Lies, Damed Lies Statistics and Yellow Journalism: Sure I’m defensive about this. The advocacy group Public Citizen has posted a report by Sidney Wolfe MD ranking the 50 state medical boards’ rates of serious disciplinary actions in 1999 and earlier years. My state, Massachusetts, rates near the bottom. Wolfe and Public Citizen imply that that means the medical board is lax, or that its members are covering for their inept colleagues:

“These data raise serious questions about the extent to which patients in many states with poorer records of serious doctor discipline are

being protected from physicians who might well be barred from practice in states with boards that are doing a better job of disciplining

physicians. It is likely that patients are being injured or killed more often in states with poor doctor disciplinary records than in states

with consistent top performances.”

But, at least for Massachusetts, couldn’t it mean that the quality of medical care is higher and the need for disciplinary action lower, as I think it might be? The state has four medical schools and an enormous proportion of its medical practitioners are medical faculty, leaders in their disciplines; another large proportion are researchers without enough patient contact to commit disciplinable offenses. Think about it: the four best-ranked states are AK, with a total of just 1160 physicians; ND, with 1596 physicians state-wide; WY, with 981; and ID, with 2278. Massachusetts had 27622 physicians in 1999.

Why Web Journals Suck by Diane Patterson. Some of the comments are germane to weblogs too. There’s a section called “Hit Sluts” on how to attract more readers, with some thoughtful suggestions. One of them is to post a long diatribe about how web journals suck. Good work, Diane. Another is to link to other journals or weblogs, especially popular ones. Good work, Eliot. Let’s face it, I’m a hit slut too.

HIV puzzle explored:

new report of an elderly patient

who has survived with the infection for about 15 years, untroubled by any virus-related complications,

according to a group of Italian physicians.

Mounties Probe Fragrant Student

“A teacher (in Sheet Harbour, Nova Scotia) has asked Royal Canadian Mounted Police to investigate whether a student is ignoring the

school’s policy against wearing scented products and intentionally trying to cause her to experience allergic reactions.

If investigators deem the boy is intentionally trying to harm the teacher, the student could be charged with assault or mischief.”

Can George W. Save Bill G.? by Ted Rose

Last week, the New York Times reported that George W.

Bush campaign consultant Ralph Reed was moonlighting for

Microsoft, lobbying Bush about the company’s antitrust case. Could

Bush really make a difference in the case if he assumed the

presidency in 2001? [Slate]

Slate: Baby Needs a New Set of Genes – Everyone’s against genetic discrimination. Or so they think.  by Michael Kinsley

“So this ban on genetic discrimination that everyone seems

to be for would, if applied consistently, be an exercise in social

leveling like nothing since the Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia

into Kampuchea. That seems to leave only two logically

coherent positions, both intolerable: 1) level away; or 2) don’t

start down this road, because there’s no place to stop.” Does Kinsley really think we’ll stop and think just because we’re on a slippery slope??

The scoop on The Copernicus Plot: Seven of the 260 surviving copies of Polish

astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ momentous 1543

book De Revolutionibus Orbium

Coelestium (On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres), in which he argued that the Earth goes around the

sun and not vice versa, have been stolen from university

and scientific libraries worldwide over the past several

years. Worth $400,000 apiece but virtually impossible

to fence, why have multiple thieves, or one thief very

gifted at disguise, used various ruses to take the tomes

from cities as far apart as Krakow, Kiev,

Stockholm, St. Petersburg and

the University of Illinois? [Chicago Tribune]

Old News: former

Washington Post pop-music critic Richard

Harrington filed suit in February alleging that

he had been demoted to a part-time job on the

weekend section as a result of his age.

What is the link between depression and artistic genius?

An Oscar-nominated documentary about emotionally tortured concert violinist Nadia Salerno-Sonnenberg, Speaking in Strings, “looks at her difficulties

sympathetically but in the process may have turned her into the next David Helfgott as far as the public is

concerned. That’s unfair to Salerno-Sonnenberg, who is vastly more talented and capable than Helfgott,

the pianist whose story was chronicled in the movie Shine, and who was then exploited by his wife and

managers in a concert tour for which he was not fit. But it does raise a question: Do depression and other

emotional problems have a particular connection with artistic creativity?”

