But the experts interviewed by CNSNews.com honed in on several aspects of a May 4, 1972, memo, which was part of the "60 Minutes" segment and was posted on the CBS News website Thursday.

"It was highly out of the ordinary for an organization, even the Air Force, to have proportional-spaced fonts for someone to work with," said Allan Haley, director of words and letters at Agfa Monotype in Wilmington, Mass. "I'm suspect in that I did work for the U.S. Army as late as the late 1980s and early 1990s and the Army was still using [fixed-pitch typeface] Courier."

The typography experts couldn't pinpoint the exact font used in the documents. They also couldn't definitively conclude that the documents were either forged using a current computer program or were the work of a high-end typewriter or word processor in the early 1970s.

But the use of the superscript "th" in one document - "111th F.I.S" - gave each expert pause. They said that is an automatic feature found in current versions of Microsoft Word, and it's not something that was even possible more than 30 years ago.

"That would not be possible on a typewriter or even a word processor at that time," said John Collins, vice president and chief technology officer at Bitstream Inc., the parent of MyFonts.com.

"It is a very surprising thing to see a letter with that date [May 4, 1972] on it," and featuring such typography, Collins added. "There's no question that that is surprising. Does that force you to conclude that it's a fake? No. But it certainly raises the eyebrows."

Which is more likely--that bleeding-edge technology was used to produce routine documents, or that someone who doesn't remember what documents looked like in 1972 hacked together a forgery? Download the memo from the CBS site and judge for yourself. It certainly looks like Microsoft Word to me. And do read the entire CNS piece, which rounds up some well-qualified typography experts to comment. (By way of background, here's today's NYT report on the "newfound documents.")

With this paradox in mind, latest NYT column looks at the shift from buying things to buying experiences:

LISTEN to the jobs debate carefully, and you might get the idea that the problem with the economy is that Americans just are not materialistic enough.

We spend too much of our income on restaurant meals, entertainment, travel and health care and not enough on refrigerators, ball bearings, blue jeans and cars.

Manufacturing employment is sluggish because of rising productivity - making more with fewer people - and foreign competition. But that's not the whole story, especially over the long term. Production is changing, but so is consumption.

As incomes go up, Americans spend a greater proportion on intangibles and relatively less on goods. One result is more new jobs in hotels, health clubs and hospitals, and fewer in factories.

In 1959, Americans spent about 40 percent of their incomes on services, compared with 58 percent in 2000. That figure understates the trend, because in many cases goods and services come bundled together.

Read the rest here, and related articles here and especially here.

And for an experience embodied in a good, buy (and read) the new paperback edition of The Substance of Style.

No, this isn't a spa. It's a design for a outpatient oncology center, created by Wirt Design as a contest entry at Neocon West (an interior design trade show, not a gathering of policy wonks). I saw it there and, like many other attendees, voted it a winner.

After all, why shouldn't an outpatient oncology center look like a spa? Chemotherapy is unpleasant enough already without requiring patients to be treated in depressing, ugly surroundings. "The space responds to basic human needs for patients by providing comfort, convenience and safety," says the Wirt Design website. The space also provides beauty, a bit of pleasure in unpleasant circumstances. (For a better look at the space, see the Wirt Design page.)

Of course, that's just a theoretical design, cooked up for a contest. This NYT feature reports on the trend toward incorporating aesthetics into health care environments:

If there is one universal truth about hospitals, it is that they are drab, dismal places, not at all designed to soothe and heal.

The furniture is industrial-grade, cookie-cutter. Lights are fluorescent and harsh. Noise, according to one recent study, can reach jackhammer proportions. Windows open onto concrete jumbles. And then there is the smell of antiseptic infused with cafeteria grub that inspires in visitors a kind of anti-madeleine moment.

But a sprinkling of architects and designers around the world are working to greatly change hospitals by humanizing their design, a concept that is slowly gaining influence in Europe and the United States.

The idea is obvious: Build inviting, soothing hospitals, graced with soft lighting, inspiring views, single rooms, curved corridors, relaxing gardens and lots of art, and patients will heal quicker, nurses will remain loyal to their employers and doctors will perform better.

