ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Anthrax
threats against Americans are
nothing
new: but attacks on supermarket tabloids get the attention that
threats to health clinics never have. Planned Parenthood tried unsuccessfully
for five months to get a meeting with Attorney General Ashcroft about the
threats to their clinics.
Feldt's first reaction on seeing the televised images of men in protective suits sweeping through the newsrooms of ABC and NBC News and the US Senate office of majority leader Tom Daschle was relief. ''Now they get it,'' she thought. Her second reaction was anger. ''Of course, we're sorry that Tom Daschle and Tom Brokaw and their staffs have to suffer the fear we have suffered. But why is an assault on them any more horrible than an assault on a young woman who opens the mail at a women's health clinic in North Carolina?''[via Red Rock Eaters]
There is no truth to the
rumor that
Osama bin Laden is a Mossad agent, and that his attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon were designed to make Islam look bad.
Remember
the 2000 election? The US press apparently have decided we don't,
or would rather not: the analysis of the
Florida
ballots has been "postponed indefinitely," on the theory that
it's not a story after September 11. Or that they don't have the
resources.
It's not easy to test these things, but researchers have shown that
baboons
can think abstractly, the first study to show that an
animal other than a human or other great ape can do so.
The baboons and humans seemed to have different cutoff points for discerning same vs. different, with humans being more sensitive to entropy. The authors speculate that language may play a role, because our verbal expression for "same" makes the idea of "same" more restrictive -- in other words, things really have to be identical to qualify. To baboons, the authors suggest, the concept of "same" might be fuzzier and more inclusive.
Okay, not all pigs are yellow, but
this
pig is definitely yellow. Western science is so wonderful.
[via Follow Me Here]
All South
American
chinchillas,
capybaras, guinea pigs, and related rodents are descended from one
African population, according to genetic analysis. The research
gives a date of 40 million years ago--which means the ancestral
rodents crossed the Atlantic. Did they float on random vegetation?
Or did they swim?
[via Metafilter]
An official
statement from the
band Anthrax about their name.
In the twenty years we've been known as "Anthrax", we never thought the day would come that our name would actually mean what it really means. When I learned about anthrax in my senior year biology class, I thought the name sounded "metal". Everyone in my neighborhood had a band with an "er" name, like "Ripper" or "Deceiver" or "Killers" and I wanted to be different. "Anthrax" sounded cool, aggressive, and nobody knew what it was. Until a few years ago most people thought we'd made it up. Even our album, "Spreading The Disease" was just a play on the name. We were spreading our music to the masses.
The first-ever sighting of a
Baltimore
oriole in Ireland is in a small seaside town--called Baltimore.
[via Metafilter]
A
new study of the
acoustics
of laughter found that laughter is a more complicated, and
higher-pitched, sound that most people think. Women's laughs are more
song-like, and men's involve more grunting. The average man's laugh
is pitched 2.5 times as high as his normal speech--sometimes up to a
soprano high C; the average woman's laugh is pitched at twice her normal
speech, which can be 2000 Hz, or an octave above high C.
The researchers are in the midst of further studies of laughter. For example, they are studying the impact that these sounds have on emotional responses in listeners. They are also brain when listeners hear laughter. Another piece of their work involves studying whether laughter is speech-like in the sense of providing "meaning" or symbolic value to listeners. The investigators instead think that laughter functions largely to sway a listener's emotional response, with any meaning attributed to the sounds inferred or interpreted from the situation in which the laughter is produced.
I guess it really is a mutual defense alliance: NATO is going
to send AWACS planes from Europe to
patrol over the
United States.
The deployment of foreign military forces to help defend the U.S. homeland is without precedent. While some NATO countries have based forces in the United States for extended periods -- German air units, for instance, are exercising with their U.S. counterparts -- this is believed to be the first time such forces were sent specifically to play a role in national defense.
The
Great Lakes are
cleansing
themselves of pollutants, including PCBs, by outgassing. This
is good for the lakes, and for anyone eating lake fish; the potential
difficulty is that PCBs don't break down easily, and could settle
anywhere within thousands of miles.
Another sign that the world has changed: I'm relieved that
the passenger jet that exploded and crashed over the Black Sea
may have been
accidentally
shot down by the Ukrainian military.
The long-lost
Diary of
Saruman, complete with explanatory footnotes, is part of the
Tolkien sarcasm page.
This year's
IgNobel
Awards, for achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced,
include "LITERATURE: John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The
Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and
defend the differences between plural and possessive" and, in technology,
a joint award to "John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for
patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent Office
for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012."
What happened to the
Florida
recount results? The current story is that the attack on the World
Trade Center is delaying them; Podvin asserts that the numbers are being
held back because they show a decisive Gore victory in Florida,
one that can't be dismissed as a statistical dead heat. [The story is
currently at the top of Podvin's Web page]
Potentially "sensitive" documents--information about hazardous
chemicals, maps of pipelines, and other files that might be useful
to terrorists have been
removed
from US government and other Websites in the wake of the
September 11 attacks.
OMB Watch warns that "While security may improve, the spirit of civil society is lost. We cannot let that happen here," and other experts warn that the data could already be on user's hard drives, and is often available in public libraries.
This
is a small study, but the researchers claim to be able to
reduce
the risk of colds by more than half, and produce speedier
recovery. The magic pills contain allicin, a chemical found in garlic.
The view from abroad: the pro-war party, calling themselves
"patriots," are doing their best to
censor
opposing views, as far too many people are removing
comments critical of the president without being pressured, in the
name of national unity.
This isn't classified information. This isn't anything that might aid terrorism. The goal is to stop anyone from criticizing a political leader, and a political party.
To the extent that we give in to this, democracy and freedom lose, and terror wins.
Copyright 2001 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page or my online journal.