Mixed signals

NPR says it supports low-power FM, a new standard for a class of 10- and 100-watt grassroots community stations. But it’s joining with industry lobbyists to gut the standard by claiming it fears interference with existing broadcasting signals. [Salon]

Last fall, British and Danish investigative reporting sugggested that the US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade had had a motive, contrary to NATO claims that it had been a terrible mistake based on outdated maps. Reportedly, NATO intelligence had discovered that the Chinese were helping Serbian military command broadcast to troops in the field. These reports were buried by the US media, but the New York Times now weighs in. After its full investigation, it can find no evidence for the British/Danish charges. “The bombing resulted from

error piled upon incompetence

piled upon bad judgment in a variety of places – from a frantic

rush to approve targets to questionable reliance on inexpert

officers to an inexplicable failure to consult the people who

might have averted disaster, according to the officials,” writes

Steven Lee Myers.

And this is all I’m going to say about this matter: “The notion that a 6-year-old child should somehow be paraded on TV as capable of determining whether he should stay or go is a tremendous distortion and at some level an abuse of the child,” child psychiatrist tells the Los Angeles Times. And: “The little kid from Cuba has overtaken some of the

biggest media feeding frenzies of the past decade,” according to Center for Media and Public Affairs analysis of network news

coverage. Bigger than Princess Di’s death, far surpassing JFK Jr., and if the debacle goes on for much longer, threatening to topple the ascendency of the OJ Simpson affair!

Shouts Bring Murmurs, And That Works: cultural critic and sociologist Todd Gitlin in the Washington Post about the significance of the IMF/World Bank protests.

I lauded the President’s proclamation establishing the Sequoia National Monument below, but in the back of my mind wondered whether it was real protection or window-dressing. Here’s a concerned environmentalist’s criticism.

Greenpeace USA

A peer-reviewed report commissioned by Greenpeace and released today by a team of

Swiss scientists reveals that tests submitted by the biotech companies Novartis and Mycogen to determine

whether their genetically-engineered corn could harm non-target insects were so poorly designed that there

was virtually no chance that adverse effects would be observed. Despite the flawed

methodology, EPA accepted the tests as scientific evidence that the gene-altered crop was

harmless to non-target insects, and continued to accept the same flawed testing

procedures for approval of other companies’ insect-resistant “biotech” crops.

Clinton’s Cruel Decision On Land Mines Risks Too Many Lives: a recent editorial in the Seattle Post-intelligencer reminds us of U.S.’s shameful 1997 decision not to be signatory of treaty to ban anti-personnel land mines. “The global banning of a weapons system is rare but not unprecedented. Exploding bullets

were banned in 1863, fragmenting (so-called “dum-dum”) bullets in 1899, poison gas in

1925 and blinding lasers in 1995.”

Jeremy Rifkin in the LA Times: It’s Death of a Salesman as Shared-Savings Catches On: “I have long been a skeptic when it comes to the prospect of persuading companies to take

responsibility for protecting the environment and public health. Yet now a revolutionary new

way of doing business called “shared savings” is changing the basic rules of commerce

and, in the process, making environmental protection and public health synonymous with

the bottom line. The implications are profound.”

Military wing of BAe Systems (formerly British Aerospace) confirms it has launched an anti-gravity research program.

Captive audience with a ringside seat.

If you’re interested in cognitive neuroscience, keep following the leaps and bounds coming out of fMRI (functional MRI) studies. They are the most exciting window into the localization of function in the CNS we’ve had. For example, this: People with autism and Asperger Syndrome process faces as objects, Yale study of brain abnormalities finds. The study demonstrates reduced activity in the part of the brain subsuming facial recognition as well as increased activity in an adjacent area processing non-face objects.It seems to me that finding such an impairment in the neural substrate of a function so crucial to the essence of human interaction goes a long way to explaining the etiology of the profound social interaction deficits that characterize autism and other so-called “pervasive developmental disorders” such as Asperger’s Syndrome.

Toddler diet influences adolescent test scores “Toddlers fed a wide variety of foods may have a long-term academic

edge over children fed more restricted diets, researchers conclude.

…(S)tudies have suggested that children fed diets consisting of only a few types

of food are more likely to be deficient in specific ‘micronutrients’ such as iron or zinc.”

