The longest winning streak in organized sports
has
been broken: Michigan State 72, Harlem 68.
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
--Phil Agre
The longest winning streak in organized sports
has
been broken: Michigan State 72, Harlem 68.
If your spouse
tries
to kill you, there's something very wrong. But this
victim testified for the defense, insisting that it was
a "domestic situation that got totally out of hand."
The would-be killer is serving prison time, while the victim plans to take their children to visit her in prison. Forgiveness is all very well, but it doesn't mean you should stay married to someone who tried to kill you. [via the Obscure Store]
I'd like to remind everyone that the United States
does have a President: his name is Bill Clinton,
and he will be President until 20 January 2001. In the
meantime, here are
13
Myths About the Results of the 2000 Election. Keep your eye
on the ball, and the spin, as this one plays out.
Sports teams don't have to be called "Bears" and "Cougars":
some schools boast of such
mascots
as the Spiders, Pretzels, Rocks, and Spongers.
Public open
spaces aren't just a luxury: they're one of the basics of
a democratic
society, and a reason most Americans don't hate the rich.
Somehow, this seems relevant to the current situation:
The hot water dispenser is dispensing tiny green specks. Someone will be here Monday or Tuesday to look at it.
I'm no fan of MacDonald's, but I think the Italian Catholic
newspaper Awenire has
gone
too far by saying that fast food is unsuitable for Catholics.
Before the election, Bush's campaign was making plans in case
Bush
won
the popular vote, but lost the electoral vote.
At the moment, the only thing certain about this
presidential election is that Bush
has not won a majority of the popular vote; I wonder how
loudly his people would scream if Gore's supporters borrowed
their plans.
While the world looks elsewhere, the Taliban are pushing
to capture the remainder of Afghanistan. In one last refuge
in the northeast,
15
women are studying medicine:
There are few textbooks for the college's 180 students, no laboratories and no electricity, but it is still said to be the best medical school left in Afghanistan.
Robert Moss, who has always wanted a London
address, now has one--in part. Moss has
donated
his old heart to a museum, to remind people of the need
for transplantable organs.
Cecelie Berry writes movingly about how she responded
when her eight-year-old son told her he
wants
to be president when he grows up. He's neither rich nor
white, which would be a refreshing change from this election, and
he's eager to learn almost anything if it might help him become
president someday.
Jon Carroll has
never
felt good about any of the people he voted for
for president, but after a while he realized that
Nowhere in the Constitution, nowhere in the Federalist Papers, am I guaranteed the right to feel good about my vote....The acceptance of human flaw is the basis of our system, and its strength. The Constitution is built on suspicion and mistrust. Let's elect a lot of scoundrels and let them keep an eye on one another -- that's the plan.
This doesn't stop me from wishing for better candidates, but it is a comforting thought nonetheless.
Acme Klein Bottles
carries the "finest closed, non-orientable, boundary-free
manifolds sold anywhere in our three spatial dimensions." A
fine gift, they come with a variety of guarantees, one or
two of which are even relevant, and a number of warnings,
most of which are summed up by "For best results, avoid doing
stupid things."
Book magazine has a fine
interview
with Ursula Le Guin, with thoughts on writing, Taoism,
feminism, science fiction, and critics' sometimes odd reactions to
the genre label.
Statistical correlation is a
strange
and wonderful thing. An economist at Carnegie Mellon
spent years trying to figure out why Pittsburgh, with CMU right there, wasn't making it as a high-tech city.
"He threw wave after wave of data at the question--airports, weather,
five-star restaurants, you name it." Nothing clicked. Then
The eureka moment happened when he saw numbers compiled by one of his doctoral students, Gary J. Gates, on concentrations of gays living in metropolitan areas--numbers published with another author last May in Demography, a peer-reviewed journal of the Population Association of America.Florida took Gates's rankings of areas. He compared them with the Milken Institute's "Tech-Pole" rankings of high-tech presence in metropolitan areas. He discovered to his surprise that the number one thing that correlates with a region's high-tech success is the concentration of gay people living there.
Correlation is not causality, of course, but this article speculates on possible reasons for the correlation, and on whether it has any predictive value. [via The Null Device]
A drug company is suing researchers whose work it funded
because they are
publishing
unfavorable results from a test of its new drug.
Immune Response Corp. does not dispute that the product, an innovative compound intended to boost the immune response of HIV patients, failed to slow the disease. Company officials say they're angered that Kahn's analysis failed to highlight promising data that showed the drug slowed replication of the AIDS virus in a group of 250 patients.
If there is any justice, or any sense, left in our court system, the judge will throw the suit out, with prejudice, and order the drug company to pay all costs.
In the meantime, if your doctor asks you to participate in a drug study, you might want to ask who's paying for it, and who will decide whether the results are published.
Where are the otters? A marine biologist has been
studying Aleutian otters for 30 years, and three years
ago realized that
they
just weren't there. Nothing was obviously wrong: he didn't find
large numbers of dead otters. But up at the far end of the Aleutians,
the pristine-seeming island of Attu has almost no otters. No seals.
No king crab. There are sharks, and pollock, and lots of sea urchins,
and eagles still circle overhead.
The best hypothesis is that orcas ate the otters, because there weren't enough sea lions. Everything is connected, and 23 years ago the temperature of the Gulf of Alaska went up by 2 degrees C. That's enough to eliminate the plankton. That kills the shrimp and herring that eat the plankton, so the sea lions that eat them are in trouble, and then the orcas are looking for a new food supply.
The Guardian asks
Would
he do to the US what he did to Texas? and explains some of
what Bush has done to Texas and to Texans.
A flurry of news articles are proclaiming that
scientists have found an
"Adam"
who is the great-great-...-grandfather
of all living humans, and wondering why he's so much
younger than "Mitochondrial Eve."
However, while "Eve" was proclaimed at first with much fanfare, the theory has come into question for a number of reasons. The main one is that mitochondrial DNA may not be inherited only from the mother: this is a key assumption behind the "mitochondrial Eve" theory. Also, and this has gotten remarkably little attention, a group of researchers decided, in the best scientific tradition, to replicate the original "mitochondrial Eve" work, using the same computer simulation program. They let it run longer than the original researchers, and got a variety of results, with no reason to prefer the single-great-great-...-grandmother conclusion.
Copyright 2000 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
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