MemeMachineGo!

=v= I usually don't see intelligent things written about spam in the daily newspapers (especially my daily newspapers), but Jon Carroll recently penned a savvy and hilarious column about the many people on the Internet who are concerned about the size of his penis.

It's charming of them to take an interest, I feel. It turns out that 76 percent of American women are disappointed by the size of my penis. This will make it more difficult for me to attend cocktail parties. Perhaps I will spend time with one of the 24 percent who have no complaints.

To those who'd say he's being fooled by spam, he responds,

But right on top of the e-mail about my penis it says: "This is not spam." So you see. The e-mail "complies with all federal regulations." Not even Dick Cheney can make that statement.

=v= Also, let it be known that spammers are equal opportunity annoyers. I recently got a "Blossom Breast Enhancement" offer to increase my bust by 1 to 3 sizes. I can tellya, they've got their work cut out for them!

"Death is our eternal companion," don Juan said with a most serious air. "It is always to our left, at an arm's length. It was watching you when you were watching the white falcon; it whispered in your ear and you felt its chill, as you felt it today. It has always been watching you. It always will until the day it taps you."

[...] "How can anyone feel so important when we know that death is stalking us?" he asked.

I had the feeling my answer was not really needed. I could not have said anything anyway. A new mood had possessed me.

"The thing to do when you're impatient," he procedded, "is to turn to your left and ask advice from your death. An immense amount of pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you, or if you catch a glimpse of it, or if you just have the feeling that your companion is there watching you."

Journey to Ixtlan: the Lessons of Don Juan, by Carlos Castaneda

[Originally posted to Death Upon My Shoulder; subsequently merged into MemeMachineGo!]

I've started a new blog, Death Upon My Shoulder, because, you know, I wasn't spending enough time on the net.

While I'll continue to make every effort to ensure the highest possible signal:noise ratio on MemeMachineGo!, I make no such guarantee of Death Upon My Shoulder (whose obvious acronym is rather unfortunate) despite its pretentious title. I fully reserve the right to natter on about the books I'm reading, the movies I've seen, or even "Today I had a tofu sandwich."

Keith Johnstone, in Impro, nominally on teaching comedy improv, implores performers to dare to be obvious, insisting that attempting to be original is a defensive mechanism to prevent revealing anything of yourself, and is thus far less interesting. I know that sounds easy to dismiss, but he makes a compelling argument for it, and I'd suggest seeing it in context before judging it. Impro's the finest book on teaching, learning, creativity, and human interaction I've ever read, and I'd recommend it to anyone who ever has occasion to teach, learn, create or interact with humans.

Death Upon My Shoulder is where I'm daring to be obvious.

Last night I saw I Wheel, a unicycling theatrical show by Pink Man. Pink Man can sometimes be seen unicycling on the streets of Berkeley, and it's truly extraordinary to watch: he can dart about like a hummingbird, suddenly freeze and strike a pose, manuver with precision I wouldn't have thought possible.

Why "Pink Man"? Because he's often doing this clad only in a pink unitard with a little silver cape.

Watching him zip about and dance with the lampposts always brightens my day, which seems to be a lot of the point. The show was a blast, and he announced it's coming back in two weeks, so if you're local to the Bay Area, I recommend it.

[Originally posted to Death Upon My Shoulder; subsequently merged into MemeMachineGo!]

Boston Globe article:

The treaty requires industrialized nations to cut their emissions by an average of 5 percent over the period 2008-2012.

But the United States, the world's largest polluter, shunned the treaty shortly after President Bush took office last year, arguing it would harm the US economy. The pact would have required the United States, which accounted for 36 percent of the industrialized world's greenhouse gas emissions in 1990, to trim emissions by 7 percent from 1990 levels.

But the Bush administration has instead announced policy changes likely to push them up by 30 percent by 2010

I am loath to discourage anyone from writing Bush telling him to ratify Kyoto and (if you're a U.S. voter) that you won't vote for anyone in 2004 who won't... but I think his doing so is about as likely as, say, his converting to Islam. I would remind everyone, though, that choices we make every day affect CO2 emissions. It's not simply someone else's problem.

