Friday, April 02, 2004

Is Fallujah Iraq's Mogadishu?
"Pentagon officials view Wednesday's horror in Fallujah as the Iraq war's Mogadishu incident: a disaster that may be a turning point for American policy. We will not flee, as we did in Somalia, but Fallujah should teach even the administration's most die-hard optimists that the mission is deeper and muddier than they'd imagined, that the country they have conquered is far uglier and far less pliant than they hoped, and that a new course of policy is necessary if we want to sustain the occupation.

Many are wondering how President Bush will retaliate for the brutal slayings of the four American contractors who were shot, beaten, dismembered, dragged down the street, and strung up on bridge poles. The universal feeling is that some response is necessary to let the insurgents know they can't get away with this. The question is what kind of response?" —Fred Kaplan, Slate

posted 5:39 AM -

Monster's Ball
Guillermo del Toro's heavenly Hellboy: "The highest praise I can bestow on Guillermo del Toro, the 39-year-old Mexican-born director and writer, is that he's in a class with Peter Jackson as a fan-boy who gets it—a brilliant filmmaker who has a kind of metabolic connection to horror and sci-fi that helps him transform secondhand genre material into something deep and nourishing. Del Toro reaches into himself and finds the Wagnerian grandeur in schlock.

Which brings us to the delightful Hellboy, which is based on a clever comic-book series of the same name by Mike Mignola that fuses superheroics with the sort of mythic religious demonology of H.P. Lovecraft, plus a bit of Men in Black macho cheekiness. " —David Edelstein, Slate

posted 5:37 AM -

Who Were the Men Killed in Fallujah?
"According to news reports, the Americans who were killed and mutilated in Fallujah were 'private contractors.' This is a euphemism for 'mercenaries': ex-military soldiers of fortune who operate outside the rules of combat." —MemoryBlog

And: Robert Fisk: "Most Of The People Dying In Iraq Are Iraqis": 'Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk reports live from Baghdad. Fisk describes the "grotesque, gruesome, terrible" attacks in Fallujah, the contracted mercenaries that have infiltrated Iraq: "They swagger in and out with heavy weapons, with automatic weapons and pistols as if they're cowboys" and the deteriorating situation throughout the country: "The violence and the insecurity, the sense of anarchy is greater." ' —Democracy Now!

posted 4:30 AM -

The Real Question on 9-11
Where Was the Air Force?: "George W. Bush, writes former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, 'failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from Al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks.' That incendiary charge, coupled with his apologetic testimony before the commission investigating the attacks, has reignited a long-simmering debate: What did Bush know when and how quickly should he have done something about it?

But both the 9/11 commission and liberal opponents of the Bush Administration are focusing on the wrong question. Nothing has surfaced from the 2001 'summer of threat' beyond a bunch of vague they're-up-to-something caveats. The specific details intelligence agencies would have needed to stop the attacks before they happened--potential hijackers' names, dates and times, targets--were maddeningly elusive.

The really big unanswered question of September 11, 2001 is this: Once it became obvious that at least four passenger jets had been hijacked--at one point that Tuesday morning, Clarke says the FAA thought it had as many as 'eleven aircraft off course or out of communications'--why didn't our government intercept them?" —Ted Rall, CommonDreams

posted 4:26 AM -

Guantánamo: Maybe None of Them are Terrorists
"Consider this theoretical possibility: if no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, is it also possible that there are no al-Qaida terrorists in Guantánamo? It seems far fetched, put so bluntly. If only by chance, it would seem likely that some of the detainees might be terrorists. The US secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, argues that the inhumane incarceration, the secrecy and the abuse of any principles of justice are all justified by the fact that these prisoners are the hardest of hard cases. But given what we know of those who have been released, the refusal of the US to open the evidence to challenge, and the secrecy that surrounds the prison and all who languish there, the proposition is worth considering. And since none of us have been allowed to know much, it is worth listening to those who know a little more." —Isabel Hilton, Guardian.UK [via CommonDreams]

posted 4:22 AM -

Eudaomonia, The Good Life
A conversation with Martin Seligman: "The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There's no shortcut to that. That's what life is about. There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it's unlikely there'll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And it's impossible that there'll be a pharmacology of meaning." —The Edge

posted 4:20 AM -

A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics
"To understand what is distinctive about today's Republican Party, you first need to know about an obscure and very conservative German political philosopher. His name, however, is not Leo Strauss, who has been widely cited as the intellectual guru of the Bush administration. It belongs, instead, to a lesser known, but in many ways more important, thinker named Carl Schmitt." —The Chronicle

posted 4:18 AM -

Mean to Gene
Louis Menand reviews Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism by Dominic Sandbrook, a young British historian:

