While the slaughter continues in Iraq, the United States has its sights set on the real prize: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
"Between April of 2003 and November 2004, the US, UK and Israel will accelerate instability operations in Iran and engage in global disinformation campaigns to belittle the political and military leadership there."
In a case of a physics education gone wonderfully applied, this 33-year old guy set out to deliberately answer every question on the SATs incorrectly. He succeeded on the verbal portion, but answered two questions correctly in the math section.
"Ugh, I have failed to achieve total failure! That is pathetic. But somehow this seems like a fitting outcome -- and it is a wide-open invitation for competition.
In a case of a physics education gone wonderfully applied, this 33-year old guy set out to deliberately answer every question on the SATs incorrectly. He succeeded on the verbal portion, but answered two questions correctly in the math section.
"Ugh, I have failed to achieve total failure! That is pathetic. But somehow this seems like a fitting outcome -- and it is a wide-open invitation for competition.
A bongo stylist, all aglow
Induced Western Avenue's woe
The trance drumming bleated
A pulse that repeated
Gutta cavat lapidem, non vi sed saepe cadendo.
Cyclic adenosine monophosphate ("cyclic-A" to its many admirers) is a good example. I can't begin to count the number of important pathways that use cyclic A - dozens, hundreds, more? And most of these are going on at the same time. The stuff is being generated, recognized, and degraded in very tight and specific patterns. Coming in med-chem style and flooding the cell with a close mimic of cyclic A would be an addled idea indeed. You'd be hitting the brakes, the gas, the horn, all the turn signals and trying to play six different songs on the radio simultaneously. And into the nearest tree you'd go. We can play the cyclic-A game, up to a point, but not that way.
"I must confess, sir, I held you in very low regard. I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt. I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization."
is an amazing look at master Orwell's work by Thomas Pynchon, circa 2003. I find it unfathomable that with the diverse warnings that we were given from all quarters (Huxley, Ghandi, Einstein, Beatles...), that we fell.
"Every day public opinion is the target of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of which is benevolently termed "spin," as if it were no more harmful than a ride on a merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same time - it seems a condition of political thought in a modern superstate to be permanently of at least two minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain there, preferably forever."
"Life is not easy for any of us.
But what of that? We must have perseverance and, above all,
confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something,
and that this something, at whatever cost, must be attained."
- Marie Curie
WASHINGTON POST STYLE has a contest in which readers submit instructions for doing various things, their choice, as written by famous authors. Jeff Brechlin of Potomac Falls recently won for the following, for wonderfully obvious reasons:
The Hokey Pokey (as written by W. Shakespeare)
O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heavens yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.
The Hoke, the poke -- banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, 'tis what it's all about.
I've never liked the term "computer science." The main reason I don't like it is that there's no such thing. Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia. At one end you have people who are really mathematicians, but call what they're doing computer science so they can get DARPA grants. In the middle you have people working on something like the natural history of computers-- studying the behavior of algorithms for routing data through networks, for example. And then at the other extreme you have the hackers, who are trying to write interesting software, and for whom computers are just a medium of expression, as concrete is for architects or paint for painters. It's as if mathematicians, physicists, and architects all had to be in the same department.
We are drifting rudderless toward disaster. Time is running out.
"George Bush's "gut," fed by the far-right ideologues that surround him, has led the American public into a kind of "alternative universe," detached from the reality which we in fact inhabit. It is a universe in which there is no global warming and pollution has no harmful effects, a reality in which all social problems can be solved by the free market, and economic growth is best accomplished by starving social services and education, and giving still more money to the very wealthy. And, it is a universe in which one super-power can establish "hegemony" over all the nations of the earth and expropriate their resources, whereupon the peoples thereof will simply be grateful to that power for "establishing order," bringing "democracy," and vanquishing the 'evil-doers." It is a universe comprehended by "gut instinct" unconfounded by science, practical experience, or even common sense; a universe without unintended consequences, or unfortunate side effects.
It is, of course, a fantasyland - not remotely like the world we inhabit."
From the Straight Dope, answers to the Mad Hatter's riddle, "Why is a raven like a writing desk?"
