MemeMachineGo!

Last year, Disinfo posted or April Fool's Day about being acquired by AOL (apparently deleted -- I don't see it in their archives.) This year, there were more AOL acquisition pranks. It's officially not funny anymore. You've got a whole year -- think of something else.

Met4filter, Metafilter as acquired by Kuro5hin, now that's cool. And frankly I prefer the format.

BoingBoing has posted nothing today. I suspect them of playing the minimalist prank of pretending to have nothing to say. If so, very cool. If not, I'll pretend it's so, because I like my version better.

Today was the first day since starting to blog that I haven't had new content in the morning. It annoyed me.

We're not getting enough sleep, and we're paying the price.

The National Sleep Foundation Poll, released today, finds that people say they're much or somewhat more likely to make mistakes, get impatient or aggravated when waiting, or get upset with their children or others when they haven't gotten enough sleep.

SF Gate's inane headline is "Sleep habits leave Americans tubby, grouchy," as one fourth of people polled said they were more likely to overeat when they hadn't gotten enough sleep. Way to sensationalize, folks. Couldn't you have worked a celebrity in? Also, adults in the Western U.S. were more likely to get 8 hours of sleep on weekdays than those in the rest of the country -- secrets of the mellow revealed.

Stanley Coren covered some similar territory in Sleep Thieves.

As a society we are all chronically sleep deprived. For example, what do the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the near melt down at Three Mile Island, the environmentally disastrous oil spill by the Exxon Valdez, and the loss of the NASA space shuttle Challenger all have in common? They were all caused by people who were making mistakes because they had had too little sleep. Coren not only reviews the scientific information about sleep in a lively and interesting way, but also presents some first hand interviews with people whose jobs or life style forces them to lose sleep.

So make the world a better place. Get enough sleep tonight.

Typecasting: The Use (and Misuse) of Period Typography in Movies does a wonderful analysis of typography in movies, nitpicking at anachronisms and inconsistencies.

[Chocolat] is set in a small town in provincial France, mid-1950s. About halfway through the film, the town's mayor puts up notices forbidding anyone to eat anything but bread and weak tea during Lent (which of course coincides with the opening of the new chocolaterie). I almost laughed when they showed a close-up of the notice. The headline was set in ITC Benguiat, a typeface which debuted in 1978 and was mainly popular in the '80s.

Too cool.

(Via Metafilter)

More free books: New York Times article on Baltimore's The Book Thing.

"I figure we'll give away 10,000 books this weekend," he said confidently, after putting out simple sidewalk sandwich-board signs announcing, "Free Books."

Mr. Wattenberg is the founder and proprietor of the Book Thing, a makeshift, backdoor operation that has become an institution in the last six years for giving away hundreds of thousands of books on the sole condition that they are presented free to browsers and must stay that way.

And one man has chosen to privately tithe to the needy.

These are the people who taught me what it is really to care for others, the people who helped me to understand the joy of giving. I will be forever grateful to them for that lesson.

It is in honor of these people that I have decided to create and fund Modest Needs, a website dedicated to those people who find themselves faced with unexpected expenses that, though relatively minor, threaten to stretch their budgets to the very limit. Beginning 1 April 2002, I will be distributing 10% of my monthly income to assist people who find themselves in that position.

(Thanks Lisa, and via Metafilter, respectively)

Proximitron 4.2 was released 3/17. It's a proxy web server that runs locally, sitting between the Web and your browser, and offers you a hell of a lot more control than your browser's settings alone do, making for faster, more secure, and more fun websurfing. And, yes, that can include blocking ads (though its abilities go far beyond that.)

Unethical? Short-sighted and stabbing websites dependent on ad revenue in the back? Maybe. I prefer to consider it practical motivation for websites and advertisers to work together to deliver ads in such a way that browsing the web doesn't suck. If requesting and viewing the ads didn't make a page take so much longer to load, interfere with reading the page because of a garish flashing ad next to a narrow text column, and compromise my privacy through the advertisers' cookies, I wouldn't be motivated to block them.

And it's got the coolest registration requirement I've ever heard of: it's ShonenWare. You can consider yourself registered if you buy a Shonen Knife album.

Updated 8/18/2002: This is consistently my most popular entry ever — it's #2 on Google for 'Proximitron.' Which is a typo. And the link above is dead. You want Proxomitron.

Hello, and welcome to the eighth stop on the "Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard" virtual book tour, the virtual book tour that refuses to die, no matter how many times I hit it in the head with a shovel. My name is Greg Knauss and I clearly have no idea when to end a joke.

During this tour, many people have asked me why they should spend six of their hard-earned dollars on a collection of stories that has already appeared on the Web, at An Entirely Other Day. Good question! I always answer: "Oh, just buy the damned thing, for Pete's sake. Put me out of my misery. Please. For the love of God, please. I just want to go home." And then there's a lot of crying and moaning and clutching at lapels.

But then I also say, "Reference." Because of all the books that tell adorable stories about children -- "Madeline," for instance, or "Lord of the Flies" -- "Rainy Day Fun" is the only one that will teach you how to get a child to punch himself in the face.

And, now, today's reading:

When I walk in the front door, Joanne, my loving wife, rushes to greet me after a hard day at work.

"Here," she says, handing Mikey to me. "Just in time."

Mike looks up at me and blows bubbles with his spit. He stinks to high heaven. The boy needs a change.

So I head upstairs and lay him out on the changing table and unbutton his pants and yank off his diaper and suddenly can't stop laughing.

"What?" Joanne yells from the bottom of the stairs. "What's funny?"

"I just remembered," I say. "Mike had raisin bread for breakfast."

There's a pause.

"Ew," she says. And then: "Dinner is going to be about half-an-hour late while I try to get that image out of my head."

Geoffrey Long asks: Do you have any plans to take your publication to other media? (Indie filmmakers take note!)

Indie filmmakers have taken note, Geoffrey, assuming your definition of "indie" means people with very patient wives. Dylan Northrup -- armed with such a wife, an even more patient child and a conveniently befouled diaper -- has made a short film of the reading above, available at here.

If you have any questions about "Rainy Day Fun" that you'd like answered, please mail them to greg@eod.com and I'll edit them until they make me look good. And be sure to join us tomorrow when this shambling corpse of a book tour pulls into Downeast. See you there!

My friend Ken Wharton just received a special citation from the Philip K. Dick Award Committee for his excellent novel, Divine Intervention. The PKD award is given annually for the years' best sf book published originally in paperback. For those of you in the SF Bay Area, Ken'll be reading at Dark Carnival in Berkeley this Sunday, 4/7 at 2, something you wouldn't know from reading Ken's website. Hey, Ken! You're a better writer than you are a publicist!

A new report says the worlds' forests are further gone and disappearing faster than previously thought.

"As we examined what we thought were still vast, untouched stretches of intact forests in the world, we came to the conclusion that they are fast becoming a myth," WRI president Jonathan Lash said.

We've mapped about half the world's forests in detail and we're finding that the closer we look, the less intact old growth and primary forest we're finding," said Mr Bryant.

Meanwhile, the Wood Flooring Manufacturing Association is placing Truax in classrooms.