Comedy improv is my life. At least lately: I'm taking East Bay Improv's Performance Improv class on Tuesday and Thursday nights (to culminate in a performance on Saturday, June 22 — mark your calendars) and the San Francisco Bay Area Theatresports (SFBATS) Beginning Class on Sundays.

Today at BATS, we did an exercise from Keith Johnstone's Impro: walk around the room, pointing at things, and calling them by anything other than their name.

That ought to be the easiest thing in the world: there are tens of thousands of things you can say, and only a few things you can't. But it's surprising how often I found my mind going blank other than for the 'right' name of something, which I owe to decades of socialization in wanting to be right all the time.

It's a wonderful exercise. Try at at home.

[Originally posted to Death Upon My Shoulder; subsequently merged into MemeMachineGo!]

Springfield, Massachusetts hosts the Dr. Seuss National Memorial

Here I am!
With Horton the Elephant, Yertle, and Sam.
We didn't come here for green eggs and ham,
but to open a memorial that honors the man,
who penned hundreds and hundreds of wondrous pages
still read out loud by kids of all ages.
With six million bucks, point nine from the feds,
his home town chose to honor old Ted.
Geisel, that is, the man known to youse
As the incomparable, indomitable, beloved Dr. Seuss.

It's titanic, stupendous, marvelous, gigantic!
What they've done in this city is truly fantastic!
From Hamden and Hampshire and Northampton, too,
they came far and wide to this most unusual zoo.
From here to there, from hither to yon
Giant bronze sculptures adorn a green lawn.
There's The Grinch, and Thidwick, and a book ten feet tall,
And no, that's not all (no, that's certainly not all);
There's The Cat (in the Hat), The Lorax and Max,
said the city's good mayor, it's a fine use of your tax.

I'm going to be in Massachusetts next month. This sounds worth checking out.

Though it's been around for about the same time as MemeMachineGo!, I only just found Vegan Blog, via American Samizdat. If environmental news is one of the things that brings you to MMG, be sure to check it out.

And speaking of American Samizdat, it and everything else Dr. Menlo hosts (recently including perennial MMG favorite New World Disorder) are well worth checking out.

=v= If you're a fan of Jack "King" Kirby, you might want to take a peek at an example of his work for the funny papers, this old Sky Masters Sunday strip. The last panel predicts that, in the far-off future (1975), rocket sled trains would make it fashionable to live 100 miles from work.

He got half of it right, at least. 25 years later, despite overwhelming public support for extending rail into downtown San Francisco, we're building a chain grocery store smack dab in the way. California's High Speed Rail Authority is setting its sights on ending the proposed line in downtown San Jose. It could take longer to get from there to San Francisco than it would take to get there from Los Angeles.

It's been said before, most recently by Tom Tomorrow, but the future just isn't what it used to be.

From a Washington Post article:

The feeling you have as you read this sentence, Wegner argues, is an illusion pulled off by a complex machine in your skull. It not only reads and understands this sentence, he says, but also makes you feel as if you have experienced the reading of the sentence. In other words, the brain, not content with being a remarkably complex machine, also convinces itself that it isn't a machine at all.

But why would it bother? The brain, Wegner contends, produces consciousness to give itself a feeling of having done something. This feeling helps the brain recognize similar situations when they arise -- the next article in the newspaper, for instance. Being aware of its actions, the brain-machine can better decide whether to read another article.

I think it's a grave mistake to demand an explanation for "why would it bother?" As I've ranted before, evolution doesn't exist for our benefit. Taking memetics and the hypothesis proposed by Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine seriously, I think we developed the capacity to imitate by random mutation; this imitation had survival value and was selected for, giving rise to sexual selection for it, eventually giving rise to memetic evolution as a semi-independent force in human development.

Just as simple life gave rise to multicellular and ever more complex forms of life through the relentless and impersonal march of evolution, so memes evolved into co-adapted meme complexes (or memeplexes, as Blackmore shortens it).

The idea of the self is one such memeplex. It has thrived simply because the environment has selected for it. Memetic evolution doesn't exist for our benefit any more than genetic evolution, but just as much, what we are is its result. And in case you missed it the first time, I'll plug again Blackmore's Waking from the Meme Dream.

