ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
--Phil Agre
Was the
banner
headline
"Dow, Nasdaq Plunge to Record Lows" part of the administration
campaign to create a recession, or just carelessness?
(Not having seen a correction two days later, I have
called this to the paper's attention, so it may vanish at any
time; in any case, Newsday links are only good for a week.)
A
taunt
to internet advertisers, via
Need to Know
Subcomandante Marcos has been offered the chance to
address
the Mexican Congress, after refusing an invitation
to meet with the president instead.
How many crusaders against affirmative action in college admissions will now speak out against the preferential treatment of athletes?[via Rebecca's pocket]
A new fossil hominid skull, a new
genus,
and more questions: Kenyanthropus platyops, 3.5 million years
old, complicates the story of human evolution.
The
formal species description includes
a discussion of how this discovery affects the classification of
other hominin fossils.
The amoeba Entamoeba invadens needs, and
gets,
assistance
in reproducing. When the two new amoebae are ready, they
emit a chemical, and nearby amoebae break the connection between them.
The precise nature of the mayday molecule is not known, but it contains sugar groups. This could explain why the midwives come to their neighbours' aid--they are getting a meal out of it.Mirelman speculates that, in the distant past, the ability of amoebae to sense and interact with each other may have been a step on the road to the evolution of multicellular organisms. "This quorum sensing may be a primordial system," he says.
The CDC has released its first survey of
chemical
exposure in the US population. The good news is, lead and mercury
levels are down. For most of the other chemicals, ranging from
cadmium to phthalates--additives used to soften plastic,
among other things--this
survey is the baseline, the start of tracking.
The Florida overvotes show
suspicious
patterns, suggestive of large-scale vote fraud rather
than simple mistake.
Sharman Braff lays out the evidence and the numbers.
And now scuttlebutt has it that Jeb is trying to sneak a bill through the Florida Legislature to seal the ballots.This last, sealing the ballots, is a huge red flag. Why would Jeb care who sees the ballots? The media hand count is no big deal. The papers have already reported tallies that put Gore over the top, and vice versa, and it was a big yawn. To attempt such a blatantly fascist act as sealing the ballots, there is something more than chad dimples Jeb doesn't want us to see.
Physical evidence, maybe? Maybe someone got careless with the hole-punch.
[via the invaluable Red Rock Eaters list.]
One minister of the Wee Free church has a
novel
explanation for the current outbreak of foot-and-mouth
disease. One question, Mr. MacLeod: why hasn't the epidemic
reached Italy? [via Need to Know]
And an unrelated question for the Scotsman (see the title of this page): what is Scotland's best-selling newspaper, then?
Analysis of what many African primates eat suggests that
our color vision evolved to detect
the
tastiest new leaves. It turns out that you don't need full
trichromatic vision to spot tropical fruit in the leaf canopy, but
if you can't distinguish red from green, you'll miss half the tender
young leaves in tropical Africa.
Volcanoes plus ice equal
liquid
water and other useful chemicals, and possibly ancient life
on Mars.
Quote of the day:
Of course, "in principle" means "not necessarily by any simpler method than by simulation the whole universe"!
--John Baez
From Baez's page on physical constants.
Salon
has a fine
interview with
Norton Juster, author of The Phantom Tollbooth, which
I just finished having (re)read to me as a bedtime story, and
The Dot and the Line.
Be careful what you wish for, you might
get
it: Selig Harrison argues that the CIA created the Taliban.
"They told me these people were fanatical, and the more fierce they were the more fiercely they would fight the Soviets," he said. "I warned them that we were creating a monster."He argues that Pakistan is backing and funding the Taliban as part of a long-term plan to extend its "sphere of influence" to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and eventually to Iran and Turkey. Note: this is from the India Abroad News Service. I have no idea of how well they check their sources, and the phrasing of the story suggests an anti-Pakistani bias. [via the null device.]
You need a tetanus booster every ten years, but if you
need it this year,
it
may not be available. Most of the US supply came from
Wyeth-Ayerst, which has decided there's not enough profit in preventing an
ugly but obscure disease; the only other manufacturer is going to need 11
months to increase production.
The basic problem is that vaccines work too well: you don't get rich giving people one injection every ten years. Price controls don't help, and neither to well-meaning activists who think vaccination is dangerous and have never seen a case of lockjaw.
The market isn't working here, because corporations measure things in terms of dollars and cents, not in terms of the larger value of a product. Right now, 60 percent of tetatus vaccine is bought by one customer, the CDC, which distributes it through Medicaid and other programs. It would be simpler and probably cheaper for the government to manufacture it, rather than negotiate with a single drug company that could drop the product because there's more money in treating baldness. (This is my comment; the Salon article doesn't come near the idea, preferring to point out the difficulties caused by price controls.) The larger problem is that public health isn't prestigious, because we take it for granted; specific conditions and epidemics get attention, but prevention is invisible.
Working out can be empowering, or it can be a distraction from more
important work. For Jessie,
hope
is a muscle.
Let my heart make me brave. Let my diaphragm muscle give me breath to speak out. Let my legs take me where I want to go, and my arms pull down any barrier I encounter, and my stomach and back hold me upright in the face of every hardship. Let my neck be strong but not stiff. Let every muscle give force to my ideals and convictions. Let them propel me forward in justice and mercy. Let these muscles be hope incarnate.
Multilingual
life
in New York: the new language an immigrant learns
may not be English. That cook listening to the Greek news
every night, and daydreaming of visiting the Greek islands someday, is
from Pakistan, and some Mexicans learn Hindi before English. It
all depends on where you settle, and what job you find.
(This link should be good through 13 March.)
A brief guide to the
Isle
of Clichés, reachable via ferry from the metaphor
mainland.
New York City plans to
inject
insecticide into trees to protect
them from Asian long-horned beetles.
Small plastic canisters containing insecticide will be inserted into holes drilled into the bases of trees.I hope this works--the only other way of dealing with these beetles has been to destroy infested trees to stop the beetles from spreading.The insecticide will then be absorbed by the tree and spread through its trunk, branches and leaves. When the beetles eat their way through the tree, ingesting the insecticide, they will be killed.
Fascinating, if unsurprising: bilingual immigrants
remember
their childhoods better in their native languages, even if they're
fluent in the language of their new homes.
There is a tantalizing array of evidence, from formal and experimental to informal and testimonial, that suggests that becoming bicultural and speaking two languages has the "feel" of living in two worlds and perhaps of being different persons in those worlds.
Copyright 2001 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.