I realized that Guardbark did not want to know
How the Earth keeps on changing, so I spoke kind of slow.
"With wildfires and wind, insects and disease,
Nature, herself, renews stands of old trees.

I looked at the Guardbark. His mouth turned to gristle.
His eyes shot some darts. His nose whirred a whistle.
"But nature is patient and willing to wait.
I want old trees NOW.
The wait's what I hate!"

From Locus Online's April 1 letters page:

OK, here?s the idea. The Left Behind series is about what happens after the Rapture, right, when all the righteous get taken up? And everyone who sticks around gets to have nifty adventures? Well, check this out. In my series, 10 volumes outlined already, all the righteous get taken up, and in their absence the rest of us enact fair tax laws, pass constitutional amendments guaranteeing the rights of women, gays and lesbians, and craft a sane, non-apocalyptic Middle East policy. Plus we get, like, all their cars and stuff. I call it the Left Alone series. I pitched it to Tyndale House, but Jeez Louise, I won?t repeat what they said, and them Christians.

James Morrow

We have a new Surgeon General, Richard Carmona.

Bush said he has asked Carmona to focus on several public health initiatives as surgeon general, ranging from prevention of disease through healthier living to reducing alcohol and drug abuse.

Considering how many corporate interests doing so would counter, I wish him the best of luck.

And why do we have a new Surgeon General? Well, Carmona's predecessor, David Satcher, got caught saying sensible things about sex and, naturally, conservatives were outraged.

He says there is no valid scientific evidence that one's sexual orientation can be changed and details the consequences of harassment on the mental health of gays and lesbians.

[...] Abstinence is the only certain way to prevent pregnancy and the spread of disease, the report says, and even properly used condoms do not prevent the spread of all sexually transmitted diseases. But the report finds no evidence that "abstinence-only" programs are effective, saying more research is needed.

You may recall that Satcher was appointed in the wake of the outrage over Jocelyn Elders' response to a question about masturbation: "I believe masturbation is a natural part of human sexuality, something that might even be taught."

Career longevity advice for Dr. Carmona: stick to saying nothing practical about sex and you'll do just fine.

If you, like me, are a US taxpayer struggling to get all his financial records in order, then you might be moved by this heartwarming tale: Tax Freedom -- A Personal Odyssey.

This Christian Science Monitor article discusses Cradle to Cradle, a new book promoting the very sensible idea that we design things differently, anticipating eventually disposing of them through recycling or composting.

"If humans are truly going to prosper, we will have to learn to imitate nature's highly effective cradle-to-cradle system of nutrient flow and metabolism, in which the very concept of 'waste' does not exist. To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things – products, packaging and systems – from the very beginning on the assumption that waste does not exist."

Packaging, they remind us, makes up 50 percent of garbage. Shampoo bottles, yogurt containers, and candy wrappers could be made of material that would biodegrade in the compost heap, becoming fertile soil. Products themselves should be reengineered so that everything that we buy, wear, and use can be either composted or disassembled for easy manufacture into new products.

Someday the human race is going to want all these resources we're dumping in landfills, and with all the toxins and methane around, retrieving them is going to be as dangerous a job as mining has ever been. Our descendants would be grateful for sound planning now. Okay, no they wouldn't, the damned ingrates, but they'll surely be complaining about what we're doing now if we don't change it.

Robert B. Watson is the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and, as is the consensus among scientists, recognizes that greenhouse gas emissions have been demonstrated to be changing the climate. So, of course, the Bush administration has withdrawn its support of him.

So those who say I'm an advocate don't want to hear the message that indeed the earth is warming; that most of the warming of the last 50 years is attributable to human activities; that carbon dioxide is the key human-induced greenhouse gas and that most of it comes from fossil fuels. There are some people who clearly don't want to hear that message, but that is the message of the IPCC, and it's obviously the message I give when I speak. I also talk about the uncertainties as well, but if that's advocacy, then by that definition, I'm guilty.

A woman is eight weeks pregnant with a clone

A University of Connecticut physics professor plans to build and test a time machine.

If his idea pans out, won't there be a host of potential paradoxes, such as time travelers killing their parents and making it impossible for them to exist? No, he says, explaining that those travelers would continue to exist in a ''parallel universe.''

And what about the ethics of changing history?

There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes.

''Any technology has a potential nefarious side to it,'' he says. ''But I don't think there's a way to stop it. We as a species have always reached out. We've been doing that since the caves. I say let's make it so that we better reality. I think we can bravely do that.''

Just give me immortality, infinite energy, a working star drive, terraforming, and nanotechnology, and I'll be just about satisfied.

(Both of these shamelessly lifted from New World Disorder, which is just rockin' the Casbah)

The Sucks-Rules-O-Meter can't be disputed.

There was an uproar among vegetarians and Hindus last year when it was revealed that McDonald's fries, which they prominently advertised as fried in 100% vegetable oil, were laced with beef fat. Hindu protesters tore apart one McDonald's in India. (As nearly as I can tell, McDonald's is maintaining that they really weren't using beef fat in India, and that no one has proven otherwise, but obviously many Indian Hindus didn't believe them.) In the U.S., there was a class-action lawsuit against McDonald's on behalf of Hindus and vegetarians.

And last month, McDonald's settled.

Fast food behemoth McDonald's has agreed to publicly apologise to "Hindus, vegetarians and others" for failing to disclose the use of animal products in foods it identified as vegetarian.

The company will also donate $10 million to concerns supported by these groups as part of a settlement in a class-action lawsuit initiated by Seattle-based Indian-American attorney Harish Bharti.

Starting next month, pending court approval, the fast food giant will insert advertisements in newspapers apologising for its mistake.

"We acknowledge that, upon our switch to vegetable oil in the early 1990s for the purpose of reducing cholesterol, mistakes were made in communicating to the public and customers about the ingredients in our French fries and hash browns. Those mistakes included instances in which French fries and hash browns sold at US restaurants were improperly identified as vegetarian," the ads will say.

So those ads might start appearing about now. Strangely, I see no reference to any of this on the McDonald's website.

Yesterday's Schism Matrix (page down to the 4/5 entry at the bottom) has a great collection of links on the Burgess Shale critters, some of the weirdest fauna we know about.

I just returned from the grand re-opening of the central branch of the Berkeley Public Library. This building has been closed for three and a half years, undergoing earthquake retrofitting and expansion. And it's gorgeous! There are some pictures here (digital artist's renderings... I can't readily find photos -- I'm going to have to start carrying my camera.)

The place was packed. The stacks were filled with hundreds of people. There were long lines of people with their arms full of books (and other media) at the circulation desk. And it was beautiful and I wanted to give everyone a hug.

Except for the unctuous guy at the automated checkout machine who had the same job as Sigourney Weaver's character in Galaxy Quest: repeating everything the computer said. "Put your card there." Dude, I'm checking out books. Incredibly enough, I can read.

