ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Local news:
Coliseum Books, on Broadway at 57th
in Manhattan, has lost its lease. They're looking for a new location; failing that,
the store will be closing next month. It's a good if not great general bookstore,
convenient to some of my regular wanderings; others may want to take advantage
of the current offer, 20 percent off on everything in stock.
Personally, I think the landlord is an idiot--not because bookstores are sacred, but because the commercial real estate market in Manhattan is not in good shape, and there are numerous empty, and emptying, storefronts nearby. The problem is, by the time landlords figure this out, a good business is gone, and we all get to walk by an empty shop window for a year or three.
The transcript of the bin Laden video was edited to
avoid embarrassing
Saudi Arabia. bin Laden's visitor claims to have been smuggled into Afghanistan
by a member of the Saudi religious police, and bin Laden praises a member of the
Saudi council on religious law.
"It shows that bin Laden's support is not limited to the radical side of Islam but also among the Saudi religious establishment," says Fawaz Gerges, professor of Middle Eastern studies at Sarah Lawrence College. "And that is bad news for Saudi Arabia." ...[via Red Rock Eaters]A member of the team that translated the tape for the U.S. government said the ABCNEWS translation is consistent with portions of the government's transcript that have not been released to the public.
Foreign diplomats are
protesting the
new US practice of hiding information about detainees, even from their
governments.
Canada is the most recent country to raise the issue after a Canadian citizen disappeared on Sept. 20, and American officials at first denied he was in their custody.Peter Lloyd, an official at the Canadian consulate in New York, said that the family of the detainee, Shakir Ali Baloch, who was admittedly in the United States illegally, had no idea where he was and asked Canada to locate him. Mr. Baloch, who was born in Pakistan, was finally found last week at the Metropolitan Detention Center. He told consular officials that he had been turned down when he asked for legal or consular help.
Canada is now putting into place tough new immigration and antiterrorism measures while under public pressure not to curb civil rights in the process. Canadians and Europeans are watching closely how the United States uses new powers of detention and trial. A European diplomat said that there had been considerable criticism of American methods in the news media there.
Some diplomats say that whatever the provocation, what they see as a failure to abide by international norms in handling detentions has undermined assertions by the Bush administration that the United States is fighting to preserve freedom.
Meanwhile, a court has ruled, following a recent related Supreme Court decision, that the policy of imprisoning immigrants awaiting deportation after criminal convictions--no matter how long the deportation process takes--is unconstitutional.
"To deprive these individuals of their fundamental right to freedom furthers no government goal, while generating a considerable cost to the government, the alien and the alien's family," the court said. "The goals articulated by the government -- to prevent aliens from absconding or endangering the community -- only justify detention of those individuals who present such a risk."
This ruling applies to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands; I suspect the Bush administration's immediate response will be to try to move detainees to another federal court district, while it comes up with doublespeak to explain why, if it's unconstitutional to hold non-citizens who have been convicted of crimes, it's okay to hold those who haven't.
New paleomagnetic data strongly suggest that geophysical
hot spots
are moving, rather than being fixed points beneath moving tectonic
plates.
Fixed mantle plumes were a practically useful idea, a frame of reference for plate motion and geological maps. If the hot spots are moving, maybe the Pacific Plate didn't suddenly shift direction 43 million years ago.
In an Einsteinian universe, it shouldn't be surprising that we can't count on an absolute reference frame even on our rotating spheroid of a world.
The FBI asked Rudy Rucker for
all the
information, including victims' passwords, that the BadTrans worm mailed
to an ISP he runs.
The database includes only information stolen from the victims of the virus, not information about the perpetrator. The FBI wants indiscriminant access to the illegally extracted passwords and keystrokes of over two million people without so much as a warrant. Even with a warrant they would have to specify exactly what information they are after, on whom, and what they expect to find. Instead, they want it all and for no justifiable reason....[via Metafilter]Rather than hand over the entire database to the FBI, MonkeyBrains has decided to open the database to the public. Now everyone (including the FBI) will be able query which accounts have been compromised and search for their hostnames. Password and keylogged data will not be made available, for obvious legal reasons.
How Stanley Kaplan
undermined
the SAT by proving that you can study for it. Much SAT-prep involves gaming
the test: knowing how the questions are constructed, one critic managed to get
12/13 of the reading comprehension questions right without reading the
passages the questions were about.
[via Arts and Letters Daily]
I'm just back
from
watching
Calliope
hummingbirds
in
Fort Tryon Park. Wow!
These are gorgeous birds, at a time that New York wouldn't expect
hummingbirds at all--and this species has never been seen in New York
City before this visit. The garden is in fine form, full of purple
salvia and other flowers, and the birds show no signs of trying to
make it to Mexico. Our visitors appear to be immature males.
A researcher quoted in New Scientist thinks the two
recent unexplained anthrax deaths may have been caused by
wind-blown
spores.
The optimistic view of this is "If true, the fear that anthrax was carried
widely across North America by contaminated mail may be unfounded." Those of
us who are, in some weather conditions, downwind from Trenton may find it
less reassuring.
The makers of Monopoly are being
investigated
for monopolistic practices, including price-fixing, in the UK.
[via Need to Know]
Tanja Dominko has examined a few hundred
cloned
monkey embryos and figured out why, thus far, nobody has gotten them
past the blastocyst stage.
Though they appeared superficially healthy, the cells in the vast majority of Dominko's embryos did not form distinct nuclei containing all the chromosomes. Instead, the chromosomes were scattered unevenly throughout the cells.The problem seems to be removing the nucleus; experiments where the nucleus was removed from an egg, then restored, produced the same results."The surprising thing is that these cells keep dividing," says Dominko. Some embryos developed to the stage known as a blastocyst, but by day six or seven they had started to look abnormal.
The cloned human embryos created by ACT didn't even get this far. Only one reached the six-cell stage.
The Google Usenet archive now goes back to May 1981, and there's a handy
timeline
of Usenet milestones.
Veterans of the US Army's anthrax bioweapons program
want
the FBI to talk to them--both to offer expertise and because they realize they,
and their colleagues, are obvious suspects.
Smith, 84, now retired in Port Charlotte, Fla., said, "I've got the education to do it. I live alone. I've got two baths, so I could use one as a lab. I want to be examined as a potential terrorist."The FBI doesn't appear interested, but refuses to comment on the matter. [via Red Rock Eaters.]He added, more seriously, that he is alarmed about the quality of the investigation because it has not scrutinized people like him: "Part of being thorough is talking to people who are knowledgeable about anthrax."
Molly
Ivins, with her usual lucidity, and better attention to Texas than most
of the national press, briefly
explains
Enron's connections, and what they mean for the rest of us.
The fact that Ken Lay, Enron's chairman, has been Bush's chief money man and key backer since he first went into politics is mentioned only in passing. The media don't want to be impolite. They have been credulously swallowing Enron's PR and overlooking the obvious for years.The main problem with Enron is that it has never produced much of anything in the way of either goods or services; it has not added a single widget to the world widget supply. Enron is in the business of "financializing," making markets, trading in wholesale electricity, water, data storage, fiber optics - just about anything. One Enron executive told The New York Times that the company's achievement was to create "a regulatory black hole" to suit its "core management philosophy, which was to be the first mover into a market and to make money in the initial chaos and lack of transparency."
Had something similar happened under Clinton, the Republicans in Congress would be screaming "impeachment" by now--and with better reason than they ever found for Clinton.
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.