ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Cases of
whooping cough
are increasing in children too young to be safely vaccinated. The vaccine
does not provide lifelong immunity, and the long-term success of vaccination programs
means adults are no longer exposed to the bacteria often enough to maintain
their immunity. Between one-tenth and one-quarter of adults with nagging coughs
have whooping cough, and can transmit it. Researchers suggest vaccinating
prospective mothers, so they can pass immunity on to their children.
The distressing French election results are a reminder that
Politicians
are not all the same.
They also have me less likely to visit Paris again in the near future: but, as I commented in a different context on rassef back in September, staying home is no guarantee of my safety, either.
In 1875, North American locust swarms set a record for size. Then they vanished: the
last live insect was collected in 1902. Researchers now
think they know
what happened: the best hypothesis is that farmers plowed up the egg masses. The research
has been slowed by a shortage of preserved specimens, but some are now being found in
glaciers.
What
Tom
DeLay thought was an impeachable offense:
He was undermining everything that I believe in and everything that I have been working for. And he was standing for the wrong worldview.We have here an admission that it wasn't the sex or the lying--the GOP leadership thought it was legitimate to impeach a president for disagreeing with them.
Molly Ivins makes some sharp points about
George
Bush, the State Department, and "moral clarity". George Will's prose may be an easy
target, but the problem isn't style, it's content: he condemns George W. Bush for lack of
"moral clarity" on the Middle East, while cheerfully supporting a coup against the democratically
elected government in Venezuela.
Five
whooping cranes have
successfully migrated
north from Florida to Michigan. These birds, survivors of eight that were led
south last fall, are intended as the nucleus of a second wild flock.
The FBI crime labs use chemical matching between bullets as evidence in criminal
trials. Unfortunately, there are
huge flaws in the
technique: bullets made months apart may match, and bullets from the same batch
may not.
"If you're in a court of law, you really need to do your homework, because you're putting people in jail or on death row," says Erik Randich, the forensics consultant and metallurgist based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who made the discovery.No one knows how many verdicts have rested on such evidence, and it is unclear whether the revelation would have changed the verdict against Behn. But there are now fears that the technique may have directly or indirectly led to numerous miscarriages of justice.
Randich says one FBI analyst told him that he has testified in hundreds of court cases that bullets could be matched in this way. Randich has informed the FBI of his findings, but the bureau did not answer New Scientist's requests for comment on whether it plans to change its procedures.
Here's a science-fictional headline, even more than the stuff about cloning:
Ant
Supercolony Dominates Europe.
Another home remedy
bites the
dust: putting salt
on a red wine stain makes it worse.
"I can see where the idea comes from, because it acts like a sponge, but if you think about it, when you dye clothes you use salt to set the colour. Everyone always thinks salt, but in fact you will make the stain permanent instead."
Hawaii's
wake, and a warm counter-current it spawns, stretch all the way to Asia. Recent
satellite data can best be filed under "rediscovery": following the current, and the
pattern of clouds above it, is probably how the first Polynesian settlers found
the Hawaiian islands.
[via Follow Me Here]
Many near-Earth asteroids are
binaries,
probably single asteroids that have been pulled apart by gravitational interactions with Earth.
Astronomers using the Chandra X-ray telescope believe they have found a
star composed
entirely of quarks:
Jeremy Drake and colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts say the nearby star RX J1856 is, at just 11 kilometres across, far too small to be a neutron star.An alternative explanation is that they're looking at a hot spot on the surface of a more "ordinary" neutron star.This only makes sense if the 1983 supernova thought to have created RX J1856 forced the neutrons together so strongly that they dissolved into their constituent quarks, creating a superdense quark star.
I can't wait:
the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws is
starting a
new ad campaign
in New York City, featuring Mayor Bloomberg, who said last year that he had
smoked marijuana and enjoyed it. Showing more grace, and a better grasp of
the constitution, than his predecessor, Bloomberg says
"I'm not thrilled they are using my name."I suppose there is that First Amendment that gets in the way of me stopping it."
"Toshaban"
is Japanese--and now Laotian--for ditto, a useful
printing
technology for schools, and especially so in areas without electricity.
[Thank you, Cat.]
An analysis of
John Adams, and what
it means that he's suddenly popular. I knew about the Alien and Sedition
Acts, but not that Adams supported a titled aristocracy or life tenure for
senators.
While his fellow Americans thrilled to the democratic, egalitarian message of Paine's Common Sense, Adams sat down to write a rebuttal....Pasley argues that it's not accidental that, while previous generations that knew what Adams did and believed in rated him low, he's now being promoted as a hero.while he usually seemed willing to leave his aristocracy "natural," elective, and relatively meritocratic, the last of his "Discourses on Davila" (the newspaper essay series that precipitated the break with Thomas Jefferson), opined that "hereditary succession was attended with fewer evils than frequent elections."
Especially among our political, business, and media elites, genuine feeling for democracy seems to have ebbed very low, while comfort levels with autocracy, inequality, and concentrated power seem to be rather high....During the 2000 election crisis, it seemed that media commentators and citizens who were genuinely alarmed at the possibility of the people's will not being done were drowned out by throngs who just wanted a decision made, to see an "endgame," as the appropriately dynastic buzzword had it.[Thanks, once again, to Red Rock Eaters]
Archeologists have excavated
stone tools made by
chimpanzees. The tools, used for cracking nuts, include hammer stones and
flakes. The site is not yet dated, and the tools are simpler than
those our ancestors made--but they are tools.
NOAA
is working on
five-day
hurricane forecasts. This is year 2, and
Statistics from the first year of the experiment indicate, if implemented, the five-day forecast will be more accurate than the three-day forecast when it was introduced in the 1960s.Many people and organizations can use this--and we now understand hurricanes well enough to do it.
Remember Angola? The U.S. government
lied
to us about why we were there, and who our allies were.
South Africa was a convenient ally, but not a politically appealing
one, in 1975--so Kissinger claimed the Cubans had gotten there first.
Today, some malcontents refuse to believe every pronouncement the government makes about the war on terrorism. It's not that we think that the attacks against America should go unpunished; we want to be sure that we are being told the truth about our behavior, our aims and our allies....This has been a war of shifting goals and slippery rationales. We are making it up as we go along, but we are pretending that we have a master plan. God knows which statements will turn out to be lies when all the documents are released.
Love your country, by all means -- love, but verify.
The alternative is to be doing this all over again in 2026, those of us who live that long.
Copyright 2002 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page or my online journal.