"In 1970, McCarthy retired from the Senate and embarked on one of the weirder and (to those who had been his admirers) more distressing afterlives in American politics. He entered the 1972 Democratic primaries, intent on defeating Muskie, who was the initial front-runner. McCarthy put most of his money and energy into Illinois, and Muskie trounced him there, sixty-three per cent to thirty-six per cent. In 1973, McCarthy explored the possibility of running for Congress from Minnesota’s Sixth District, the part of the state where he was born, but he was made to understand that the Democrats of the Sixth District did not find the possibility thrilling, and he didn’t run. In 1976, he ran for President in the general election as an independent. In 1980, he endorsed Ronald Reagan, a perversity motivated by his loathing for Jimmy Carter. He ran for the Presidency in 1988, as the candidate of the Consumer Party, and again, as a Democrat, in 1992, when he was seventy-six. He received two hundred and eleven votes in the New Hampshire primary. Some of those who voted for him may have believed they were casting their ballot for Joe McCarthy (a confusion from which McCarthy probably benefitted throughout his career). McCarthy now lives in a retirement home in Washington, D.C..." —The New Yorker

posted 4:16 AM -

Survivor Challenge
"Ten years after Jerry Seinfeld got caught necking during Schindler's List, reverence for the Holocaust still makes Larry David squirm." —Nextbook

posted 4:11 AM -

University actions against high journal prices
"For at least three decades universities have struggled with the problem of rising journal prices. Prices have risen faster than inflation since the 1970's, and four times faster since 1986. Because this rate greatly outpaced the growth of library budgets, it was obvious that it could not continue for much longer. But it was not obvious how it would end. Even though libraries had responded by selectively cancelling subscriptions and cutting into their book budgets, these incremental actions merely postponed the inevitable large-scale responses to reclaim control over their budgets and address the deeper problem. In late 2003 major universities started announcing large-scale cancellations. More, they accompanied these decisions with public statements denouncing publisher pricing practices as unsustainable and inconsistent with the mission of science and scholarship, and calling on all academic stakeholders to join in building sustainable and compatible alternatives. We've all heard about the major actions, at schools like Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and Stanford. But to understand what's been going on, we need to see a more comprehensive account. I've put together this list of actions by U.S. universities since the fall of 2003, with enough links for those who want to read further and enough detail for those who don't." —SPARC Open Access Newsletter

posted 4:08 AM -

Dogs do resemble their owners, finds study
"The old adage that people resemble their pet dogs may really be true, suggests a new study by US scientists.

Pure-bred dogs can be matched to their owners by strangers most of the time. But the same does not hold true for mixed breed dogs, say Nicholas Christenfeld and Michael Roy, psychologists at the University of California San Diego.

When judges were shown digital photos of dog owners and given a choice of one of two dogs - they matched the correct pair 64 per cent of the time when the dog was a pure breed, showed Christenfeld and Roy.

However, their study did not pin down what factors were responsible for this resemblance. 'We can't tell whether it's a physical resemblance or a stylistic resemblance...'" —New Scientist

posted 4:05 AM -

Viagra could reduce men's fertility
"The anti-impotence drug not only speeds sperm up, researchers found, but it also caused the vital reaction needed to penetrate an egg to occur prematurely...

"Most use it for impotence and aren't contemplating having a family, so this has no implications for them," (one of the study's authors) says. However, younger men are using it recreationally, and they may be trying to start a family. Furthermore, an audit of fertility clinics by the team revealed that 42 per cent use Viagra to help men produce sperm samples on demand." —New Scientist

posted 4:02 AM -

Liquorice drug boosts memory in elderly
"A compound based on a liquorice extract improves memory in older men, shows a new study.

The substance works by blocking the activity of a brain enzyme that boosts levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This hormone is thought to be responsible for eroding memory with age.

The drug, called carbenoxolone, was once used to treat stomach ulcers. But when given to men aged between 55 and 75 it sharpened their verbal memories within weeks.

'You get subtle but definite improvements,' says Jonathan Seckl who led the study at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Verbal memory, he explains, is needed for remembering recently received information, and is 'crucial to normal functioning' - for example, recalling the time of an appointment.