Get rich quick by creating a fad diet

When choosing the menu for your fad diet you will need your list of items that they have at the grocery store. Using this list, you must follow these rules:

• Serving sizes must be an incredibly small portion of an item that must be bought in bulk. Best if this item is useless for everyday consumption or spoils quickly.
  • 1/8 of a pound of ground pork.
  • One 1/8" slice of watermellon.
  • 1/4 cup of puffed rice.
  • Two teaspoons of un-milled barley.
  • 1 teaspoon of dark corn syrup.
  • 1/4 plaintain.
• Items must be repulsive (this is what nutritionists call an appetite suppresant). For repulsive items you can kick up your diet if you allow people to eat tons of it.
  • As many brussel sprouts as you want, they are a hidden source of carageenen!
  • 6 cans of popeye creamed spinach.
  • 12 oz of braized goat liver.
  • On Thursday eat all of the boiled plaintains you want, stuff yourself.

Slate has this paean to the Dvorak keyboard layout, something I'd been planning to write for MemeMachineGo! myself, but the Slate article is pretty good, so I'll let it do most of the heavy lifting.

In short, Dvorak is simply better. I've been typing with it for a couple of years now. Yes, the transition took a couple of months and was annoying (my high school required a typing class; I was an excellent QWERTY touch typist.) Though all the typing speed records have been set with Dvorak keyboards, it's probably not the case that you'll notice a speed improvement in daily use.

What you will notice is greater comfort and less fatigue. Since becoming a Dvorak touch typist, I notice when tying a word conspicously involves fingers travelling from the home row. Noticing this with the QWERTY layout would be redundant: nearly every word involves such conspicous travel. To type 'the', I just depress my right middle, right index, and left middle fingers where they sit. In QWERTY, every character involves a reach.

It's easy to logically remap your keyboard in all modern operating systems. And if, like me, you never bother to label the keys or physically remap the keycaps, it becomes a security measure and a source of amusement whenever anyone else wants to do anything with your computer! There is much fuss about computer ergonomics; this is something you can do for free with your existing equipment that'll make a bigger difference than a lot of devices.

One thing I find interesting in talking about Dvorak is the violent reaction it inspires in some. Some people have used Dvorak to demonstrate the limitations of the Invisible Hand of the Market: something obviously superior lost out to something obviously inferior -- QWERTY wasn't even intended to make typing efficient or comfortable: its design goal, explicitly, was to prevent typewriter jams by slowing down the rate at which the physical keys hit the platen. It was designed to facilitate a machine's operation, not a human's use of a machine.

But there are others so dogmatically devoted to the infallibility of the Invisible Hand that this is an unconscionable heresy. In their reality tunnel, August Dvorak becomes an evil, twisted fraud faking his studies. Because, after all, QWERTY has won in the marketplace, therefore Dvorak must not be better. Any alternative is like saying pigs can fly and dogs live in trees.

I think this gets down to a fundamental and pervasive misunderstanding of Darwinism. A free market would be Darwinistic. But Darwinism is not, as is popularly believed, a meritocracy. And this rant has already gained too much momentum to halt, but would go beyond the scope of this entry so I'll give it its own.

Stephen Jay Gould's paraphrase of Darwin in Ever Since Darwin:

1. Organisms vary, and the variations are inherited by their offspring.
2. Organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive.
3. On average, offspring that vary most strongly in directions favored by the environment will survive and propagate. Variation will therefore accumulate in populations by natural selection.

With this in mind, notice that survival of the fittest has nothing to do with the better triumphing over the worse: it is a tautology. 'fittest' is defined as that which survives. In any environment of replicators featuring variation, selection and heredity, evolution just naturally occurs: traits for longevity, fidelity of reproduction, and fecundity will be passed on in greater proportion than the alternatives with each generation (what these traits are depend on the environment, which is subject to change -- one of the things that keeps things so interesting.) This has nothing to do with 'progress' in the sense of things getting 'better' (though there is a tendency toward greater complexity.)

Something I have to make clear: none of this operates for our benefit. It has nothing to do with making our lives better, or making us happier. It's just something that happens; something that has happened for all of the history of life -- a process we're stuck in the middle of.

If tomorrow a mutant superpeacock were born, that was stronger, faster, smarter than every other peacock in the world because he had no tail and thus had so much biological wherewithal to expend elsewhere, all those traits would die with him, because he couldn't get laid. Peahens have undergone selection to want to mate only with peacocks with impressive tails. Sexual selection is a powerful force, and once a snowball like "big tails good" starts rolling, it can pick up a lot of speed.

But mortality selection is powerful, too. Imagine a change in the environment that began to select against big-tailed peacocks -- say there was some new predator that could only find, or could only catch, or just plain preferred the taste of big-tailed peacocks. Suddenly the superpeacock would start to look awfully good in a last-man-on-earth kind of way. And it's not only the case that tail-less genes would be winning out over big-tail genes by default because those with the latter were getting killed, but the genes of the peahens most willing to mate with tailless peacocks would be getting passed on more often than those of peahens who held out for big tails: there would be selection for peahens preferring taillessness.

Some generations down the line, all peacocks would be tailless, and if some throwback had a magnificent tail, then he couldn't get laid.

Kurt Vonnegut understood this in his Galapagos in which he changes humanity's environment such that we don't have the physical means to create technology, and diving is our only source of food. So a pointy streamlined head offers a greater survival advantage than intelligence. Thus, over the course of a million years, evolution results in a human race of pointy-headed idiots who are good at diving.

Now, I'm not immune to falling prey to the fallacy that human intelligence is some evolutionary pinnacle -- it took some effort for me to wrap my mind around that one. But it checks out. (Now if only someone could explain to me why this is supposed not to be science fiction. Oh yeah. Because Vonnegut is a savvy and cynical marketer and most people would sooner let a label on a book spine determine their opinions than think for themselves.)

A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that because some trait exists there must be some specific reason for it. For instance, in a discussion on one blog I read, a young woman wondered: "what could possibly be the evolutionary benefit to menstrual cramps?"

There isn't one. There doesn't have to be. Mutation happens and the absence of selection against something can be all it takes for it to persist. In the environment in which humans evolved, women were pregnant or lactating for pretty much all of their short adulthoods. Menstrual cramps would have had so little opportunity to occur that they'd have been inconsequential as a force in evolution. Again, evolution doesn't exist for our benefit; we exist as an effect of evolution.

And at any given moment, it's the case that the traits that exist have not been selected for their suitability to the current environment. They are, rather, those traits which have been selected by all past environments. Like the prospecti say, past performance is no guarantee of future results. If a trait is prevalent, we can say it has been successful, but no matter how prevalent it is, how successful it has been, it's meaningless in the face of a changing environment. Mother Nature doesn't extend credit -- she's always asking "What have you done for me lately?" If the current environment selects against your traits, i.e. if you can't survive or reproduce, you're out of the gene pool with no possibility of appeal.

Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine writes:

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is, to my mind, the most beautiful in all of science. It is beautiful because it is so simple and yet its results are so complex. It is counter-intuitive and hard to grasp but once you have seen it the world is transformed before your eyes. There is no longer any need for a grand designer to explain all the complexity of the living world. There is just a stark and mindless procedure by which we have all come about -- beautiful but scary.

Pete's back! After a month-long vacation, Pete Abrams, the writer/artist of Sluggy Freelance, my all-time favorite Internet-only comic strip, has returned to active duty. I like comics and this is the only one I reliably check daily.