Of course, all this only addresses part of the hard problem. Finding the mechanism by which consiousness occurs is a different, and fascinating, problem.

(The Post link via Follow Me Here)

Global warming is happening

In a stark shift for the Bush administration, the United States has sent a climate report to the United Nations detailing specific and far-reaching effects that it says global warming will inflict on the American environment.

In the report, the administration for the first time mostly blames human actions for recent global warming. It says the main culprit is the burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

...and we should learn to stop worrying and love the bomb.

But while the report says the United States will be substantially changed in the next few decades — "very likely" seeing the disruption of snow-fed water supplies, more stifling heat waves and the permanent disappearance of Rocky Mountain meadows and coastal marshes, for example — it does not propose any major shift in the administration's policy on greenhouse gases.

It recommends adapting to inevitable changes. It does not recommend making rapid reductions in greenhouse gases to limit warming, the approach favored by many environmental groups and countries that have accepted the Kyoto Protocol, a climate treaty written in the Clinton administration that was rejected by Mr. Bush.

But, hey, I'd might as well take what I can get for the moment: Hey, anyone still in denial, trying to insist that only environmentalist cranks believe in human actions causing global warming — even the Bush administration has finally owned up to it!

OK, like anyone fitting that description is actually reading this.

(Via This Modern World)

The calorie restriction diet:

As scientists begin to uncover the secrets of longevity, they are finding a prescription for long life that few will want to take: a diet so low in calories that to most Americans, it would feel close to starvation.

The diet, dubbed “calorie restriction” in the clinical parlance of science, would be called severe deprivation in any other lexicon. Calorie restriction was first shown to create exceptionally long-lived rats in the 1930s. It later had the same effect in guppies, water fleas, yeast, spiders and a microscopic water invertebrate called the rotifer. Last month, Labrador retrievers became the first large mammals to join the list.

Now, scientists appear on the verge of a finding that calorie restriction also extends the lifespan of monkeys, who share more than 90% of their genes with humans. At the National Institutes of Health, where researchers have been studying a colony of 120 rhesus monkeys for 15 years, evidence for calorie restriction is mounting. The control animals, fed a healthy lowfat diet, are dying at a normal rate, while animals fed 30% less appear to be living far longer — and avoiding age-linked maladies. One of the underfed monkeys is 38 years old, the human equivalent of 114 years.

An effect of eating less is that your metabolism slows down, so this makes perfect sense. And in case anyone in the studio audience is thinking of trying this at home, I'd like to stress that yoyo-ing between "calorie restriction" and bingeing would be a terrible thing for your health and thus unlikely to extend your life.

(Via moxie.nu)

Remember the carcinogens in common comfort foods story? Well, Dr. Weil says don't worry.

There has been a surprising amount of media attention to this report given the facts that (1) acrylamide isn’t a proven human carcinogen and (2) the amount found in your daily consumption of food is 700 times less than levels needed to cause cancer in rats.

I don’t think there’s any great cause for alarm about these findings for two reasons. In the first place, if you’re on a healthy diet, you’re probably not eating a significant amount of fried foods and processed baked goods. Secondly, you have to maintain perspective about foods that cause cancer in rats. Most aren’t human carcinogens.

Phew!

ATMs to gauge and respond to human emotions:

Engineers simply take an image from the camera, use software to pinpoint facial features (such as the measurement from the corner of your eye to your lip), and create a map of your probable emotional state. Those points are then compared to Teradata's massive catalog of emotions in an attempt to decipher your emotional state.

[...] The machine can track which ads you frown at and change those pitches. Maybe a cute, humorous ad pops up that causes you to chuckle. The database remembers your reaction and you'll likely see the advertisement again.

...with a twist of Pohl & Kornbluth with this emphasis on more effective advertising. Never in eleventy skillion years would I have called the first application for machine reading of human emotions to be in ATMs to deliver better ads. It sounds so much more like dystopian sf satire than like what I would prefer to imagine the real world to be.