* Because the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes. (Puzzle maven Sam Loyd, 1914)
* Because Poe wrote on both. (Loyd again)
* Because there is a B in both and an N in neither. (Get it? Aldous Huxley, 1928)
* Because it slopes with a flap. (Cyril Pearson, undated)
Thanks to Diana of Gotham and the Thurana cell phone, Where is Raed? is back. What living in Baghdad during an invasion feels like. Welcome back, Salam, glad you, Raed and G and your families lived through it.
posted by Gary Williams at 3:44 PM
| link |
via Christianity Today Magazine
Will Isidore Be Patron Saint of the Internet? Pope John Paul Will Decide
A man of wide knowledge, Isidore, one of the church's leading intellectuals, was born sometime between 560 and 570, eventually becoming bishop of Seville, in Spain. His name was well known to scholars of the medieval church. But most contemporary Catholics were unaware of Isidore until 1999, when he was named as a possible patron saint for the Internet.
The proposal was made by an organization called Internet Observation Services (SOI) after it was asked by the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications to suggest a saint who could serve as guide and protector to millions of computer operators and "cybernauts"—addicts of the Internet—around the world.
SOI declared that Isidore was the most suitable saint for the role. For many centuries, he was considered as a man ahead of his time. He wrote a form of dictionary, called Etymologies, with a structure similar to what is now called a database. Like the World Wide Web, Etymologies put at the disposal of its readers massive amounts of knowledge. An encyclopedia in 20 volumes, it contained information on the seven liberal arts, and subjects such as medicine, agriculture, architecture, the books and offices of the church, and other religious subjects. It was an extremely popular reference work.
Wincrypt enables users to encrypt and decrypt sensitive files and email attachments so that they are totally unreadable to unauthorised readers.
Wincrypt Encrypted Files use 256 bit AES encryption which is one of the most secure forms of encryption available on the market today. This combined with it's advanced usability features makes Wincrypt one of the most comprehensive yet simple to use encryption utilities available.
A swelling throng of Internet users such as Ewalt are being victimized by so-called spyware — software that gets installed over the Web without the user's awareness of what it does.
Spyware can herd users to porn and gambling Web pages, track where users go on the Internet, trigger a deluge of pop-up ads and slow PC performance.
"It's extremely aggressive and abusive. And the average Internet user has not a clue on how to protect himself or undo the damage," says Eric Howes, an English instructor and privacy advocate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Howes has cataloged spyware for three years. His data show 493 types lurking on 1,317 Web sites, up from 56 types on 125 Web sites a year ago.
I have no intention of mollifying fear (aside from being a great motivator, fear is also a sane response to untenable situations), no desire to protect delicate sensibilties (every available sense must be honed to sharp attention else the connotation be usurped), and I most certainly have no advice to give (conscience resides perfectly within every individual).
"I like to say that the essence of the Buddha's teaching
can be found in two sayings: If possible, you should help others.
If that is not possible, at least you should do no harm."
- the Dalai Lama
The agency says the three countries furthest from keeping to their share of the overall target are Spain, Portugal and Ireland: its emissions in 2001 were 31% higher than in 1990.
Luxembourg showed the biggest reduction of all, cutting emissions by 44% between 1990 and 2001.
It is on course to keep its Kyoto promise, as are Germany, Sweden and the UK. France looks at present likely to fail by a very narrow margin.
The prominent UK global warming sceptic Professor Philip Stott commented: "One of the most galling things about the whole climate change debate has been European duplicity.
"While lecturing everybody else, especially America, on the morality of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it has been abundantly clear from the start that most European countries didn't have a snowflake in hell's chance of meeting their own Kyoto targets."
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Researchers around the world are racing to patent the SARS virus and its genetic material, rekindling criticism of laws that allow people to claim intellectual property rights on living things.
Several biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, the U.S. government and researchers in Canada and Hong Kong have filed SARS-related patent applications in recent weeks, claiming ownership of everything from bits of genetic material to the virus itself.
A Spy Turned Artist Found a Fugitive, Then Found His Subject
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Peter Zvi Malkin, in his Lower East Side studioHe will forever be known as the man who captured Adolf Eichmann. But more than 40 years after he snatched that fugitive Nazi off a street in Argentina to face judgment in Jerusalem for directing the mass murder of Jews, Peter Zvi Malkin is making a new mark as the man who captured Eichmann on paper.