It's been around since '97, so sitting down to read the whole thing takes some time. If you start from the beginning, be aware that it took the author a little while to find his own voice... it begins with a long Star Trek/Aliens parody that's much less interesting than the original situations he comes up with. One of my favorite storylines is Kitten (but that seems to be one people either love or hate.)

Something that continues to impress me is how he tells a coherent narrative and comes up with something really funny as a punchline for the last panel day in and day out. That said, his best work was immediately prior to his recent sabbatical in which he dropped the punch line and did a wholly dramatic story.

To get an idea of how fanatic a devotion the strip has garnered, check the Sluggy Statistics, in which one reader maintains a chart of the characters' frequency of appearance. Don't believe him? Go ahead and use the Sluggy Search Engine to double check. Or check out some of the foreign language translations, Latin being the most recent.

Bomb shelters are way out of fashion. Try a safe room (or 'panic room' after last month's Jodie foster film of that name.)

Paula Milani bought a home with three bedrooms, two baths and one Batcave.

[...] While Foster's room was filled with snacks and blankets, Milani's looks like a weapons factory. On a recent Friday, she had two rifles, two handguns, pepper spray and enough ammunition to quell the next 10 prison riots at Pelican Bay.

If Milani were the protagonist in "Panic Room," the movie would have been about five minutes long.

Last year when I heard of disposable cellphones whose circuits were printed on paper with magnetic ink, I was so impressed by the idea that my techie excitement at the news actually outweighed my environmentalist disgust at the perpetuation of a culture of waste. (Hop-On's product thus far continues to be vaporware.)

Now, scientists are making working organic circuits.

An organic or plastic circuit, however, could theoretically be printed directly onto a package's surface in one step by a souped-up ink-jet printer at a much lower cost, perhaps less than a penny. Made of carbon and hydrogen as opposed to inorganic silicon, such circuits are soluble and can be attached to organic substrates like plastic, paper or even cloth — materials that would never survive the high temperatures required to make circuits out of silicon.

The technology is thus far slow, and only suitable for applications that don't require speed. But consider it in light of picoradio -- cheap, slow data transmission.

Distributed computing is going to be everywhere, and the results are quickly going to be weirder than we can imagine.

I just yesterday learned that it's customary for models to have a composite card with pictures and contact info, and that this is called a Zed card.

Dana Fisher is a visiting scholar at Columbia, studying global environmental change.

...she says that "vehicle travel per capita is the strongest predictor of CO2 emissions per capita." In other words, individuals driving cars are the biggest culprits in global warming.

While buying a drink one day, she consented to be considered for a New York Lotto ad campaign: her picture was taken, and a quote about what she'd do with a million dollars was solicited.

Fisher wrote on a sheet of paper, "Establish a foundation that would deal with global environmental issues." "I remember thinking, Maybe they'll pick me, just because I had this very altruistic, socially responsible answer."

And this was the last she heard of it until her face showed up on a bus stop, proclaiming that with a million dollars she'd buy a car and a cute driver to go with it.

The woman at the ad agency said, 'Oh, we didn't use almost anybody's quote, and you signed a release.' Then she said, 'That's advertising!'

Boy scout attempts to build nuclear reactor and irradiates backyard.

At the shed, radiological experts found an aluminum pie pan, a Pyrex cup, a milk crate and other materials strewn about, contaminated at up to 1000 times the normal levels of background radiation. Because some of this could be moved around by wind and rain, conditions at the site, according to an EPA memo, "present an imminent endangerment to public health."

After the moon-suited workers dismantled the shed, they loaded the remains into 39 sealed barrels that were trucked to the Great Salt Lake Desert. There, the remains of David's experiments were entombed with other radioactive debris.

But don't worry -- it can't happen without access to nuclear materials.

...2 million small- but-valuable radioactive contraptions are used in the US in everything from construction to healthcare to scientific research. And every year, hundreds of them are lost, stolen, even abandoned. Most are never retrieved, and 30,000 are unaccounted for, according to some estimates.

New studies say St. John's Wort counters a common anti-cancer drug and that it doesn't counter depression.

Yesterday, for the first time, someone specified something was off-the-record vis-a-vis my blog. And me without a particularly revelatory style, even!

In other news, I finally mailed off my thrice-damned taxes. One millstone down, one to go: my personal trainer certification exam on 5/4 -- 3 weeks to learn a 500 page exercise science textbook.

But surely I can procrastinate that long enough to redesign my website.

He's a starving creative wannabe cartoonist who still lives with his mother. She's a highly sexual near-sighted graphic design artist who has a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. They have blogs.

(Via LinkMachineGo)

MemeMachineGo! has two eponyms. One is Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (quoted below in my Darwinism rant.) Her essay, Waking from the Meme Dream, discusses memetics, Zen, and the self. No excerpt -- just read it.

From the Wired News Story:

In 1998, Hauger and instructors at the school's Automotive Academy developed a curriculum that applies math and science to the new technology of AFVs.

[...] A six-week summer program was added to focus on AFVs because most of the year is committed to teaching standard coursework. Students tear apart cars and trucks to replace their gasoline engines with hybrid, electric and diesel engines. In addition to figuring out how to calculate gear ratios and learning the geometry of wheels, students also learn about the political ramifications of petroleum dependency and write essays for English class.

Prior to 1998, West Philly High had never won a gold medal in the city's highly competitive science fair, as awards generally went to the city's five magnet schools that attract the top students.

But students from the automotive program have won twice during the last four years, including one student who designed aerodynamic body panels for a Saturn.

Gosh. You mean students can perform better given meaningful goals with real world consequences? What'll they think of next?

Theradate:

You are an intelligent, verbal, achievement-oriented person using therapy to improve your life. You are interested in your behavior and how it impacts others. It's time for you to meet someone with this same outlook on life.

Our TheraDate^SM therapists are specifically focused on helping our patients and other therapists' patients truly connect with each other. Eighty years of research, information from your therapist — and your prospective partner's — therapist, and a team of experienced psychotherapists are what make TheraDate unique.

Our TheraDate process is unfair. We stack the deck in your favor — like no one else ever has — to help you find the right life partner. If you are serious about exploring the possible, there is no one more serious about it than TheraDate.

From a New York Observer article:

For a recommended fee of one regular therapy session (an average of $150 in Manhattan), your therapist will present you as Bachelor or Bachelorette No. 1 in the 10-page survey, which is expected to take your doctor 45 minutes to fill out. Here is how you are being evaluated: What are your defense mechanisms? What are your personality factors? Are you argumentative? Are you dominant or submissive? What was your family environment like? Where do you fall in the birth order? How is your relationship with your mother and your father?

I am laughing my ass off here. If the Long Bets Foundation didn't have such a high ante ($1000) I'd be willing to formally stake that either Theradate would be out of business in ten years or that the first independent auditing of its results found them to be worse than individuals meeting each other without benefit of expert consultation.

(Via Metafilter)

Jonathan Ross interviews Alan Moore:

I don't think that the thing that calls itself Alan Moore will survive death, I think it would be kind of horrible if it did, because this is the personality that works for here, this is the personality that I've developed to get by in this place, and the idea of that hanging on forever...