"The environment of a hospital contributes to the therapy of the patients," said Tony Monk, a British architect who specializes in health care design and recently published a glossy book called "Hospital Builders'' (Academy Press).

"People are happy to be there, to help themselves to get better," he said. "People are mentally vulnerable when they come in, and if they are beaten down by an awful, dreadful, concrete, uninteresting, poor building with poor colors, it makes them even worse."

You have to be pretty obtuse to define hospital "function" without paying any attention to how the environment makes patients feel--but that's exactly how hospitals have historically viewed the problem. Aside from the sheer ugliness of most health care environments, lots of them are also extremely confusing to navigate, adding that extra dollop of stress that patients and their loved ones so need and want.

This may be yet another case in which the disconnect between consumers (patients) and payers (insurance companies and the government) distorts health care provision.

Belmont Club's analysis is astute, as are many of the comments that follow it:

Little public analysis has been devoted to options realistically available to Vladimir Putin in response to the massacre of schoolchildren in Ossetia. The fact is that the world has been spoiled by looking at the world through the prism of the American media. When President Bush stopped to consider his response to September 11, he had a range of options available only to a nation as unimaginably powerful as the United States of America. Japanese newspapers reported that President Bush was offered the nuclear option immediately after the attack, probably as an extreme in a range that included filing a diplomatic protest on the opposite end of the spectrum, which he rejected, choosing instead to do what no other country could do: take down the state sponsors of terrorism and pursue the terrorists to the four corners of the earth. America's unmatched power allowed President Bush to select the most humane course of war available. No European power, nor all of them put together, could have embarked on such a precise campaign for lack of means. It was a rich man's strategy, a guerre de luxe.

But no one who has seen the rags and hodgepodge of equipment issued to the Russian Special Forces can entertain any illusion that Vladimir Putin can go around launching raids with hi-tech helicopters, or follow around perps with robotic drones before firing, or use satellite-guided bombs to wipe out enemy safe houses that have been seeded with RFID chips. Nor will those detained by Russia gain weight the way detainees have done at the "inhuman" Gitmo prison. That's an American way of war which even Europeans can only regard with envy. The poor must respond with less. When the Nepalese saw the video of their 12 compatriots executed by terrorists in Iraq, they did what you could do with a box of matches: they burned the mosque in Kathmandu. To paraphrase Crosby, Stills and Nash, 'if you can't hit the one you should then hit the one you're with'.

While Russia can do better than a box of matches, the reality is that its poverty and low-tech force structure will make any response that Putin may choose a brutal and largely indiscriminate affair unless it is subsumed into the larger American-led Global War on Terror. The real price of the European vacation from history is its abandonment of the first principle of civilization. Unless there is common justice, there will be vigilante justice.

Expect Putin to use the escalating terror war as a reason for more authoritarian domestic measures, some possibly justified, many not.

The paperback edition of The Substance of Style is now available.

On a similar note, James Dao's short Week in Review piece on the weird political effects of the concentration of swing states in the Rust Belt is also worth a glance. Best graf:

"Anyone campaigning in that part of the world is going to be torn between two worlds," said Richard Feinberg, an economist at the University of California at San Diego and a former Clinton administration official. "For a national audience, the candidates talk about economic modernism, global mobility and open markets. But in that part of the world, there is a temptation to appeal to the romanticism of the industrial Midwest, with its memories of a faded golden era when they had a virtual global monopoly."

Meanwhile, kids are looking to design for future jobs. This Sunday Styles article focuses on fashion, but everywhere I go people tell me their college-age kids are studying graphic design.

I wish him the best and, like most people, fully expect he'll be fine. It's amazing how routine and effective these once-extraordinary operations are.

The most striking thing about Bush's speech was that he not only made audience members cry but teared up himself, here: "And I have met with parents and wives and husbands who have received a folded flag, and said a final goodbye to a soldier they loved. I am awed that so many have used those meetings to say that I am in their prayers--to offer encouragement to me. Where does strength like that come from? How can people so burdened with sorrow also feel such pride?"

