the role of signing death warrants in Texas, for God’s sake!