As an artist Mr. Malkin long used his gift for drawing and painting as a cover for his operations for the Israeli secret services, including his 1960 Mossad mission to kidnap Eichmann. Now his work has been collected in a two-volume set of images that memorialize his time in Argentina, family members he lost to the Holocaust and a rainbow world of vibrant humanity.
"For me painting is like an operation," he said, speaking of spy work. "The most difficult thing is the idea."
Treasury Is Moving to Make All Sales of Saving Bonds Online
By JONATHAN FUERBRINGER
The Treasury announced yesterday that it would end the sale of United States savings bonds in paper form after 2004 and require all purchases to be made online.
The Treasury will also encourage, but not require, current holders to convert existing paper bonds into a book-entry or Internet account form.
The announcement came as the Treasury began the sale of EE savings bonds over the Internet through TreasuryDirect, at www .treasurydirect.gov.
Here is how SARS the acronym came about. Three worried officials of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, needed a name for a virus causing sudden deaths in China. The three were Denis Aitken, deputy director general; David Heymann, director of the Communicable Diseases Section; and Richard Thompson, its communications officer. (Presumably, he answers the phone with ''Communicable communications here.'')
''We wanted a name that would not stigmatize a location,'' Thompson says, ''such as 'the Hanoi Disease.' We first thought of A.P.W.D., or Atypical Pneumonia Without Diagnosis, and I'm glad we dropped that. Then we simply described the disease in another way, and it was in front of us -- Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS.''
But what did they see as the difference between severe and acute?
''I asked this question, too, when we came up with the name. In medicine, severe is 'grave' and acute means 'suddenly.' This respiratory syndrome caused great harm (severe) and had a rapid onset (acute). Later, when we had conclusive evidence that a new coronavirus is the cause of the disease, we named it the SARS virus.''
As the use of computers, the Internet, and Internet technology becomes more pervasive in society, psychopathological thought content characterized by the incorporation of the Internet into delusions and hallucinations will become increasingly common. Michael T. Compton, MD, from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine and Grady Memorial Hospital, Atlanta, GA discusses 3 case vignettes involving Internet delusions in an article from the Southern Medical Journal recently published on Medscape Psychiatry. According to the author, "this would seem to indicate that delusions incorporating ideas about the Internet are becoming increasingly common. In addition to this remarkable prevalence of delusions with Internet themes, there are several other points of interest. The Internet delusions presented tended to have themes involving being controlled, having one's private life broadcast to others, and being recorded, tracked, and persecuted."
Also, in a letter to the editor of the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, the author pointed out that "in our recent information-oriented society, will the Internet take the place of televisions in delusions? Delusions regarding the Internet have been reported." They discussed the case of a patient with a schizoaffective disorder and a delusion involving the Internet.
The case vignettes described above are interesting clinical reading and a reminder to include questions about technology in our mental status exams.
Understanding bone metabolism is a very important area of research today. Here is another in a long series of papers that discovers a link between a gene and osteoporosis. This one looks particularly interesting because it is the first one to show a genetic reason for stem cells, the cells that are required to form bone-making cells, to be less plentiful in aged animals. If so, stem cell research could lead to a treatment. Stay tuned.
There's an interesting and potentially very important paper in the April 18th issue of Science (p. 486.) If it pans out, this could lead to simultaneous breakthroughs against a list of terrible diseases. At the very least, it's provided a big step forward in understanding them. This should be getting more press than it is, frankly.
A team from UC-Irvine has been studying amyloid proteins, a class that causes all sorts of trouble. Perhaps the most famous amyloid is one that has long been suspected as the cause of Alzheimer's disease. The brains of Alzheimer's patients always show plaques of precipitated protein, surrounded by dying neurons. The protein always beta-amyloid, 42 amino acids long in most cases, which is cut out of a larger protein called APP (amyloid precursor protein.) Vast amounts of effort have gone into finding out which enzymes do the cutting, where they are, why they do it, and so on. What's for sure is that APP itself is found all over the body, in places where beta-amyloid never shows up, so it's something peculiar to the brain.