Several months ago it was a British laptop with British state secrets; now: FBI Looks for Laptop Missing With U.S. Secrets

“A laptop computer which may have held classified

information disappeared from the State Department about two months ago and the

FBI is investigating whether it was stolen, the State Department said Monday.”

A paean to walking by James Hillman [Utne Reader]

Probably everybody with a weblog is going to link to this: Game console ‘could be used in missiles’ “Japanese authorities have restricted the export of Sony’s new game

console, PlayStation 2, amid fears that it could be exploited for

weapons technology…The government’s concern centres on a powerful processor

responsible for the console’s realistic graphics. Experts believe this

could be converted for use in missiles that read visual information to

home in on targets. Sony said it did not expect the restrictions to

affect PlayStation 2’s release in other countries.” [The Telegraph]

I’ve seen a couple of weblogs that linked to this with comments like, “I don’t believe it!” They obviously didn’t follow the directions to read all the way to the end of the page. (It’s easy to be smug, isn’t it?)

R.I.P., Edward Gorey, age 75.

Cadaver donations line somebody’s pockets to the tune of millions, an expose in the Orange County Register reported Sunday.

Why didn’t I think of that? [BBC News]

Chipping Away at Leptin’s Effects

“Leptin is produced by fat tissue and secreted into the

bloodstream, where it travels to the brain and other

tissues, causing fat loss and decreased appetite.

Identifying genes regulated by leptin will improve

knowledge of how leptin causes its effects on weight

and appetite, and may also offer new targets for

drugs designed to stimulate weight loss.”

Rx for hospital nurses: unions Laudable trend toward nurses’ organizing may be an important response to profit-driven cuts in healthcare if it catches on.

Penn State cancer researcher shows cancer cells can be contained from growing at second site. Stopping metastasis may be an effective and fundamentally different type of intervention in cancer therapy. Might be less noxious to the patient as well.

This doesn’t happen much: Saudi Arabia Says Amnesty Official Invited to Visit. In response to human rights criticisms by Amnesty International, the Saudi regime has asked a representative of the organization to visit to assess the human rights situation there.

Seven Die, 65 Hurt in Lisbon Disco Attack ( later reports say nine dead): two canisters of an unknown toxic gas were hurled into a Lisbon club crowded with immigrants from Portugal’s former African colony Angola. Police cannot comment on a motive but would you be surprised if it were a white-on-black attack?

Clinton Protects Sequoias With Order: Logging will be permanently eliminated in 34 of 75 remaining groves of the giant redwoods designated to fall inside the new Giant Sequoia National Monument flanking Sequoia National Park to the north and south. The Republican representative whose district includes some of the new monument called it a political ploy and denied that the trees needed further protection.

BevNET.com: The Beverage Network “…the most extensive guide to new age beverages and much more!”

“Don’t link to hate sites!” David Goldberg’s Hatewatch catalogues websites of bigots. Film critic Roger Ebert takes him to task. “If I were somebody looking for hate on the Web, this would be a good place to start.” Does Ebert really think these people need help hating??

“It’s an unholy mix of encryption, anonymity, and digital cash to bring about the ultimate

annihilation of all forms of government. The system, which Jim Bell spent years talking up online,

uses digital cash and anonymity to predict and confirm assassinations.” Assassination Politics:

“Before … Bell went to prison, he suspected that most government officials were corrupt. Three years

behind bars later, the self-proclaimed Internet anarchist is sure of it.

After Bell, a cypherpunk who the United States government dubbed a techno-terrorist, is released Friday at

10 a.m. PDT, he plans to exact revenge on the system that imprisoned him.” [Wired]

The loggerhead at Metascene writes of “Ten Signs That I Am Becoming Everything I Once Despised”. By my count, my current score is 5 out of 10, but they’re not necessarily anything I “once despised”…

Latest installation of my Annals of Depravity: Miami Herald: Two Broward students arrested in murder plot: “The two girls arrived at Silver Lakes Middle School with a plot to murder their

rivals, carrying “kill kits” to make good on their plan.

According to police, the seventh-grade students planned to lure three of their

female classmates behind the school’s portable trailers on Monday, flog them on

their heads with a bag full of batteries, then slash their throats with an assortment

of knives.”