Seckl believes such compounds may be available for the elderly within five years to help improve memory and possibly even treat dementia." —New Scientist

posted 3:58 AM -

Thursday, April 01, 2004

Ian McEwan barred from entering US by border officials

"One of Laura Bush's favourite British authors has been refused entry to the US, a day before he was due to lecture to an audience of 2,500 people.

Ian McEwan was stopped by immigration officials as he left Vancouver airport, in Canada, for an engagement in Seattle.

The man who was last year invited to Downing Street by Cherie Blair to meet American's first lady - who said she keeps a McEwan novel by her bedside - found himself detained for four hours before being turned back." —Guardian.UK

McEwan noted he has "been doing this type of thing for 30 years and I have never been refused entry". The comments from McEwan's would-be host, CalTech, suggest that his refusal was purely the result of a technicality. I cannot find any record of comments from US officials on the matter. Do any readers know of any positions taken by McEwan on issues that would get him barred? I would be interested in seeing what would happen if John Le Carré tried to tour the US behind his most recent book, Absolute Friends.

posted 3:16 PM -

Boy Yawns, CNN Bumbles, Letterman Yelps
"Whether he really was there or not for the president's speech, the young yawner has caused quite a flap between David Letterman and CNN." —Washington Post

posted 3:07 PM -

Charlie McCarthy Hearings
It is of course an April Fool's piece, but the question Maureen Dowd poses is a real concern: Will Dick Cheney's lips move when George W. Bush gives his testimony? —New York Times op-ed

posted 2:59 PM -

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

BookNotes is four
Happy blogiversary, Craig!

posted 11:14 PM -

Throwing Rice
I quite agree with this observation by Ed Fitzgerald:

I think this is own major difference between George W. Bush and his father. Both obviously value loyalty to an extreme degree, but Bush Senior, being a more accomplished man himself, also has an awareness of, and respect for, competency and the abilities needed to get a job done. Bush Junior, never having had the need to complete anything himself, always having been rescued from the jams he gets into by his Poppy and Poppy's friends and connections, clearly has no way of making an independent judgement of competency and capability, and therefore seems to rely almost totally on loyalty as his primary indication of worth. If true, this explains why we're hearing that Bush himself is running the anti-Clarke campaign, since Clarke's disloyalty must be punished.

Ed is riffing off an excellent piece by Steve Gilliard considering Condoleeza Rice's competency. It is pretty clear to me that Bush has no means of evaluating competency and would thus tend to depend on narrow judgments of loyalty. He is sounding more and more Nixonian. Policymaking shaped by personal vendetta? Chilling. Not only does it explain running the campaign against Clarke personally but for me it resurrects the speculation that it was personal for him against Saddam Hussein.

posted 10:46 PM -

US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide
"President Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time. Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene." —Guardian.UK It was not only public opinion that demanded the genocide be concealed but the fact that the US was obligated under international covenants to act in response to genocide. But, on the other hand, it is doubtful an international response could have been mounted rapidly enough to stop the bulk of the killings, which started the very night the moderate Hutu president of Rwanda was killed n a mysterious plane crash and which tallied 800,000 within three months. State Dept. briefings during that period resorted to the most obscene sophistry to avoid saying the 'g' word. How many 'acts of genocide' dancing on the head of a pin does it take to make a genocide?

posted 10:20 PM -

Bush Scores Points By Defining Kerry
Polls show that the Republican ad blitzkrieg has largely been successful. American voters who know nothing about Kerry have their opinion shaped primarily by the negative ads the Bush campaign has put out since the Democratic primaries ended. Expect the ugliest of campaigns... —Washington Post

posted 10:12 PM -

U.S. to defend Muslim girl wearing scarf in school
"Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Alex Acosta said government lawyers would support 11-year-old Nashala Hearn, a sixth-grade student who has sued the Muskogee, Oklahoma, Public School District for ordering her to remove her head scarf, or hijab, because it violated the dress code of the Benjamin Franklin Science Academy, which she attended." —CNN

posted 10:08 PM -

Why Clarke Helped Bush
Dick Morris: "If voters are focused on terrorism on Election Day, Bush will win. If their gaze is on economic issues, Kerry is likely to prevail. The struggle between the two candidates is, at its core, a competition between these two issues for domination of the national agenda.

In this context, what happened last week?