Hard to choose just one excerpt from all the brilliant things he says. Check it out.

Updated 4/13: I gave in to the urge to excerpt more.

The way that school seemed to me was that there was an overt curriculum — reading, writing and arithmetic — and a covert curriculum, which was more or less punctuality, obedience and the acceptence of monotony... In a lot of cases it seemed that school was like aversion therapy. It wasn't there to teach you knowledge, it was there to put you off learning. You'd associate learning or reading with work and you'd associate work with drudgery. This is why most people are happy to just sit down in front of the televsion at night. "I'm not actually doing any work, therefore I must be having a perfect time."

(Another one via Linkmachinego)

Evidence that the Earth's magnetic pole may be reversing. But don't panic; we're still talking about a geological time scale here.

(Via Post-Atomic)

While studying two presumed neutron stars, scientists found them to be denser, and one of them colder, than current theories can account for. Some think they may be made of strange matter.

(Via Follow Me Here)

I always enjoyed Stephanie Brush's columns in Comic Relief magazine. Just found this account by her of living with ADD:

I found my phone bill in the freezer one time, and I don't really believe I put it there on purpose, though you never know. I sometimes find myself brushing my teeth and getting so distracted halfway through that I may not finish the job until an hour or so later, though I may have sat down at the piano and written a song in the meantime; or logged on and sent a couple of e-mails; or figured out the distance from Seattle to Portland by car in case I ever want to have the gas money saved in advance for a road trip I may or may not take in the next decade.

I've been inclined to disbelieve in ADD. Not, of course, to deny that the patterns of behavior which have in recent years been labelled ADD exist — it's that last 'D' that's the sticking point for me: 'disorder'. It's relatively easy to get behind considering, say, clinical depression to be a disease: by definition, the depressed person feels bad. ADD's symptoms, on the other hand, have more to do with difficulty corresponding to societal expectations. Defining it as a disorder has struck me as an exercise in homogenizing, in enforcing conformity to an ultimately arbitrarily defined norm. Couldn't the so-called ADD sufferers redefine everyone else to be suffering from an Attention Surplus Syndrome?

Brush's article and the pain she evinces has me reconsidering.

However, I'm unlikely to cease thinking that the description of ADD in children sounds like a description of what being a child is. Or that the U.S. over-medicates children not for their own benefit so much as to make them more tractable for harried and overworked teachers and parents. Not that it mightn't be best for some given child, but for four million?

Oh, and I stopped writing this entry literally mid-sentence to go make breakfast and go to the gym. In every "if you experience 3 or more of these 10 things, you may have ADD" list I've seen, I've tended to recognize in myself, well, all of them. So it's an issue I've given some consideration.

(Via Wandering Randomly Among the Blogs)

Saturday I passed the Berkeley panhandler I think of as the Instant Karma guy. To anyone who fails to give him money, he'll snarl something to the effect of "It'll come back to you -- you'll see."

And he's right, of course. Every single time I've failed to give him money, dozens of other strangers have passed me in the streets and given me no money at all!

Also came across my favorite Berkeley busker, Michael Masley who plays a dulcimer with bowhammers of his own invention, allowing him to strike or strum. Check out the song samples on his page.

Yesterday I renewed my CPR certification (a prerequisite towards my personal trainer certification.) Did you know:

It's not called the Heimlich manuver anymore; it's called a J-thrust.

Once someone trained in CPR has so much as said "Are you okay?" to someone who's choking or who proves to need CPR, he or she is then legally obligated to provide care, and, if CPR is required, may not stop unless the scene becomes dangerous, someone of equal or higher training takes over, the recipient revives, or he or she is totally exhausted and can't go on.

If a choking person refuses your help, you cannot give it without being liable for assault and battery charges. However, having initiated caregiving with your offer, you're then obligated to follow the choking person around until he or she passes out, and then J-thrusting the ungrateful bastard. Unconsciousness implies consent under the law. (Note to frat boys: no, not like that.)

Despite what you would learn from watching TV, CPR pretty much never revives anyone. Usually, at best, its role is to prevent brain damage long enough for a defibrillator to arrive.

Marine biologists just discovered a new species of whale. Meanwhile, the Japanese promote whale-eating. Last year, a new species of squid was discovered. The game show Reality Factor killed on the order of a hundred thousand squid for a gross-out stunt in which contestants had to dive in tanks of dead squid to retrieve weights from the bottom. Earlier last year, nine new lemur and two new marmoset species were discovered in Madagascar. It's likely they're already endangered as their habitat is being destroyed. How many undiscovered species are out there? Could our discovery of them possibly outpace their destruction with our casual contempt?

The 6th UN Conference on Biodiversity is currently underway. But if they're to have a chance, we need a new attitude toward animals. Recently, I reported on super-powered shrimp. How many wonders are we forever losing as we drive more animal species to extinction? How many things could we learn? Given how little we still understand about ecology, how many of the pieces can we afford to kick out without risking making it all collapse? Not even to suggest that what's in it for us is biodiversity's best justification.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men. — Alice Walker.

And, of course, any progress on this front is going to require leaving places wild and ceasing to encroach on habitats. And if we're going to be even slightly honest, that's going to require reversing the growth of the human population.

"Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the Earth." — Genesis 1:28. We've done a bang-up job at the first two. Isn't it about time to consider that last?

Frog populations have been in decline for years. A new study suggests why.

According to the study, the chemical [atrazine, the most commonly used herbicide in the U.S.] can turn male tadpoles into hermaphrodites - frogs with both male and female sexual characteristics.

In adult males, the herbicide lowers levels of the sex hormone testosterone to below that of female frogs.

[...]"Atrazine is just one of a long list of pesticides thought to have hormone disrupting effects and many of these turn up in our food as residues," pesticides campaigner Sandra Bell told BBC News Online. "

I already avoid tap water and eat a lot of organic food. Going absolute on those keeps sounding better and better.

I mentioned picoradio last week. This article offers more detail.

...the applications his group develops for the TinyOS are on the order of 24 bytes long. That's even shorter than this sentence. So it doesn't take long to teach each node something new.

[...] Still, it's absurdly inefficient to program each node individually. Instead, Culler introduces the equivalent of a computer virus into the network. As the nodes communicate, they infect their kin with the new operating instructions.

I found this article especially striking having just read "Fast Times at Fairmont High" in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge in which such a network plays an important role.

The potential surveillance applications for this could get kind of scary.

Startling new tale of government incompetence.

A growing number of black taxpayers are being misled by scams falsely claiming that, for a fee, they can get tax credits or refunds as reparations for slavery. The scams are given credence when some taxpayers actually get money.

[...]In 2000 and the first four months of 2001, Williams said, more than $30 million in erroneous reparations payments were paid. [...] Most of the mistaken payments were for about $43,000, a figure Essence magazine suggested in 1993 as the updated value of 40 acres and a mule, which some freed slaves were given under an order by a Union general during the Civil War.

The moral of the story would seem to be that it pays to make up tax credits.

(Via Follow Me Here, my favorite blog of recent discovery)

The Connecticut eXtreme Croquet Society : "Dedicated to enjoying eXtreme croquet, nature, and the near-death experience!"

I still like the talk.bizarre version better.

