Yet Another Web Log

A clipping service without portfolio*, compiled and annotated by Vicki Rosenzweig since March 1999

ISSN 1534-0236

Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.

2 March 2002

Ethnic politics can get complicated, sometimes in amusingly weird ways: the New York City Council's Black and Hispanic Caucus is trying to decide whether a mother born in Havana qualifies David Weprin for membership.

Other people have easier decisions:

Allan Jennings, an African-American council member from Queens, has reportedly inquired about joining the council's new Jewish Caucus, which is being organized by Brooklyn's Michael Nelson and others.

"His mother is Jewish," Weprin said of Jennings. "Mike said, 'Sure, he's welcome.' We'd be happy to have him in the group."

Patrick Nielsen Hayden writes to defend the "Continuity of Government" plan, saying that the goal is to assure the maintenance of duly constituted civilian authority, rather than leaving the military as the only government structure if someone nuked Washington. What I'd like to know--and this is addressed to the administration, not to Patrick, who I don't expect to have a direct line to the White House any more than I do--is what, in that case, is gained by hiding the existence of such a plan. Hiding the actual bunkers to stop them from becoming targets, yes--but what is gained by not telling people you have plans to recover from attack? The knowledge of such plans should be reassuring: an insurance policy you hope never to collect on. The secrecy may just be reflex, but that reflex is harmful and anti-democratic.

Also, I'm not convinced that the current administration cares about duly constituted anything, given how they came to office.

1 March 2002

The Bush administration is talking about ensuring continuity, while the BBC calls it a "shadow government"--upper-level managers from various government departments have been rotating in and out of secret underground bunkers since September 11. Even their families don't know where they are--though some may be making some shrewd guesses today.

The plan goes back to the Cold War, but had never been used before.

Its first mission, in the event of a disabling blow to Washington, would be to prevent collapse of essential government functions.

Assuming command of regional federal offices, officials said, the underground government would try to contain disruptions of the nation's food and water supplies, transportation links, energy and telecommunications networks, public health and civil order. Later it would begin to reconstitute the government.

Known internally as the COG, for "continuity of government," the administration-in-waiting is an unannounced complement to the acknowledged absence of Vice President Cheney from Washington for much of the pastfive months. Cheney's survival ensures constitutional succession, one official said, but "he can't run the country by himself."

This is executive-branch only--there are no plans to reconstitute the courts or legislature. To the BBC's core audience, "shadow government" echoes shadow cabinet, the leaders of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition; over here, it sounds more like Oliver North and his band of merry traitors.

28 February 2002

There are enough dodo fragments in museums for a DNA analysis, revealing the dodo's family tree. Its nearest relative, the solitaire, is also extinct: next kin is the Nicobar pigeon.

27 February 2002

This form resolutely ignores function.

26 February 2002

Tim Wise comments on the "Invisible Whiteness" of the Olympic beer riot, and the news coverage thereof. He argues that, if the rioters had been black or Hispanic, their race would have been mentioned--and they'd have been viewed far more harshly.

In the wake of riots at Michigan State and Colorado University, neighbors in the riot zone and local police sought to "reach out," to attempt to "understand their frustrations," referring to the students who had just trashed their streets.

Wise also presents a brief historical overview of white people rioting for access to beer. One point he implies, then misses, is that the Irish and Italian immigrants rioting in Chicago in the 1850s weren't considered white at the time.

He's right, though, that some college students are exaggerating the significance of their annoyance, and glossing over the difference between limits on on-campus drinking and serious oppression, racial or otherwise. [link via Follow Me Here, comments my own.]

25 February 2002

Four out of four old lotus seeds gathered from a dry lakebed in China sprouted when tested for viability--and all four were visibly abnormal. The seeds are between 200 and 500 years old, and were buried the entire time. The researchers suspect that low-level radioactivity in the soil damaged the seeds.

23 February 2002

Cautious optimism: a search team thinks it heard an ivory-billed woodpecker drumming on a tree in Louisiana, though the searchers neither saw the bird nor heard it call.

There have been no confirmed sightings in half a century. [NY Times link, you know the drill by now (if not, drop me a note).]

21 February 2002

The risks of auto-update programs include accidental distribution of buggy software, deliberate distribution of spyware, and third-party hijacking of the update to spread voruses.

Auto-update is probably here to stay (at least for the next few years, which is a long time in computing), because--as this article notes--it has numerous benefits, including the ability to distribute fixes for security holes. As the author points out, "For most people, the benefits generally outweigh the risks."

Missouri may be about to execute an innocent man because the evidence in his favor showed up too late. Or maybe because the judge just likes executing people. There were three prosecution witnesses: when the first two recanted, the judge said that didn't matter, because the third hadn't. When the third then recanted, the judge dismissed his recantation as "not credible" because he was a convicted felon--a credibility problem that didn't seem to matter when his word was being used to convict Joseph Amrine.

The only remaining hope is for the governor to commute his sentence, or issue a stay of execution--something he has yet to do for any prisoner.

More strange devices on the internet: Dartboard IP. [from Koolish, via the potsmaster]

A literature survey, followed by a detailed study watching individual animals, suggest that primates are less aggressive than generally believed:

In addition to studying the literature, Sussman wanted to observe primates’ interactions firsthand. Last summer in Madagascar, Sussman, a Malagasy student and two Japanese researchers each studied one lemur from sunup to sundown.

"We had four different people looking at four different animals all day to see how many social interactions and fights the animals got into throughout the day. Again it fit exactly what we had found in the literature: Less than 10 percent of all the animals were involved in social behavior; there was almost no aggression amongst them; and one animal spent the whole day with no social interaction at all."

"The two Japanese researchers had been at the site studying these animals for 14 months," Sussman added. "They were amazed after observing just one throughout a day. They said they couldn’t believe it, when they looked at one animal, how little it interacted. They hadn’t put it in that context before."

Lemurs aren't apes, of course: we're more social than they are, in all sorts of ways.

19 February 2002

The problem with this proposed Swiss Expo pavilion isn't that it's going to be made mostly of water vapor. It isn't just that

Visual and acoustical references are erased along the journey toward the fog leaving only an optical "white-out" and the "white-noise" of pulsing water nozzles.

will compare profiles and change color indicating the degree of attraction or repulsion, much like an involuntary blush - red for affinity, green for antipathy. The system allows interaction among 400 visitors at any time.

Computational origami concerns itself with whether you can refold a map, or how to build furniture from a single sheet of metal.

Paper does not always follow predictions, warns mathematician Martin Kruskal of Rutgers University in New Jersey. Unlike a computer model, real paper has thickness - an A4 sheet is nearly impossible to fold in half more than six times. "Idealization has limitations," he says.

Paypal has gone public and raised over a billion dollars; the Register is typically, and I think appropriately, cynical about this investment.

The Parks Department has released 18 screech owls in Central Park, hoping to reestablish a population. The owls are common regionally, but the last one seen in the park had been in 1955. (NY Times, usual deal with registration.)

The Justice Department is hiding reports from the press by arbitrarily deciding that the reporter requesting them is no longer a reporter, despite documentation from his employer. [via the invaluable Red Rock Eaters]

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Copyright 2002 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.

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