Superficially, Bush was on the defensive as Richard Clarke testified that he was not sufficiently focused on al Qaeda, had failed to respond appropriately to the 9/11 attacks and was preoccupied with Iraq. The daily tracking polls of Scott Rasmussen indicated that Kerry went from two points behind Bush when the flap started to three ahead at its peak. Rasmussen shows, however, that Kerry has since lost his lead and the race is now, again, even.

But what really happened was that the nation's focus was further diverted from the economy onto the issue of terrorism. Kerry is not about to close the huge gap Bush has opened up on this issue. No matter what negatives emerge on Bush's conduct in dealing with terrorism, it will still be the president's issue." —NY Post op-ed

posted 10:06 PM -

Note to Eric: U Need 2B More Careful
"Did you hear the one about the guy at Starbucks? No? Okay..." —Al Kamen, Washington Post

posted 10:01 PM -

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Grinning and Baring It
Richard Goldstein on the crimes of Courtney Love; he likens her to Janis and frets: "If you step back a bit from this vaudeville, it's hard to ignore the evidence that Courtney is a woman in crisis. She faces drug possession charges. Her daughter has been removed from her custody. The 10th anniversary of her husband's suicide is coming up. Sure she markets her madness, but the primal currents that course through her act are real. That's what makes her a hunger artist. And she doesn't just put her personal pain in your face. In the tradition of Joplin and Finley, her art answers Sojourner Truth's fearsome, if rhetorical, question: Ain't I a woman?

But Courtney's 'tude also evokes a much less salutary tradition. Entertainers like her are often rewarded for being out of control, and the reinforcement accelerates their downward spiral. That's what happened to Janis, and for that matter, Judy Garland. Baring the breast can represent a rebellion against this sacrificial rite. It's a gesture of agency. Check out the manual of psychological disorders and you'll see that exhibitionism is regarded as a quintessentially male pathology. When women do it, they lay claim to the phallus.

There's something about a rampageous woman flashing men that resonates with power. You expect guys to rear back in horror, as they did before Sojourner Truth, or to throw lit matches, as they did at Finley. That was then and this is now. David Letterman was anything but fazed by Courtney's desk dance. In his insouciance, you can glimpse the liberal man's defense against the phallic potential of women. Don't try to repress it—that's for Republicans. Just sit back and enjoy the show.

If I have to choose between The Stepford Wives and MTV Spring Break, I'll definitely opt for the latter. But at least conservatives take sexual transgression seriously. The liberal solution is to tame it by trivializing it. That way, male distance is maintained. The classic gesture of female incursion is neutralized. And ultimately the joke is on desire." —Village Voice

posted 11:56 PM -

Learning From Prozac:
Will New Caution Shift Old Views?: "Since the ascendancy of the biological approach to psychiatry in the 1980's, Americans have tended to view psychiatric illness as something that should always be treated with drugs and to believe that medication is the only intervention needed. But the real story of 20th-century psychiatry is how complex mental illness is and how difficult it is to treat.

If there is are lessons to be learned from this controversy, they are that antidepressants should not be dispensed like candy, that depression is a serious problem and treating it a serious enterprise, that therapy should always be considered as an option and that, at the least, patients who are given medication should be carefully followed by people who ask them how they feel." —Tanya Luhrmann, professor at the University of Chicago and the author of Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at Modern Psychiatry, in New York Times

posted 6:11 AM -

"I still think the world is ending, but perhaps a bit slower than I thought."
The Age profiles Art Spiegelman's new work and its reception: "Spiegelman's role as a staffer at (The New Yorker) became decidedly precarious when the editors saw the working drawings for his new book, In The Shadow of No Towers, which illustrates his emotional and political confusion since September 11.

'The work is on my feelings towards the hijacking and then the hijacking of the hijacking by the Government. I'm not so sure The New Yorker is being complacent. I'm sure I'd be welcomed back once I had found the right medication.'

Spiegelman's new book is sure to cause as much, if not more, ruckus as MAUS. It depicts a government out of control, or, more chillingly, totally in control. 'They had an agenda already on their mind before September 11,' he says. 'Drying up funds for health and education and moving the funds upward to the rich, all made more implementable by the war in Iraq.'

Works in progress from The Shadow of No Towers were roundly rejected when he first showed them to publications in New York. They finally found a home in a Jewish newspaper in Manhattan, The Forward.