(Extreme Croquet link via Metafilter)

New Times LA reporter Amy Alkon harasses SUV drivers, enlisting her friends to leave business cards under the SUV's windshield wipers:

Road-Hogging, Gas-Guzzling, Air-Fouling Vulgarian! Clearly you have an extremely small penis, or you wouldn't drive such a monstrosity. For the adequately endowed, there are hybrids or electrics. 310-798-1817.

The article includes some of the responses she got. Amy Alkon is my new hero.

Me, I ride a bike. Draw your own conclusions.

(Via Boing Boing from which I avoid stealing links 'cause I figure you all read it anyway, but sometimes I can't resist)

I just discovered the cartoon Cat and Girl. It was love at first sight when I saw the first one listed — it's simply beautiful.

(Via The Null Device)

MemeMachineGo! was just added to this list of Berkeley blogs — check out some different perspectives on our fair Berzerkley.

From Things to Do Next Semester:

16.) Put the following disclaimer on all undergraduate creative writing course descriptions: "If you wish to write gangster stories, drug dealer stories, 'Ever-Since-I-Saw-Her-In-The- Student- Union-I-Knew-I-Was-In-Love-With-Her' stories, dead grandmother stories, Slacker stories, Man- Goes-On-A- Hunting- Trip-With-His-Old-College-Roommates stories, Woman-Talks-To-Her-Cat- About-How-Much-Men-Suck stories, Two-Genderless-Philosophers-Meet-In-Some- Indescribable-Netherworld-To-Discuss- The-Impending- Annihilation-Of-The-Mindless-Race-Of- Human-Automotons stories, YUPPIE-Who-Learns-A-Valuable-Lesson stories, wedding fantasy stories, 'entertainment' stories, Kill-The- Professor stories, 'Let-Me-Tell-You-How-Much-Hashish- I- Smoked-In-Amsterdam-And-Guiness-I-Drank-In- Dublin-On- My-Semester-Abroad' stories, Person-Who-Dies-Then- Comes-Back-To-Life-To-Do-Something-She/He-Should-Have- Or- Should-Not-Have-Done-When-She/He-Was-Alive stories, or any other story in which YOU have not a.) fundamentally created the characters and their lives we call plots, and b.) developed a unique point-of-view from which to tell these stories, then you might want to consider taking Photography or Pottery to satisfy your Fine Arts Requirement."

(Via Cheese Dip)

Holy cow! The car is just a prototype now. Top speed: 75 mph. Its gas tank isn't even 1 3/4 gallons, but considering that gives it a range of just over 400 miles, that's not so bad. It's skinny and funny-looking, like something out of Brazil, seats two, the passenger behind the driver.

And given how little fuel economy is valued over here, I wonder if it'll ever be sold here.

(Via Metafilter)

Well that's a novel case.

(Thanks, Jym!)

Putting bunnies in a trance:

To trance a bunny, you need to flip them over on their back and pet their cheeks and nose area at the same and they should start to go out. The easiest way to get a bunny on its back is if you pic it up with your right hand under to front legs and your left hand on the butt and they you kind of stick the bunny into the crook of your elbow as if you are cradling a baby. Once there, you use your right hand and start petting the bunnies face and you should start to see them relax and the head start to fall backwards and then they are in a trance.

(Thanks, Rex!)

August Pollak rants:

The Defense Secretary of the United States- the man who pretty much answers only to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President himself over the military actions of the country, announced today, without immediately resigning afterwards, that although we bombed an entire country, killed thousands of people, and intervened in specific governmental regime changes because it might have hosted a man from a different country, we didn't really have enough information to merit doing it.

[...]"I'm not ashamed to say we don't know," Rumsfeld told reporters Wednesday. "We don't know."

Well, isn't that nice. He's not ashamed to say he doesn't know. So he's not ashamed to say he didn't know when we killed a few thousand people.

Because all that mattered was finding another man who wasn't ashamed about killing a few thousand people for no particular reason.

Immediately after 9/11, I was really scared the U.S. would go off half-cocked with the government responding to a perceived need to show Joe Sixpack that we're still number one by blowing someone up real good. In the first couple of weeks, when the government seemed to be appraising and gathering information, I actually felt some hope. That was a while ago now.

If we stop being the biggest bully on the playground, the terrorists have already won.

(Via This Modern World)

You know the joke about "we've got dozens of popes in heaven, but we hardly ever see a lawyer"? (If not, see Lawyer Jokes, #20.)

Turns out it's straight out of Grimms' Tales, so it's at least a couple hundred years old.

Extremely thought provoking New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) about Nassim Taleb, who manages a hedge fund called Empirica.

Suppose that there were ten thousand investment managers out there — which is not an outlandish number — and that every year, entirely by chance, half of them made money and half of them lost money. And suppose that every year the losers were tossed out, and the game replayed with those who remained. At the end of five years, there would be three hundred and thirteen people who had made money in every one of those years, and after ten years there would be nine people who had made money every single year in a row — all out of pure luck.

[...] there is a description of a simple experiment, where a group of people were told to imagine that they had three hundred dollars.They were then given a choice between (a) receiving another hundred dollars or (b) tossing a coin so that if they won they got two hundred dollars and if they lost they got nothing. Most of us, it turns out, prefer (a) to (b). But then Kahneman and Tversky did a second experiment. They told people to imagine that they had five hundred dollars, and then asked them if they would rather (c) give up a hundred dollars or d) toss a coin and pay two hundred dollars if they lost and nothing at all if they won. Most of us now prefer (d) to (c). From a probabilistic standpoint, those four choices are identical: they all yield an expected outcome of four hundred dollars. Nonetheless, we have strong preferences among them. Why? Because we're more willing to gamble when it comes to losses, but are risk averse when it comes to gains. That's why we like small daily winnings in the stock market, even if those entail the risk of losing everything in a crash.

At Empirica, by contrast, every day brings a small but real possibility that it will make a huge amount of money; no chance that it will blow up; and a very large possibility that it will lose a small amount of money. [...] "We cannot blow up, we can only bleed to death," Taleb says, and bleeding to death — absorbing the pain of steady losses — is precisely what human beings are hardwired to avoid.

(Via Metafilter)

Updated 3/1/2005: Replaced dead link to Gladwell's article with a working one to his own site.

Con Jose, the 60th World SF Convention, to be held Labor Day weekend in San Jose, has announced the 2002 Hugo nominations.

I would have been very upset if James Patrick Kelly's "Undone" or Charles Stross' "Lobsters" hadn't made the ballot (and with both of them in the race, choosing best novelette isn't going to be easy.) I'm bummed that Pat Murphy's Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell didn't — it's sheer delight. And I look forward to reading the nominated fiction I missed during 2001.

Congratulations to everyone — and I'll single out the fine folks at Strange Horizons, nominated for best website, and Campbell nominee Ken Wharton.

Turkey reviews hunting videos.

Nancy Arena arrived at her video store 30 miles east of Buffalo last week to find the front window smashed and feathers and movie cases scattered everywhere. [...] the turkey bashed into the hunting videos first — and left some droppings on them.

(Thanks, Marjorie!)