Has Zell Miller been mad a long time? I'm not so sure. Bill Shipp, who knows Georgia politics about as well as anyone, wrote a column a few months ago where he said that it's impossible that Miller didn't figure out until 2001 that the national Democratic Party was a lot more liberal than he was.

Miller has a huge chip on his shoulder about being a "hillbilly" raised in house without running water, and he's easily offended. Witness his bizarre overreaction to the proposed CBS reality show that would update the Beverly Hillbillies.

Shipp says that once he got to Washington, Miller felt, rightly or wrongly, that his fellow Democrats were looking down their noses at him. And that's where his pique really began.

I talked to a long-time friend of Miller who said that there's something to Shipp's theory, and that the condescension Miller felt from the Washington Democrats was very real.

But he also adds that isn't all there is to it. Miller really does think the Democrats are soft on defense. From what I've seen, he probably thinks the Republicans are soft too.

I think Miller really is representative of the Jacksonian strain in American politics, and I don't regard that as a compliment.

Miller's most Jacksonian moment came after the speech, when he told Chris Matthews he'd like to challenge him to a duel--and he seemed to mean it. He's definitely a throwback, far removed different from the prosperous, satisfied (even smug) Republicans of suburban megachurches.

It was interesting to hear a fellow Georgia Democrat make an unqualified, and contemptuous, reference to Jimmy Carter's "pacifism": "They claimed Carter's pacifism would lead to peace. They were wrong." I'm guessing Miller's been mad for a long time.

Unfortunately, I doubt that the film is that faithful. If the ads are to be believed, the movie turns that great amoral user Becky Sharp (who makes Scarlett look like Melanie) into some kind of enterpreneurial/feminist hero. Better to read the book.

UPDATE: Reader Joe Gusmano writes that you can get Vanity Fair for free at Project Gutenberg. Of course, you won't get binding with that.

Watching this election season on the blogs, I'm struck by the generation gap among people who hold basically the same political views--say, Dan Drezner and me. Children of the 1970s, like Glenn and me, may not exactly be Republican partisans but we don't trust Democrats, especially those from the liberal wing of the party, with national security or the economy. Youngsters like Dan are less cynical, or more naive (take your pick), about the Dems and more likely to vote on social issues. This isn't simply a matter of priorities. It's also a product of associations and culture: What personalities and issues define the parties in your mind?

In evidence to a parliamentary inquiry, the [Royal College of General Practitioners] accuses the companies of over-playing the dangers of conditions such as mild depression or slightly raised blood pressure.

Dr Maureen Baker, the college's honorary secretary, wants the Commons health inquiry to investigate the companies' practices.

"It would be fruitful to look into the increase in disease-mongering by them," she told The Sunday Telegraph.

"It is very much in the interest of the pharmaceutical industry to draw a line that includes as large a population as possible within the 'ill' category. The bigger this group is, the more drugs they can sell. If current trends continue, publicly funded health-care systems will be at risk of financial collapse with huge cost to society as a whole."

The college lists hypertension, high cholesterol, osteoporosis, anxiety and depression as examples of common conditions that, in mild forms, are often inappropriately treated with drugs.

As someone who suffers from mild depression--which doesn't seem mild when you have it--I'm glad these people don't get to decide whether I'm sick enough to merit medication. Of course, some members of the Kass Commission might welcome that prospect--a valuable reminder of the dangers of government provision of health care. He who pays ultimately determines what's worth paying for. (As for cholesterol and hypertension, I guess they're not "diseases" until you've had a heart attack or stroke.)

It wasn't, of course. It was an extraordinarily comfortable, even conversational, argument about foreign policy and leadership. Giuliani argued for George Bush and also for himself--for fighting bad guys by being a stubborn hard ass. The core of the speech is not the jokes about John Kerry. It's this passage:

Terrorism did not start on September 11, 2001. It had been festering for many years.

And the world had created a response to it that allowed it to succeed. The attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics was in 1972. And the pattern had already begun.

The three surviving terrorists were arrested and within two months released by the German government.