'They are a peculiar format,' he says. 'They're broadsheet, colour works.' MAUS was black and white in paperback format. 'I've finally got them placed in The London Review of Books, Liberation in France, Die Zeit in Germany and La Republica in Italy. So I've found my own coalition of the willing.'" [via walker]

posted 5:18 AM -

Monday, March 29, 2004

Customer Disservice
These Days, Consumers May as Well Keep Their Complaint To Themselves: "But wait a minute. Wasn't it only a few years ago that Americans were seeing in practically every ad, every TV commercial that the customer was number one, that 'service is our middle name?' Didn't Nordstrom, the upscale department store with a mythic service reputation, have every retailer quaking in his Ferragamos?

That was then, and this is now, say those whose job it is to pay attention to the passing parade. Service was a fine buzzword when the economy was soaring; came the downturn and customer service came close to getting squeezed out of the corporate budget. 'It's a frustration,' said customer service consultant Tschohl, 'because corporate America is not spending any money to train its staff.'" —Washington Post

posted 11:44 PM -

RIP Jan Berry, at 62
Pioneer of Surf Music Sound, Dies: Jan was half of 'Jan and Dean' along with Dean Torrance. I think Jan and Dean's "Little Old Lady from Pasadena" may have been the first single I saved up my $.50/week allowance to buy. In a life-imitates-art tragedy, Jan suffered a head injury in 1966 when he crashed his speeding Corvette that largely ended his (and Dean's?) career. By that time my tastes were migrating further north to a preoccupation with Bay Area psychedelia but I never ceased to get a thrill from the falsetto trill of "two girls for every boy..." [Surf music hasn't really stood the test of time, but should I be embarrassed to say?] —New York Times

posted 6:49 PM -

'Lunatic' Asteroid?
"The Earth has only one true Moon, but astronomers have found that we also have a 'quasi-moon' - a travelling companion through space that is circling the Earth while actually orbiting the Sun.

The object, the only quasi-moon discovered so far, is an asteroid called 2003 YN107 which circles the Sun in an orbit almost identical to Earth's, but follows a corkscrew path that from time to time means that it appears to orbit Earth." —New Scientist

posted 6:37 PM -

Buckyballs cause brain damage in fish
"Nanoparticles cause brain damage in fish, according to a study of the toxicity of synthetic carbon molecules called 'buckyballs'.

The soccer-ball-shaped molecules show great promise in nanotechnology. But the preliminary study raises the possibility that nanomaterials could cause significant environmental harm, although much further work is needed to establish the extent of this risk." —New Scientist

posted 6:34 PM -

Abridged too far
"I went to the library to get my daughter The Wind in the Willows. What I found was a happy-face, Disney-esque conspiracy to rob the classics of children's lit of their drama, their passion and their soul." —Hilary Flower, Salon

posted 6:32 PM -

How to Fix Your CD Player
"Every year countless CD players get junked because of one simple and easily-fixed problem: they fail to 'find' CDs placed in them or they skip. Both of these faults are commonly caused by a misaligned read head.

In this article I provide details of a simple method which I have successfully applied to a number of ailing CD players. I hope that some of you will find it useful and that it will reduce the number of these devices that end up in the trash." —kuro5hin

posted 6:27 PM -

The Height Gap
Why Europeans are getting taller and taller — and Americans aren’t. "Like many biases, this one has a certain basis in fact. Over the past thirty years, a new breed of 'anthropometric historians' has tracked how populations around the world have changed in stature. Height, they've concluded, is a kind of biological shorthand: a composite code for all the factors that make up a society's well-being. Height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental, anthropometric history suggests. If Joe is taller than Jack, it's probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it's because Norwegians live healthier lives. That's why the United Nations now uses height to monitor nutrition in developing countries. In our height lies the tale of our birth and upbringing, of our social class, daily diet, and health-care coverage. In our height lies our history." —New Yorker [via walker]