Charles of Six Different Ways on waking up this morning:

Let me tell you, there's nothing that will make a bloke feel more nefarious than waking up — momentarily forgetting the events of the previous evening — all made up with barrettes in your hair and $36 on the bed.

Conventional farming depletes the soil. John Jeavons grows more food while building up the soil.

"It takes about 15,000 to 30,000 square feet of land to feed one person the average U.S. diet," he says. "I've figured out how to get it down to 4,000 square feet. How? I focus on growing soil, not crops."

Fantasy legislation of mine: ceasing to subsidize non-organic farms.

(Via Boing Boing)

Rebecca Blood writes:

Libertarian: We don't need rules, we can take care of ourselves.
Conservative: We need rules to help the upper class and control the lower class.
Liberal: We need rules to control the upper class and help the lower class.
Anarchist: We don't need rules, we can take care of each other.

Anarchy is from the Greek, an- — without; archos — ruler. Without rulers. If you're not an anarchist, you either want to tell other people what to do, or you want to be told what to do, or maybe a combination thereof.

So. Which is it?

A story I can only find on Indymedia — not in any mainstream news source:

An affinity group constituted primarily of university students from the state of Wisconsin have been denied their pre-purchased seats on a commercial flight from Milwaukee to Washington D.C. because the federal government has declared them "potential terrorists" and thus a high security risk.

Does this ring any bells:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. [emphasis added]

What, has the government already simply gotten used to the idea that the word 'terrorist' is a magic wand that makes the Constitution go away?

This is a deliberate effort to keep the populace too scared to dissent. It's serious police state type shit and we cannot take this lying down.

Bruce Sterling's keynote speech at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2002:

[The Bush Administration is] not making a big public deal over this likelihood of Washington DC getting incinerated. That would definitely put a crimp in tourist visits to the cherry blossoms. But add up what we've seen in the past year. Congress subjected to a biowar attack. The Pentagon blown up. In India, Moslem carbombers raided the national Parliament and did their level best to kill every lawmaker they could find.

The decapitation scenario is a hard thing to keep a level head about. Once you've gotten it about this, and internalized it as a likely enemy initiative, it makes everyone else seem quite childish, and very poorly-informed. The Bush clan are paternalistic, noblesse oblige, right-wing aristocrats with an intelligence background. They think they know more about global realpolitik than the American public can face. That's why they treat us like idiots. They expect us to panic. They are trying to spare us that.

[...] The Bush Cabinet isn't afraid about the danger. Rumsfeld is not a jittery guy. Wolfowitz is a little pocket Bismarck. Condi Rice is scary. Colin Powell is a general, and he's the softie of the group. Bush himself is ticked-off. He's personally insulted. He's got a dead cop's badge in his desk drawer and he looks at it every damn day. Their courage is not the problem here. The problem is that they consider the rest of us to be children.

In an interview I read, George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't, answered his title's implied question: that American politics is paternalistic, with the right the stern, punishing father, and the left the nurturing father. He says that whether someone would get up in the middle of the night to comfort a crying baby is a good predictor of their politics.

And, like most liberals, he's sure he understands libertarians, and he's wrong, dismissing them as right-wingers. That's a shame, as his model offers such a succinct way to describe how libertarians differ from both the left and right. They're the ones who think adult citizens are... wait for it... adults. The ones who don't want a paternalistic government infantilizing them, whether punishing or nurturing.

I'd go comfort a crying baby in the middle of the night. What I wouldn't do is support redistributing wealth by force to empower a bureaucracy to force everyone else to act in the same manner I do. Why the hell is this radical?

Washington Post article from last year on the JFK assassination:

A new, peer-reviewed article in Science and Justice, a quarterly publication of Britain's Forensic Science Society [...] said it was more than 96 percent certain that there was a shot from the grassy knoll to the right of the president's limousine, in addition to the three shots from a book depository window above and behind the president's limousine.

Not long ago, among a group of friends, there was an awkward silence when I expressed belief in there having been a conspiracy to kill JFK, as if I'd just said that the aliens had come for me again last night, and this time they used the anal probe.

Well, comforting as the lone nut theory might be, I don't see how anyone can actually maintain belief in it faced with the impossible shot Oswald would have to have made, the impossible pinball game the bullet had to have played in the limosine, the impossible mountain of coincidences resulting in so many witnesses and investigators turning up dead.

And comforting as it'd be to dismiss anyone who's willing to question the Lone Nut theory as some paranoid loon — even Doonesbury got into the act with In Search of Cigarette Holder Man — well, with admitted self-interest, I don't see that one as holding up, either.

(Via New World Disorder)

It's Turn Off Your TV Week.

High-speed Internet connections are still OK!

Vegan Porn has the noble and seemingly quixotic goal of being the number one google result for 'porn.' Incredibly, they're already at number eight! Won't you throw your googleweight their way by linking to them?

So Earth Day has come and gone. Having an Earth Day always reminds me of Tom Lehrer's National Brotherhood Week.

Step up and shake the hand
Of someone you can't stand,
You can tolerate him if you try!

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Moslems
And everybody hates the Jews

But during National Brotherhood Week
National Brotherhood Week
It's National Everyone-Smile-At-
One-Another-hood Week
Be nice to people who
Are inferior to you
It's only for a week, so have no fear
Be grateful that it doesn't last all year!

I take some effort to tread lightly on the Earth. I eat mostly vegan, largely organic, get much of my groceries at the local Farmer's Market. I bike for transportation, and don't have a car. I compost and recycle, buy recycled, think about ways to reduce consumption and waste, only need to put the trash can to the curb once every 6 weeks or so.

And I have too much stuff in general — comics, books, CDs and electronics in particular — am somewhat compulsive about upgrading my Palm, fly way too often, and have generally figured that my level of consumption is still way too high for the Earth to support anything close to everyone doing.

This Ecological Footprint Quiz attempts to quantify just that. I scored 10 acres necessary to sustain me, compared to a U.S. national average of 24. If everyone lived like me, we'd need 2.2 planets. The real killer for me by their counting was that I live alone in a free-standing house. If I'd had three kids, and lived with them, my score drops to 7. The test ignores reproductive choices, which is my only big beef with it — having kids obviously has a big effect on global consumption, and one that snowballs, at that.

Many Americans consider it sacrilege to suggest that there's anything wrong in our consumption being constrained by scruple, by anything other than simply what we can afford — that economic might makes right, and the rich deserve to consume as much as they can.

That attitude itself is perhaps our most successful export. And, ultimately, I don't think it's one the species can afford.

Apocalyptica

According to respected sources, the oldest surviving cello can be dated back to 1572. It was fashioned by the Italian Andrea Amati, a Cremonese craftsman who could never have guessed that distant cousins of his cherished 'violoncello' would one day be fitted with pre-amps & pick-ups then remorselessly bowed to the brink of sawdust...

Four Finnish guys playing heavy metal on cello. Check out the music samples.

Common comfort foods carcinogenic. (Alliteration at no extra charge.)

...heating of carbohydrate-rich foods, such as potatoes, rice or cereals formed acrylamide, a much-studied substance classified as a probable human carcinogen.[...] an ordinary bag of potato chips may contain up to 500 times more of the substance than the top level allowed in drinking water by the World Health Organization (WHO).