(Via 6 Different Ways)

Another roadside attraction:

Dangling in the branches of the 70-foot cottonwood tree in a gully a few yards off Highway 50 are what looks like every type of footwear in existence — cowboy boots, tennis shoes, running shoes, sandals, ballet slippers, high- heeled shoes, even Rollerblades. Red, blue, yellow, green, black, striped, red- and- white, yellow-and-black. All sizes, all shapes.

[....] A few plastic soda bottles stuffed with papers and dollar bills are lashed to the tree about 20 feet up, and American flags flap amid the soles here and there. Nailed to the trunk at eye level is a yellow, 6- by-2-foot metal sign that reads "Shoe Tree" in faded black letters.

So last night I went to a Learning Annex class by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way and a stack of other books on creativity.

Mostly she spent the time drumming home the first two exercises from the Artist's Way, one of which is morning pages.

Morning pages are, simply, brain dumping 3 pages of whatever's in your head first thing in the morning every day, written longhand. It can be anything including "I don't know what to write" so long as it's what's on your mind... the only way to do it wrong is to worry about getting it right.

I've done morning pages before, but never really stuck with them. I did them this morning. What the heck. I realized that this is the first time I've pursued them since my repetitive stress injury has been wholly in remission — always before I could feel my arm fatiguing as I went, and felt anxious about expending my limited supply of arm usage for the day. It'll be nice to not worry about that.

[Originally posted to Death Upon My Shoulder; subsequently merged into MemeMachineGo!]

A New York Times article on Enoosaen, a Masai village in Kenya, and 9/11.

Most Masai had learned of the attacks from the radio soon after they occurred. But the horrible television images passed by many Masai, who got electricity in their village only shortly before the attacks. In the oral tradition they rely on, Mr. Naiyomah sat them down and told them stories that stunned them.

Through his tales, Sept. 11 became real. The Masai felt sadness. They felt relief that Mr. Naiyomah was unscathed. They wanted to do something.

Today, in a solemn ceremony in a grassy clearing, they did, blessing 14 cows being given to the people of the United States. Elders chanted in Maa as they walked around the cows, animals held sacred by the Masai (often spelled Maasai).

[...] when Kimeli Naiyomah returned recently to this tiny village from his studies in the United States, he found only the vaguest understanding among his fellow Masai of what had happened in that far-away place called New York on Sept. 11.

[...] He had been visiting Manhattan on Sept. 11 and came home last month with first-hand accounts of the horror of that faraway event. Now a young elder in the community, Mr. Naiyomah, 25, told the others of huge fires in buildings that stretched high into the clouds, and of men with special gear who entered the structures to save lives.

"They couldn't believe that people could jump from a building so high that they would die when they reached the ground," he said.

Thanks, Enoosaen.

(Via Cogito, Ergo Sumana)

A mid-day nap improves learning.

That, at least, is the eye-opening implication of a new study in which college students were challenged to detect subtle changes in an image during four different test sessions on the same day.

[...] The scores of the participants who didn't nap declined throughout the final two sessions. In contrast, volunteers who took a 30-minute nap after completing the second practice session showed no ensuing performance dips. What's more, 1-hour nappers responded progressively faster and more accurately in the third and fourth sessions.

Last night, a friend of mine and I agreed to work through the exercises in Julia Cameron's Right to Write. I've never formally sat down and done all the exercises in a writing book. Let's see how it goes.

[Originally posted to Death Upon My Shoulder; subsequently merged into MemeMachineGo!]

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." &mdash Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891

Anonymous is "the place to anonymously post the thoughts that you wouldn't put in your own blog." How cool.

(Via Wander-Lust)

A little over a week ago, Yami of Green Gabbro put out a call for guest bloggers while she deals with finals and a field trip. I volunteered.

And while I'd had starting a separate blog in mind for a while, this was before I'd decided to actually begin Death Upon My Shoulder.

So now, in my third month of blogging, I'm posting to three blogs. With the passage of time, I hope there ceases to be a direct relationship there.

Meanwhile, check out the fun on Green Gabbro as Yami lets me, Kat of mindspillage.net and Simon of Malpractice play in her sandbox. You know, like cats.