posted 6:26 PM -

Of Mice and Men:
New York Times: Why Test Animals to Cure Human Depression? With the recent furor about whether antidepressants can promote suicide, why not test them on animals to find a more definitive answer? The answer illustrates some fundamental differences between drug development in the rest of medicine and that in psychiatry, which treats 'higher' cognitive functions that by and large have no direct analogues in laboratory animals. For example, there really is not a good 'animal model' for human depression, which involves feelings of guilt and worthlessness that have no animal analogue of which we are aware. Indeed, after the serendipitous discovery that some compounds alleviated depression, animal testing was developed to help speed the discovery of subsequent antidepressants. All tests that assay antidepressant effectiveness in animals rely on one aspect of depression, of controversial value, which is called "learned helplessness" and is based largely on the work of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman. Essentially, animals treated with compounds that turn out to have human antidepressant properties struggle longer before giving up in any of several paradigms in which they are made helpless to fend off an adverse stimulus. Seligman insists that the antidepressant amelioration of learned helplessness represents a good animal analogue of depression and its treatment despite significant differences the actions of these compounds have in animals as opposed to humans, such as rapidity of onset and regions of the brain affected. Indeed, animals do not at all have a well-developed prefrontal cortex, that most recently evolved and most human of brain regions where the cognitive aspects of the depressive experience such as worthlessness, self-reproach and, yes, probably the helplessness and hopelessness reside. So it may be the case with antidepressants, as I have argued with other classes of psychoactive drug discovery driven by animal testing, that depending on such an imperfect 'animal model' restricts us to discovering only a small and imperfect subset of potentially therapeutic substances. [It is even worse with animal screening of potential antipsychotic medications; the target symptoms watched for are side effects, virtually ensuring that antipsychotic medications that were discovered with the aid of animal testing will be poorly tolerable!] One thing is certain with respect to depression at least; there is no 'animal model' for suicidal self-destruction per se, and thus no way to screen our medications for promotion of suicide, as the recent concerns emphasize. But since, as FmH readers know, I do not believe antidepressants actually promote suicide at all, not to worry about the lack of an animal test... [In a psychopharmacological stand-up comedy routine, the comedian would have Eli Lilly asserting that they had definitively proven that Prozac does not promote suicide, since no laboratory rats killed themselves after receiving large doses of the antidepressant...]

posted 7:00 AM -

Sunday, March 28, 2004

Stumbling Down the Road
Keep your eyes on the counter at the bottom of the lefthand sidebar if you are interested in milestones. Sometime in the next two weeks or so, the half-millionth visitor will register on the meter. Thank you for all your attention, and onward toward a million. Wiill it take another 4 1/2 years, do you suppose?

posted 8:57 PM -

Modern Ruins
Phillip Buehler: "I photograph modern ruins because I find it disturbing to find familiar objects and technology to be abandoned. I'm reminded that nothing is permanent, that everything is always in a state of transition. And we see ourselves in our own transitions, sometimes too focused on where we're going to notice and appreciate where we are.

I created this homepage so I could gather people's stories and recollections about these modern ruins when they were alive as well as to help me better understand why people are fascinated them. I've included them throughout the site. If after visiting you have something to say, please send me e-mail or sign my guestbook." [via Viridian mailing list]

posted 5:08 PM -

Beware! Carbohydrates will ruin your health
Dave Barry: "I probably shouldn't admit this to you younger readers, but when my generation was your age, we did some pretty stupid things. I'm talking about taking CRAZY risks. We drank water right from the tap. We used aspirin bottles that you could actually open with your bare hands. We bought appliances that were not festooned with helpful safety warnings such as, 'DO NOT BATHE WITH THIS TOASTER.'

. But for sheer insanity, the wildest thing we did was - prepare to be shocked - we deliberately ingested carbohydrates." —International Herald Tribune [via walker]

posted 2:04 PM -

Saturday, March 27, 2004

Hard-Disk Risk
Declan McCullagh makes a hobby of buying used hard drives to see what data has not been erased from them. For example,

"I took the drives home and started my own forensic analysis. Several of the drives had source code from high-tech companies. One drive had a confidential memorandum describing a biotech project; another had internal spreadsheets belonging to an international shipping company.

Since then, I have repeatedly indulged my habit for procuring and then analyzing secondhand hard drives. I bought recycled drives in Bellevue, Wash., that had internal Microsoft e-mail (somebody who was working from home, apparently). Drives that I found at an MIT swap meet had financial information on them from a Boston-area investment firm. Last summer, I started buying drives en masse on eBay...