Action like this became the rule, not the exception.

Terrorists came to learn they could attack and often not face consequences.

In 1985, terrorists attacked the Achille Lauro and murdered an American citizen who was in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer.

They marked him for murder solely because he was Jewish.

Some of those terrorist were released and some of the remaining terrorists allowed to escape by the Italian government because of fear of reprisals.

So terrorists learned they could intimidate the world community and too often the response, particularly in Europe, was "accommodation, appeasement and compromise."

And worse the terrorists also learned that their cause would be taken more seriously, almost in direct proportion to the barbarity of the attack.

Terrorist acts became a ticket to the international bargaining table.

How else to explain Yasser Arafat winning the Nobel Peace Prize when he was supporting a terrorist plague in the Middle East that undermined any chance of peace?

Before September 11, we were living with an unrealistic view of the world much like our observing Europe appease Hitler or trying to accommodate ourselves to peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union through mutually assured destruction.

President Bush decided that we could no longer be just on defense against global terrorism but we must also be on offense.

On September 20, 2001, President Bush stood before a joint session of Congress, a still grieving and shocked nation and a confused world and he did change the direction of our ship of state.

He dedicated America under his leadership to destroying global terrorism.

The President announced the Bush Doctrine when he said: "Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there.

It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

"Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists."

And since September 11th President Bush has remained rock solid.

It doesn't matter how he is demonized.

It doesn't matter what the media does to ridicule him or misinterpret him or defeat him.

They ridiculed Winston Churchill. They belittled Ronald Reagan.

But like President Bush, they were optimists; leaders must be optimists. Their vision was beyond the present and set on a future of real peace and true freedom.

Some call it stubbornness. I call it principled leadership.

One could tell a similar story about crime in New York City. Giuliani probably assumed listeners would make the connection, though I'm not sure how many people outside New York did. (Based on what I saw on TV, pundits weren't providing much context.) The speech might also remind New Yorkers, especially those who dislike Bush, why, before 9/11, they may have disliked Giuliani. Stubornness is useful in the face of determined evil, but it also tends to run over innocent--or, in some cases, less guilty--bystanders.

When Giuliani talks about terrorism, I think he's right, and persuasively so. When he was making headlines with dubious Wall Street prosecutions--most famously of Michael Milken--I thought he was a dangerous fanatic. Even as mayor, I distrusted his authoritarianism. But like most people who prefer their streets clean(ish) and safe, I do prefer New York today to New York before Giuliani. Unfortunately, the two sides of his crime-fighting persona are inseparable.

What to make of all this? The usual lessons, I suppose: Life is full of tradeoffs. Power requires checks and balances. And you probably don't want John Lindsay fighting terrorism.

The most remarkable thing about the speech wasn't its content but how it was delivered. Giuliani spoke fluidly, but in an utterly conversational way, as though he had no text. Instead of trying for old-style oratory, which works for few contemporary speakers, he gave a model 21st-century performance. If you didn't see the speech, check out the video, available via this C-Span page.

"It shows how desperate Nader is, to have to join up with these people. He basically has nothing in common with them, aside from an anti-corporate leaning and a desire to rehabilitate his image," said Cal Jilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Texas who has written extensively on third parties. "And when a party nominates Buchanan one election and Nader the next, it shows there's no there there."

Nader spokesman Kevin B. Zeese sees it differently. "It's actually surprising how much Ralph and the Reform Party agree on," he said, citing electoral reform, ending corporate welfare, and opposition to the Iraq war as examples.

For those who aren't familiar with him, Cal Jillson (the correct spelling is the Sherry Bebitch Jeffe of Dallas (or to flatter both, the Norm Ornstein)--always good for a quote that suits the reporter's needs but shows no particularly deep understanding or interesting analysis of what's going on.

For more background, see the first chapter of TFAIE.