Recreational self-analysis.

Afterlife Codes Project: “The history and scientific foundation of the Susy Smith Project is described in Schwartz and Russek (1997c).

Briefly, one way to test the SOC hypothesis is to determine whether a key phrase known only to a person in

life (termed the sender) can be communicated after the sender has died (Berger, 1984). To ensure that the

key phrase is not inadvertently communicted by someone (such as a research assistant) who is living after the

sender dies, the key phrase is encoded by various coding systems and the correct key phrase is required to

decode the encoded information.”

Another Superficial Piece About 176 Beatnik Books

What Beat is. What Beat isn’t. Who it is and isn’t. Stuff like that.

By Richard Meltzer

Most Distant Object Ever Observed: A quasar 26 billion light years away, with a red shift so great its light is out of the visible spectrum, is the most distant object ever observed. It is estimated that the universe was less than a billion years old when it began sending out the light we view now.

Japan at Center of Debate on Endangered Species

“Japan is again at war with conservationists

over proposals to resume trading in whales, elephant ivory and marine turtles.”

”X-Files” creator nears feature directing deal: Chris Carter to direct film version of The World of Ted Serios, based on 1960s true story of a psychiatrist who studied a Chicago bellhop with the ability to project his thoughts onto unexposed photographic film.

Witness Rights Alert, “a collection of streamed video clips that document human

rights abuses around the world. The biweekly alert is produced and hosted by Oddcast.com, an interactive entertainment site,

on behalf of the human rights organization Witness.”

The furor over Gnutella.

Ouch: University Sues Over Drug Patent. The University of Rochester, claiming it has a patent on the mechanism of action of the new cox-2 inhibitor class of arthritis drugs, sues to prevent Pharmacia from continuing to market Celebrex, the blockbuster drug in that category which has been a miracle for many arthritis sufferers and is the fastest-selling drug in the U.S. at present.

Eli Lilly wasn’t about to lose out on this one: Federal Trade Commission OKs licensing agreement on new

Prozac. “The Federal Trade

Commission has approved Eli Lilly and Co.’s deal to license a new and improved version of the

popular antidepressant Prozac, the company said Thursday.” Lilly’s main patent on Prozac expires in 2003, and it has been hellbent on finding a way to fend off the appeal of cheaper generic versions that may then start to erode its market share drastically.

ANDREW DOBSON and RENEE KURIYAN: U.S. must help save

elephants “With little notice, the

international ivory trade has quietly reopened, reawakening a threat to the world’s remaining

elephant populations.” [Christian Science Monitor opinion]

The Infamous Eagles Joke: I’m ashamed to say I have returned to this “intelligence test” at intervals since it was first emailed to me several weeks ago, and I still haven’t a clue. If you get the joke, please let me know, thanks!

I’m hoping this is disturbing to you consumers of healthcare, as it is to me as a physician. Kaiser Drug Policy Prompts State Inquiry “Kaiser Permanente, (California)’s biggest health maintenance organization,

routinely requires its psychiatrists to prescribe psychiatric drugs to some mental

health patients whom they have not personally examined, a practice that leading

experts say endangers patients and violates professional codes of ethics.” [LA Times]

I grew up with WBAI in New York. Until recently, I’d’ve said I’d give my eyeteeth for a Pacifica station in Boston. What’s Going On at Pacifica?

“Sorting out who is right and who is wrong in this story is a near-impossible task given the management blunders and

heavy-handedness on the one side, and the insults, harassment and threats on the other side. Both sides could claim the

pursuit of high-minded goals: Pacifica management sought to strengthen lines of authority in the name of increased audience

and political effectiveness; KPFA and its defenders presented a resounding case that “free-speech radio”–Pacifica’s traditional

no-holds-barred programming–was threatened by a sanitized, NPR-style takeover by establishment liberals.” [The Nation]

The New Scientist reports on new calculations based on general relativity theorizing that wormholes large and stable enough to allow intergalactic travel really can exist. The trick is that they produce enough postulated ‘exotic matter’ to keep themselves open and arbitrarily large.

Another vain attempt to halt the MP3 juggernaut.