Much of the data we found was truly shocking. One of the drives once lived in an ATM. It contained a year's worth of financial transactions—including account numbers and withdrawal amounts—from a organization that had a legal requirement to not divulge such information. Two other drives contained more than 5,000 credit card numbers—it looked as if one had been inside a cash register. Another had e-mail and personal financial records of a 45-year-old fellow in Georgia. The man is divorced, paying child support and dating a woman he met in Savannah. And, oh yeah, he's really into pornography." —CSO

...And it is so easy to completely wipe a disk irretrievably.

posted 8:18 PM -

Boo-Boos in Paradise
"David Brooks is the public intellectual of the moment. But our writer found out he doesn't check his facts..." —Phillymag.com

posted 3:23 PM -

Top doc backs picking your nose and eating it

"Innsbruck-based lung specialist Prof Dr Friedrich Bischinger said people who pick their noses with their fingers were healthy, happier and probably better in tune with their bodies.

He says society should adopt a new approach to nose-picking and encourage children to take it up.

Dr Bischinger said: 'With the finger you can get to places you just can't reach with a handkerchief, keeping your nose far cleaner.

'And eating the dry remains of what you pull out is a great way of strengthening the body's immune system.

'Medically it makes great sense and is a perfectly natural thing to do. In terms of the immune system the nose is a filter in which a great deal of bacteria are collected, and when this mixture arrives in the intestines it works just like a medicine.

'Modern medicine is constantly trying to do the same thing through far more complicated methods, people who pick their nose and eat it get a natural boost to their immune system for free.'" —Ananova [via dangerousmeta]

Can the revulsion that this image causes most people be explained entirely in terms of their socialized manners? Given the evidence that the emotion of disgust serves an important evolutionary purpose (BBC), could there be an evolved disincentive to picking one's nose, in contrast the the advantages touted here??

posted 3:22 PM -

F u t u r e M e . o r g
Send an email to yourself — or anyone else, for that matter — to arrive at a specified date in the future. [via boing boing]

posted 3:13 PM -

Bush League Follies
As BillMon points out, the latest Rasmussen Presidential Tracking Poll, from a pollster who some have seen as biased toward the Republicans, puts Kerry at 46% and Bush at 45%. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld is singing out of the other side of his mouth these days (Village Voice), testifying to the 9-11 commission that the 9-11 attacks were a law enforcement issue and not under the mandate of the Dept. of Defense, which defends the US against threats outside our borders. So where does that leave the administration's ignoring all the pleas in late 2001 to treat bin Laden's actions as crimes rather than acts of war, and arrest and try him rather than bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age? And, of course, there's Condoleeza Rice, who sings out of both sides of her mouth at the same time. And The New York Daily News reports that Richard Clarke turned the Bushies' best week, when they "had John Kerry on the run" into one in which they are scrambling to spit the crow out of their mouths. Discrediting and refuting Clarke are now apparently the White House's sole preoccupation. It seems to me that this puts the final nail in the coffin of the President's claims to be a 'war president', which would depend on uniting the country behind his vision and leadership no matter how unpopular the decisions he had to make rather than descending to pitiful, politicized squabbling which divides the country further. But you already knew that...

The New York Times reports we are fashioning a legal subterfuge to keep US forces in control of the security situation after the June 30th deadline to hand over responsibility to the Iraqis. And the Washington Post has dismal reports on the level of the morale of US troops in Iraq.

posted 12:22 PM -

Will We Say 'Never Again' Yet Again?
"The perennial refrain about genocide is sounding hollow as 1,000 black Africans are being killed by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government every week." —Nicholas Kristof, New York Times op-ed

posted 11:57 AM -

The Brain? It's A Jungle In There
The immensity of Dr. (Gerald) Edelman's project — explaining the development of the human mind — overwhelms. Yet his ideas about how consciousness arises from the firings of neurons begin to seem eminently plausible because something similar seems to be happening in the hum and current of your own brain, in the excited state brought on by Dr. Edelman's voluble mixture of calculation, charisma, enterprise and brilliance." —New York Times

posted 11:52 AM -

Court Opens Door To Searches Without Warrants

"It's a groundbreaking court decision that legal experts say will affect everyone: Police officers in Louisiana no longer need a search or arrest warrant to conduct a brief search of your home or business.

Leaders in law enforcement say it will provide safety to officers, but others argue it's a privilege that could be abused.

The decision was made by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Two dissenting judges called it the 'road to Hell.'

The ruiling stems from a lawsuit filed in Denham Springs in 2000.

New Orleans Police Department spokesman Capt. Marlon Defillo said the new power will go into effect immediately and won't be abused." —New Orleans Channel

It is inconceivable to me that this decision will stand on review by a higher court. It is unbelievable to me what abuses some try to push through...

posted 9:38 AM -