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.