ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
"There is no better place to shop and
buy real
evidence than on EBay." It's a small market, but a growing one, especially
in asbestos liability cases: much of it is old product manuals, but this
is also where lawyers go to find a hairdryer just like the one their client
discarded 20 years ago.
it's hard to believe anyone spends more time--or money--at this form of discovery than Mark Lanier. The Texas lawyer paid $1,025 recently to win a 47-year-old pack of sealed cigarettes believed to have asbestos filters. The 1955 Kent Micronites may become Exhibit A in litigation he is preparing on behalf of more than 20 clients who have asbestos-related cancer and who smoked the brand....Lanier's most prized EBay purchase is a 1958 draft report of an asbestos industry-commissioned study that linked asbestos to cancer. Only 63 copies of the draft were prepared, stamped "restricted" and numbered, one through 63, so that they could be accounted for as they were circulated for industry review.
Each copy was to be returned and destroyed. When the study was published a year later, it said the results showed that asbestos does not cause cancer, Lanier said. The report was later shown to have been a lie when the test results came to light and insiders testified to the falsification of the final report.
But everyone believed that all 63 draft reports had been destroyed until a couple of years ago when Lanier spotted one while surfing EBay auctions. He eagerly paid more than $3,000 to obtain it.
We're wandering into "what I did
last night" territory here, but I promised: here are names and URLs for the other people
who actually ventured out in the heat for the uptown half of the NYC Blogger "Meetup":
Anna Airoldi: Red Jacaranda
Alex Shaffer: Mr. Nosuch
Conny Alt
Rickey Yaneza
Ursula Mills: NY Yoga Girl
Josh Newman: Cyan Pictures
Tony Hightower: The Evil Twin Theory
Some of these may not be "worksafe"; even if I checked them now, they might change before you saw this.
If you're small enough, and quick enough,
you
can beat entropy. Small enough is on a quantum scale, and quick enough in this
experiment is a tenth of a second: in carefully set up conditions of this scale,
entropy decreased.
The scientists say their finding could be important for the emerging science of nanotechnology. Researchers envisage a time when tiny machines no more than a few billionths of a metre across surge though our bodies to deliver drugs and destroy disease-causing pathogens.This research means that on the very small scales of space and time such machines may not work the way we expect them to.
Essentially, the smaller a machine is, the greater the chance that it will run backwards. It could be extremely difficult to control.
The use of
chocolate,
as a beverage and a seasoning, goes back at least 2,600 years. The new results, from
Belize, push the record back by a millennium.
In response to criticism, the Justice Department
says it's
scaling
down the "TIPS" program so that the anonymous volunteers will only report
suspicious activity in public places. This doesn't seem practical or
realistic:
*ring* *ring*
--"TIPS line, good morning."
++"I think the people at #3 are terrorists"
--"What did you see?"
++"I heard a suspicious conversation"
--"Yes?"
++<details>
--"Now we're not allowed to record this if it was in private. Where were they?"
++"In the front room."
--"Ah, right, in front of their house. Thank you"
Robert Scheer reviews
Dick
Cheney's dubious business career:
Vice President Dick Cheney has spent most of the past year in hiding, ostensibly from terrorists, but increasingly it seems obvious that it is Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the media and the public he fears. And for good reason: Cheney's business behavior could serve as a textbook case of much of what's wrong with the way corporate CEOs have come to play the game of business.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the US Department of Justice
plans to recruit
millions of
informants to spy on other Americans.
The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police. The program would use a minimum of 4 per cent of Americans to report "suspicious activity".The discussion thread on BoingBoing suggests that their source for this is a conspiracy theorist; I find this less reassuring than I would have a year ago.
What
did the (p)resident know, and when did he know it?
Richard Cohen points out
that, since
not one
member of Congress, regardless of their own beliefs, was willing to publicly
object to "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, it's unrealistic to claim that
an eight-year-old won't feel pressured to say it.
[Via the Sideshow]
The Ontario
Supreme Court has ruled that it is a
violation
of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms for the provincial
government to refuse to register same-sex marriages.
A lower court in British Columbia ruled the other way, and that case is being appealed; ultimately, this will probably end up at the Canadian Supreme Court, since marriage is considered a federal rather than provincial matter.
The human fossil tree is getting
even more
complicated: Sahelanthropus tchadensis is seven million
years old, from a part of Africa where no human ancestors had been
found, and has a mix of chimp-like and ape-like features.
If Toumai is a human ancestor, the status of Australopithecus
is murkier; if it's both a human and a chimp ancestor, the
molecular
clock for that divergence is wrong.
Meanwhile, last week, a relatively small, primitive-looking skull was announced from Georgia: at 1.5 million years old, this is an older, simpler hominid than had been expected outside Africa.
Since the Inwood
Park page is way overdue for updating, here's an
eagle cam.
Two fledged bald eagles so far, the other two are too young to leave the
hacking box. Yes, that camera is in Manhattan. This link evades lots of
annoying Javascript and such, so you'll have to refresh by hand.
Paging an undisclosed location: Cheney made a
promotional
video for Arthur Andersen, and is about to be sued for deliberately
inflating the value of Halliburton shares.
White rhinos use the
buddy system: they'll
rarely enter a strange area unless they have a companion that knows its way around.
The rise in obesity in the United States has taken place at the same time
as the push for low-fat diets. What if
this isn't
a coincidence? Some doctors are considering the possibility that just
about everything they know--and have been promoting--about health, diet, and
weight loss is wrong.
[Some researchers] say that low-fat weight-loss diets have proved in clinical trials and real life to be dismal failures, and that on top of it all, the percentage of fat in the American diet has been decreasing for two decades. Our cholesterol levels have been declining, and we have been smoking less, and yet the incidence of heart disease has not declined as would be expected. ''That is very disconcerting,'' Willett says. ''It suggests that something else bad is happening.''Much of the alternative theory is based on insulin metabolism.
It's easy to blame lack of exercise--but there's no evidence for this. Quite the opposite: the increase in both average weight and diabetes has paralleled the growth of recreational exercise. Taubes has one eye on the low-fat-food industry, pointing out that it's easier and more profitable to push a new "diet" snack than to get people to buy apples from you instead of your competitors.
While the author points out some flawed assumptions--like doctors assuming that because a cholesterol-lowering drug was good for heart patients, a low-fat diet would be--he still assumes that thinness is per se healthy.
Air
conditioning has been around for a century, during which it has reshaped
architecture, the movie industry, and the South.
Catching all the big fish, and leaving only small ones to breed,
selects for smaller
fish, because size isn't just a function of whether the fish is mature: it's
partly genetic. In a lab experiment, researchers shrank their experimental fish
to one-third of the original size in only four generations. They also tried letting
only the largest breed--that approach doubled the size of the fish in the same four
generations.
Perhaps more important for commercial fisheries, the smaller-fish population also had lower total productivity.
Blowing my own horn:
The Guardian includes YAWL on its
list of Weblogs
it likes, under "personal, non-UK".
Guardian readers, welcome!
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.