I continue to be disconcerted about the sellout: Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream maker dumps Newport Folk Festival sponsorship. A sign of the times after the announcement earlier today that it was being acquired by Anglo-Dutch conglomerate Unilever, which already owns the Breyer’s and Good Humor ice cream brands. Update: I heard today on NPR that the highminded terms of sale to which Ben Cohen is holding Unilever (continue to donate 7.5% of net to charity; use only Vermont, hormone-free milk, etc.) are only binding for two years.

“Road rage” on high? “Since July 1997, over a dozen passengers have attempted to

breach cockpit doors during commercial airline flights. We’ve

been lucky so far.” [Salon]

`Copenhagen’: A Fiery Power in the Behavior of Particles and Humans: The New York Times weighs in quite favorably on this challenging drama about what happened during a mysterious 1941 meeting between Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, originator of the famed “uncertainty principle”. What may have been at stake was the possible success of a German project to develop atomic weapons under Heisenberg’s direction.

John Hinckley’s Request: The New York Times finds “disconcerting” a report that St. Elizabeth Hospital officials are supporting John Hinckley Jr.’s request for passes for unsupervised visits with his parents. Hinckley has been walking unescorted around hospital grounds without incident for years and for the past six months has taken supervised field trips to area restaurants and shopping malls. The Times, in a remarkably unwarranted and unjustified editorial position, IMHO, opines that skepticism about Hinckley’s progress should be preserved and that “the decision should not be based solely on the advice of hospital doctors.”

Decision time: The discovery of the protein that steers the differentiation of mouse embryonic stem cells suggests we may be closing in on hoped-for methods of controlling recently-developed human immortal lines of stem cells.

Deadly Dengue Fever Could Worsen in 21st Century: “The outbreak of dengue fever and its sometimes deadly hemorrhagic strain will continue to

increase across the Americas in the 21st century unless governments boost their will to combat the tropical virus, experts said.

Cases of dengue are on the rise in almost every country in North and South America even though the disease was almost wiped out by a

1962 plan to eradicate the mosquito that carries and spreads the virus”.

NASA’s Advanced Space Transportation Program looks at ways to turn science fiction into reality. Researching new propulsion methods and new methods of onboard energy generation to power propulsion; and “how to attain the ultimate achievable speeds to dramatically reduce travel times…(including) faster-than-light travel if it turns out to be physically possible”.

Yahoo! News – Holes sink sell-off

“Gov’ts. hoping to earn a fast buck by switching off analogue television transmitters and selling the

frequencies to cellphone operators are in for a shock. Even if viewers can be persuaded to switch to digital TV, the

frequencies released will be too widely spaced to be of practical use to cellphone and wireless Internet companies,

according to a report released by Britain’s Independent Television Commission.”

Pulitzer Prize winners in brief

Martian mysteries at poles: “Pictures released on Monday unveil features of

the unique layered terrain at Mars’ south pole.

These may well hold the secret of the planet’s

climate history for the past 100 million years

but scientists remain baffled as to how the

features formed.” [BBC]

I linked to reports of this trial as it unfolded. Now, the good news that a British historian with Holocaust doubts loses libel suit: Historian David Irving, who has outraged survivors of Nazi death camps by

questioning the scope of the Holocaust, on Tuesday lost the libel suit he launched to save his academic reputation. [Nando Times]

Antioxidant value discounted

“There is no convincing

scientific evidence that taking large amounts of

vitamin C, vitamin E, or the nutrients selenium

and beta carotene can reduce the chances of

getting cancer, heart disease, diabetes,

Alzheimer’s disease or other illnesses, a

National Academy of Sciences panel announced

yesterday.”

The Smoking Gun teeshirt features an official Bill Gates mugshot.

The Smoking Gun: Russian Arms for Sale:

“Pssst: Need a rocket launcher or a minesweeper? Have you

struck out on eBay? Well, has Russia got a deal for you. In

need of hard currency, Moscow is selling part of its weapons

inventory, showcasing the lethal loot via a nifty 96-page

catalogue produced by Rosvoorouzhenie, a state-owned company

that handles overseas sales in places like Libya and Iraq.”

No Swelling Unseen Choruses, Just Hard Truth on Film: The New York Times reports from the Double Take Documentary Film Festival in Durham NC.

Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune art critic, laments the end of originality in late-20th century artistic creation.”The only originality left…is the choice of what to borrow from.”

Music critic John Rockwell, in The New Republic, chronicles the decline of Philip Glass.

R.I.P. John Smith:

“John Smith & Son, the world’s oldest bookseller

and a favourite of the poet Robert Burns, is to

shut its doors in Glasgow after losing the battle

against book superstores and online discount

shopping.” I’ll miss it personally, having visited several times including just last June. And I steadfastly refuse to buy books on the net if I can find them in my local bookshop.

Auction House Chairmen Scrutinized: Is anyone really surprised that price-fixing accusations implicate the highest levels of management of Sotheby’s and Christie’s? Is anyone surprised that they deny it? [New York Times]

Animal rescuer tries to make ‘a small dent in the misery’

I agree entirely: [Association of Alternative Newsweeklies]: ‘How big is Ira Glass today?

He’s so big that http://www.suck.com, a reliable font of Internet rudeness, just awarded

him an “evil genius grant”—or Suck EGG—to shut up for a year. “The only real work he

seems to do anymore is give interviews to fawning journalists and fight off the

attentions of love-struck soccer-mom groupies.’

I’d previously linked to the ACLU’s position on the proposed medical privacy legislation. Here’s what the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has to say.

Windows 98 Communication Tips: How to Speed-up your Connecting time – Windows-Help.NET

To Speed-up the time it takes for DUN (Dial Up Networking) to establish a connection with your ISP

(Internet Service Provider) in Windows 98.

Here’s a message that has to get widely distributed:
BOLIVIA UNDER MARTIAL LAW

As of 10 am Saturday morning Bolivia was declared under martial

law by President Hugo Banzer. The drastic move comes at the end of a

week of protests, general strikes, and transportation blockages that

have left major areas of the country at a virtual standstill. It also

follows, by just hours, the surprise announcement by state officials

yesterday afternoon that the government would concede to the protests’

main demands, to break a widely-despised contract under which the city

of Cochabamba’s public water system was sold off to foreign investors

last year. The concession was quickly reversed by the national

government, and the local governor resigned, explaining that he didn’t

want to take responsibility for bloodshed that might result.

Banzer, who ruled Bolivia as a dictator from 1971-78, has taken an

action that suspends almost all civil rights, disallows gatherings

of more than four people and puts severe limits on freedom of the

press. One after another, local radio stations have been taken

over by military forces or forced off the air. Reporters have been

arrested The neighborhood where most of the city’s broadcast antennas

are located had its power shut off at approximately noon local time.

Through the night police searched homes for members of the widely-

backed water protests, arresting as many as twenty. The local

police chief has been instated by the President as governor of the

state. Blockades erected by farmers in rural areas continue across

the country, cutting off some cities from food and transportation.

Large crowds of angry residents, many armed with sticks and rocks are

massing on the city’s center where confrontations with military and

police are escalating.

Tom Kruse

Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia

TelFax: (591-4) 248242, 500849

TelCel: 017-22253

A sense of Well being: Salon celebrates the 15th anniversary of “the world’s most influential online community” (which they bought out last year).

Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times Magazine comprehensively runs down the meaning of testosterone to masculinity.

Single mothers should take on a partner not only to help with their parenting, to have someone to survive them for their chlidren’s sake, but also to increase their own chances of sticking around longer themselves, a new Swedish research study asserts.

Project Censored has released its 25 top censored news stories of 1999. Some are new news, but others no surprise; for me, #1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 12, 14, 16, 18, 22, 24. How about you? What surprised you? What was old news?

Here’s my ambiguously legal deeplink to a New York Times story on the legality of ‘Deep Linking’. ‘When a federal judge issued a decision last week in a

case involving “deep linking,” many reports suggested

that the controversial Internet practice was now

unambiguously legal. But the story is more complex than

that. In fact, deep linking — the practice of linking to a page

deep inside another Web site, bypassing its home page —

still appears to be in legal limbo.’