The commission thinks the reason the bits of information that might have been assembled into a mosaic spelling 9/11 never came together in one place is that no one person was in charge of intelligence. That is not the reason. The reason or, rather, the reasons are, first, that the volume of information is so vast that even with the continued rapid advances in data processing it cannot be collected, stored, retrieved and analyzed in a single database or even network of linked databases. Second, legitimate security concerns limit the degree to which confidential information can safely be shared, especially given the ever-present threat of moles like the infamous Aldrich Ames. And third, the different intelligence services and the subunits of each service tend, because information is power, to hoard it. Efforts to centralize the intelligence function are likely to lengthen the time it takes for intelligence analyses to reach the president, reduce diversity and competition in the gathering and analysis of intelligence data, limit the number of threats given serious consideration and deprive the president of a range of alternative interpretations of ambiguous and incomplete data -- and intelligence data will usually be ambiguous and incomplete.

"But the Cheneys apparently put family values above political litmus tests."

What the fuck is this supposed to mean? Anyone against gay marriage doesn't have family values? Go back to writing about economics you fuckin' idiot.

For this gentleman and others who might have been confused, let me clarify: The Cheneys have a gay daughter. Their family experience--the role of family values in their own personal lives--is more important to them than toeing the Republican line.

I do believe that enabling gay people to form families--not merely couples, but the extended kinship relations implied in marriage--would be a good thing, for extended families as well as for couples. But I don't think "anyone against family marriage doesn't have family values." If I did, I really would be an idiot, no adjectives required. Only a highly defensive misreading would suggest otherwise.

In related news, Grant McCracken blogs on Candadian anti-Americanism: "Anti-Americanism is rampant. Many Canadians now make free with the most derogatory comments about their southern neighbors. They are pleased to call Americans stupid, aggressive, and vulgar."

Mark Franchetti of The Sunday Times (London, presumably; the link is from The Australian) has more:

[F]ollowing the discovery in the wreckage of flight 1047 of traces of hexogen, an explosive used in previous Chechen attacks, the Russian authorities had conceded that terrorism was to blame.

The Federal Security Service (FSB) has confirmed that traces of the same explosives were found in the wreckage of the second plane, and it has also emerged that the Tupolev-154 sent at least two distress signals – an SOS followed by a hijack alert.

Suspicion pointed to two suspected "black widows", female Chechen suicide bombers, apparently determined to strike a blow against the Kremlin in the run-up to yesterday's elections in the breakaway Caucasian republic--expected to be won by Moscow's man Alu Alkhanov.

The suspected "widow" on flight 1047 was S. Dzhebirkhanova, a young woman believed to be a Chechen who boarded the plane after changing her ticket for an earlier flight.

Suspiciously, none of Dzhebirkhanova's relatives or friends has come forward since the disaster to claim her remains.

No next of kin have been identified either for Amanta Nagayeva, 27, the suspected terrorist on the other plane. Registered on the passenger list as living in Grozny, the Chechen capital, she was the last person to buy a ticket for flight 1303, only an hour before takeoff.

She was a market trader whose brother disappeared four years ago after he was detained by Russian troops. It is also believed that she once lived in a small village in southern Chechnya where an Islamic militant ran a terrorist training camp. Her remains were found in small fragments, suggesting she had blown herself up.

The mystery remained how the bombers managed to smuggle their explosives on board. Domodedovo airport, which the two flights left within 46 minutes of each other, was overhauled two years ago and re-equipped with the latest baggage scanning technology and dogs trained to smell explosives.

Maybe black widows didn't fit the profile.

What movies rarely do, however, is provide us an opportunity to marvel at the scope and complexity of materials science and engineering.

Ah, but “rare” does not mean “never,” and there are a handful of films that have great materials moments even if the movies themselves do not always, if ever, attain greatness. To be sure, materials never have the starring role, but they oftentimes have the power to amaze, awe, and accomplish fantastic feats.

Before pushing the “play” button on the countdown, however, I encourage you to first review the ground rules that I employed in filtering through the nominees. Some of them may seem arbitrary (and they are), but they all serve to give me a manageable structure in which to operate. As with any good article, these parameters are outlined in the Experimental Procedures section. Okay, enough with the introductory blah, blah, blah. Let’s get on with the show.

The list is here, and, no, The Graduate isn't #1.