French fries sold at Swedish franchises of U.S. fast-food chains Burger King Corp. and McDonald's contained about 100 times the 1 microgram per liter maximum permitted by the WHO for drinking water, the study showed.

[...]"Fried, oven-baked and deep-fried potato and cereal products may contain high levels of acrylamide."

Aw, man. Not baked potatoes too! Note: this study has not yet been peer-reviewed or journal-published. Let's see if it holds up to scrutiny.

In 1961, Enos became the second chimp in space.

One of the skills Enos would learn required him to differentiate between colors and shapes on a instrument panel - a correct answer earned a drink of water, an incorrect answer resulted in a shock to his foot. [...] During his flight two malfunctions occurred. The first malfunction occurred in the lever for the motor skills test and Enos was shocked rather then rewarded for each correct answer. As a tribute to Enos, or perhaps his rigorous training, he continued to perform his required operations correctly despite the repeated shocks.

(Story, but not the specific link via Vegan Porn)

I am a big Doonesbury geek. When Mark came out after over 20 years of his life being depicted in the strip, after about 12 years of feeling I knew him well, I was surprised. And I thought back... was Trudeau playing fair?

Yes, he was. In all those 20 years, Mark had almost nothing to do with women. Almost.

That sequence, from Mike and Mark's road trip, didn't make it into Call Me When You Find America. Then there's the time Mike set Mark up with his sister (also never reprinted.) (Mike's sister was mentioned in the very third strip, but subsequently quietly disappeared — Mike's brother, Sal, nee Benjy, has been a major character at points and is obviously the other person indicated by their mom's reference to being the mother of two.)

The hardest thing to reconcile is that in the musical play of Doonesbury, Mark's is the voice of wisdom and seeming experience in love and sex as Mike frets about what to do with J.J. Not that he alleges anything specific about his own experience. And that nicely comes full circle when Mike's the first person he turns to in his own crisis, as linked to above.

And I'll note that I found all the strips to make my points in just a few minutes with the spiffy Doonesbury Search Engine.

In Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, the narrator, Rob Fleming, is a huge music geek. When his ex's father dies, he reflects on pop music being a narrow art form — he can't think of any songs dealing with what she was feeling. Writing this has emphasized for me Doonesbury's breadth: there are Doonesbury strips that speak to a great many situations.

Bama County in China has a high longevity rate.

It has a population of just over 300,000, yet it has 73 centenarians, one of the highest ratios in the world. Scores more nonagenarians display the carefree air of people who know their time is not yet up, while octogenarians toil under the Chinese burden of deferring to their elders.

But why?

Today, sloshing rice wine from her glazed bowl, which is filled at 8am and continually replenished until she retires at nightfall, Ms Xiao demands that visitors match her glass for glass.

[...]Another staple of the local diet is houmayou - soup that is made with oils from hemp seeds and is traditionally eaten twice a day.

[...]Bama sits at an altitude of 4,500 feet, and the still, clear air and clean water of the Paiyang river also help to prolong life, says Professor Xiao Zhenyu, a senior fellow at the Old Age Science Research Centre in Beijing.

"Villagers lead harmonious lives," he says. "Sometimes there are four or five generations under one roof, and disputes are rare among neighbours. They normally labour until old age, and even centenarians can be seen working in the hills. Locals also take an unusually serene view of death - taking it in their stride."

Ultimately, however, he believes that it is the unusual — to Western eyes — diet that puts Bama county at the top of China's longevity league.

Reading this, I thought well of course continuing to have meaningful, connected social lives in a culture that respects its elders plays a huge role. Of course strength earned from a lifetime of hard physical labor plays a huge role. Of course their isolation from pollution is significant. And maybe the diet is what distinguishes them from other rural Chinese.

But I bet Westerners are going to seize on the diet, pretending it's a sole or primary cause, because it could be isolated and lifted out of context, and we'll be seeing rice wine extract capsules in health food stores.

Websearching proved that speculation to be too late.

We have conducted the research for five years on this wild plant of the Yanzizhang plant family, a growing only in the Bama Yaozu county, Guang Xi Province, China [...] Renka, an all natural dietary supplement from a rare Chinese cactus is believed to be a secret of longevity

(OK, not a rice wine extract per se.)

And I really wonder — will their unusual longevity persist after they build the road there?

As we walk along the riverbank my translator regales me with the plans the local government has for the village.

"Tourism is the key," he tells me. A new road is being pushed through the mountains, he says, new hotels are planned.

[...] there is real peace here, even now the outside world hardly intrudes. There appears little yearning for its wealth or its trappings.

How long will that last once the road and the tourists arrive?

I'm pleased to announce that my friend Jym is joining me as a contributor to MemeMachineGo!

You know how really close childhood friends develop their own private vocabulary of allusions and quotes and in-jokes and can have whole conversations — deep, or hysterical, or both — entirely impenetrable to outsiders? Well, despite meeting as adults, Jym and I already had that. We've read a lot of the same books and comics and comic strips, and they seem to have impressed us in a similar fashion a great deal of the time. It was actually a little spooky at first.

I know I'll enjoy seeing things I didn't expect when I load MemeMachineGo!

Welcome, Jym!

Men are more attentive when their female partners are ovulating, according to a new study.

The women with partners also reported about 30 per cent more attention and "monopolisation" behaviour during their fertile period, such as frequent telephone calls to check on their whereabouts.

[...] Gangestad admits he does not know what cues men could be responding to. "There may be subtle clues in the partner's scent or visual signs," he says. "Or it may be a response to behaviour, such as an increased interest in other men."

I start pretty much every morning with a cup of Yogi Tea's Joint Comfort Tea, a decaf green tea/turmeric/yucca/Devil's claw mix. So I was just thrilled to find this..

These Times purchased 10 boxes of different brands of green tea at a suburban New York supermarket and health food store, and had them analyzed by Toxicology International of Fairfax, Virginia. Analysis of the tea samples showed that two of the 10 brands were contaminated with DDT, in violation of Environmental Protection Agency rules. The one with the highest levels was produced by the Yogi Tea Company

(Via Eclectica)

Having approximately one bajillion logins and passwords in my life, I keep them all in an encryption app on my Palm. But tonight I was trying to login to a website, and the info I had stored wasn't working. Finally, I resorted to requesting my password hint.

It was "why is a mouse when it spins?"

Y'know, sometimes I'm a real pain in the ass.

According to the Fox News story:

The Swintons, who say they approach veganism as a religion, fed the child a diet of "ground nuts, fresh-squeezed fruit juices, herbal tea, beans, cod liver oil and flax seed oil," a complaint said.

I wonder if the reference to cod liver oil there is an error — obviously that's not vegetarian.

Of course it's a tragedy that this child has been malnourished (just as it's a tragedy for any child to go malnourished.) It's also extremely frustrating for the media to imply that veganism is inherently horrendously dangerous and that it was veganism per se that caused the malnourishment, rather than a bad diet which happened to be vegan.

Every so often babies or young children are killed by e. coli poisoning from meat, yet somehow the headlines don't read "Omnivorous couple poisons baby with meat."

(Via Metafilter, whose discussion of the subject was mostly reasonable.)