You probably won’t care about this unless you’re raising children. If you are, you know that there is a raging folklore-and-urban-myth debate about how much crankiness can be attributed to teething. “(M)any …symptoms commonly associated with teething — such as high fevers, diarrhea or

vomiting — cannot be blamed on the imminent emergence of a new tooth, according to results of one of

the largest studies of its kind…Furthermore, there was no cluster of signs that could help parents predict when a

tooth was about to emerge. No particular symptom — such as biting, drooling or

gum rubbing — was seen in more than 35% of infants during the teething time.”

I logged with interest the report of the first reported discovery of an extra-solar planet. But: NASA: Suspected Extra-Solar Planet Probably a Star

‘It looked like a planet, the first directly detected outside our solar system, but

NASA researchers and the astronomer who discovered it now believe it is probably just a faraway star.”

It is just too hot to be a planet, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said in a statement

released late on Thursday.

The weird space object photographed three years ago by the Hubble Space Telescope is most likely a star

far in the background, with its light dimmed by interstellar dust, so that it looks like it is close to a

double-star system in which it was supposed to be a planet.’

Why this long puff piece on the “nerd warriors” of the NSA?

“This technology is something that could ultimately devour us,” says the Archbishop of York.

Study Says Brain Damage Makes Gulf War Vets Dizzy

: “…reflex tests and electronic brain measurements found that veterans who complained of

bouts of vertigo showed signs of brain-stem damage similar to the damage seen in victims of the 1995

Tokyo subway nerve-gas attack.

‘The study provides further evidence to suggest that these veterans were exposed to chemicals and nerve

agents in the Gulf War,’ the team from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas said in a

statement.” [Reuters]

An Irish Times survey compiled a list of a hundred favorite Irish poems. Jorn Barger found most of them on the web and posted a list with hotlinks. Thanks!

Slow Wave is a comic strip based on dreams people submit to the cartoonists. Revealing, and it really makes sense to me to use the comic strip medium to render dreams!

Return of the Snapper:

An English photographer tracks down the

anonymous subjects of his photographs from

the 1970s and asks them to pose for him

again, is staggered by the response. [The Irish Times]

Gel Prevents Chemotherapy Hair Loss in Rats

“A clear gel rubbed on the scalps of rats was able to prevent hair loss from

chemotherapy, one of the most distressing side effects of cancer treatment, scientists said. A researcher for developer Glaxo Wellcome said the company hopes to start human tests of

the gel, which includes a drug known as GW8510, to see if it could help reduce the trauma of

chemotherapy.” Exciting news if true, but I’m skeptical. The drug apparently works by seeping into hair follicles and temporarily inhibiting their cell division, which means they are spared by chemotherapy drugs which essentially work by targeting fast-growing and -dividing cells throughout the body. Because the new gel is topical, it will not affect the internal targeted cancer cells. But could the cure be worse than the disease? Can we really turn cell replication on and off with precision?

TV Ad Roach Frightens Viewers

“Television ads for (Orkin) that feature a realistic-looking cockroach scurrying across the screen have left some viewers

laughing, others upset and a few broken TVs.”

Scandalous Doin’s in the Ruins of Pompeii

The contents of

the Secret Cabinet that

were so scandalous they

were kept locked up for

most of the last 200 years

will be unveiled to the

public next week.

Schoolchildren visiting

the National

Archaeological Museum of

Naples, however, will

need parental permission

to see the exhibition.

Curators delicately refer

to the Secret Cabinet or the “Forbidden Collection,” but

museum guards loudly direct visitors to “il pornografico.” [New York Times]

Your Mail Isn’t Spying on You Thoughtful reflections by a colleague of mine on the privacy-violating fears raised by completing the census questionnaire make the New York Times op-ed page.

The number purple: exploring color-number synaesthesia. [New Scientist]

Netscape 6 Preview Release 1 is here for download. Playing with it tonight, what I can say so far is that it’s fast. Major frustrations: blogger editing windows don’t work; and I can’t find a way to import my Netscape 4.7 bookmarks en masse.

The heart of our galaxy may be a cluster of up to 25,000 black holes created by the demise of stars throughout the Milky Way and slowly falling to the center where they are gradually gobbled up by the giant black hole lurking there.

Jumbo discovery: DNA analysis confirms that African forest elephants have diverged enough from their savannah cousins that, along with the Indian elephant, there should be considered to be three separate species. Add one more to the endangered species list.