Most of the action was in bordering counties; at stately Arcturus manor, the only practical effect was a repeated scramble to locate pets and shut computers down when the tornado sirens went off, which they did three times in the space of two hours. We did get hailed on a couple of times, but it was the usual pea-to-marble-sized stuff.
UPDATE: Nice historical perspective here. Notice the trend toward lower death tolls and -- for those of us who remember several of the later events -- faster recovery times, in spite of greatly increased population and infrastructure.
"But where is the point to life?
Where is the point to love? Where, if it comes to the point,
is the point to a bunch of violets? There is no point.
Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is
a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point
is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love,
flower and fade, and follow the natural curve,
which flows on, pointless."
- D.H. Lawrence
"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."
From the beginning, President Bush has been far more interested in exploiting the public lands for commercial purposes than in protecting their environmental values. On matters ranging from snowmobiles in Yellowstone to roadless areas in the national forests, his administration has tried steadily to chip away at safeguards put in place by the Clinton administration — largely in an effort to help the oil, gas, timber and mining industries, and often in cavalier disregard for environmental reviews mandated by law. Now comes another devastating blow: The revelation that his Department of the Interior is no longer interested in recommending any of the millions of acres under its jurisdiction for permanent wilderness protection.
The new policy has still not caused much of a stir. Like most of the bad environmental news emanating from this administration, it emerged from the shadows late on a Friday evening. There was no formal announcement — just a few letters to interested senators from Gale Norton describing a legal settlement she had reached earlier that day with the state of Utah. But a close reading of that deal showed it to be a blockbuster — a fundamental reinterpretation of environmental law, and a reversal of four decades of federal wilderness policy.
Now call me a cynic. $15 billion for HIV. Sounds very very good. But read the small print. Over five years. And mostly for drugs produced by the Republican party’s most generous donors – the drug companies. In other words, $3 billion a year for Pfizer and other friends of George. They get to expand the lucrative HIV market and guarantee that pesky generic manufacturers are kept completely out of the picture. No wonder the drug company lobbyists are being lavishly funded to promote this plan.
In a bid to encourage corporations to back the AIDS projects, the White House recently sent Barry Jackson from Bush's political shop and Joseph O'Neill, director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, to a meeting of the Corporate Task Force on AIDS, said people who attended.
The task force is run, in part, by former Bush campaign aide Terry Holt and headquartered at the Dutko Group, a Washington lobbying firm. Bristol-Myers, Abbott, Pfizer and several other corporations paid $15,000 each to underwrite what Holt called a "shoe leather" lobbying campaign to enact the Bush bill. Scott Hatch, a GOP lobbyist who works for U2 lead singer Bono, a rock star and AIDS activist, is also working on the project, GOP aides said.
At Heathrow Airport, a 300-foot long red carpet stretches out to Air Force One and Mr. Bush strides to a warm but dignified hand shake from Queen Elizabeth II.
They ride in a silver 1934 Bentley limousine to the edge of central
London where they then board an open 17th century coach pulled by six magnificent white matching horses. They ride toward Buckingham Palace, each looking sideways and waving to the thousands of cheering Britons.
So far everything is going well.
Suddenly the right rear horse lets fly with the most horrendous, earth-rending, eye-smarting blast of flatulence ever heard in the British Empire and so powerful that it shakes the coach. Uncomfortable, but under control, the two Dignitaries of State do their best to ignore the incident, but, embarrassed, the Queen decides it's impossible to ignore it.
"Mr. President, please accept my regrets. I'm sure you understand that there are some things not even a Queen can control." Ever the Texas gentleman, the President replies, "Your Majesty, please don't give the matter another thought. You know, if you hadn't said something, I would have thought it was one of the horses!"
Most genetic problems that we will be dealing with over the next generation will be ones in which the environment plays a key part. It is the interaction of genes and environment, nature AND nurture, that really determines who we are. Recent work indicates that cloned animals have as much variation in appearance and behavior as non-related animals.
There are several variants of the gene klotho. In a recent study, one of the more common forms, found in a least 1 copy in 25% of humans, appears to be very important in the development of early atherschlerosis. About 15% of the people in the study with 2 good copies had undetected atherosclerosis. For those with 2 "bad"copies, this rose to 40%. Smokers faired even worse.
Quantum Tea