I've been blogging up a storm at MMG! lately. I suspect I'm self-consciously overcompensating to avoid even the appearance of having bitten off more than I can chew in having multiple blogs. And as I just said there, for the next few weeks, I'm posting to Green Gabbro too. (Ha! I'm privy to what the categories mean!)

As is my wont on Wednesdays, I went to Funk Aerobics at the Y, and then got the new comics at Comic Relief. Yay! Grant Morrison's The Filth is out! Also spotted, but not yet purchased: Anarchy for the Masses: an Underground Guide to the Invisibles. I read some comics over an Egyptian Wrap at Razan's Organic Kitchen, and some more at Royal Grounds Coffee where I also read more of Redshift, and did the second 'initiation' (exercise) from Right to Write, and wrote in my journal.

Life is good.

[Originally posted to Death Upon My Shoulder; subsequently merged into MemeMachineGo!]

Cake thievery:

For four mornings in a row, Evaristo Perez went into the same pastry shop in Mexico City. Each morning he threatened a shop assistant with a knife and rushed off with a chocolate cake.

More SFtnal dystopia: talking margarine.

As you pass one of the tubs, a motion-sensor chip triggers a digital sound device that yells, "Butter!" And another chip makes the tub wiggle slightly.

CM+NT Jon Kramer, CEO of J.Brown/LMC, an arm of Grey Worldwide New York, said the idea is to interfere with the goal of most food shoppers: to rush through the store and get out within 20 minutes.

As this goes on, how are we going to distinguish the schizophrenics?

(Via New World Disorder)

Well looks like that drinking more tea than a London suburb habit of mine is going to pay off:

Results of a Chinese study published in the May 2002 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine showed that men and women who are long-time tea drinkers do seem to have an advantage in terms of bone mineral density over those who don’t habitually drink tea. That’s not the only recent good news about tea. A study from Harvard Medical School showed that tea drinkers among heart attack patients might survive longer than those who drink something else.

I bet weight-lifting is better for bone density, though.

I've posted more on Green Gabbro in the past couple of days than my own blogs.

There are actually a lot of things I have to say, but I've been busy doing things.

The unblogged life may not be worth living¹ but the unlived life is not worth blogging ².

1. I don't really believe this.
2. I really believe this.

[Originally posted to Death Upon My Shoulder; subsequently merged into MemeMachineGo!]

Baby Panic?

When was the last time you panicked and it turned out great? You hear, "I panicked and shot him, but that flash of metal I saw was just an Eskimo Pie." You never hear, "I panicked and earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Now I teach at Wellesley and summer in Nice."

I bring this up because I've read about a panic — spreading like a cold through a classroom — among young, professional women over whether they've waited too long to have children.

[...] People with kids have overwhelming cultural support for their lifestyle in our family-mad society. You will hear people stupidly tell a childless woman, "You should have kids," but you will never find them asking a mother of three, "Was that last one necessary?"

I find the article's attribution of the panic to Sylvia Ann Hewlett's Creating a Life odd, though, given that despite the advance publicity almost any author would kill for, it's not selling.

Dr. Weil on legalizing marijuana:

The federal government continues to fight an irrational war against medical marijuana, and the sick and struggling are its principal victims.

I learned recently that Peter McWilliams, author of Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do and lots of interesting books now free on his website, was a casualty of the Drug War (no excerpt — it's short; just read it.)

This entry's title owes, of course, to Robert Anton Wilson.

I suggest a simple experiment. Everytime you hear the expression "the war on drugs," change it mentally to "the war on some drugs." At the same time call up to mind all the Drug Stores and Bars/Saloons in your town or neighborhood and all the cigarette shelves in your friendly supermaket and remember that the government has started no war against them. When you understand that we have no "war on drugs" but only a "war on some drugs," consult the passages on double-think and duck-speak in Orwell's "1984" for further enlightenment on neurolinguistic mindwarping.

Myself, I'm a rarity among my generation for never having tried the stuff. But its illegality pisses me off.

(First link via Follow Me Here)

Your little will can't do anything. It takes Great Determination. Great Determination doesn't mean just you making an offer. It means the whole universe is behind you and with you — the birds, trees, sky, moon, and ten directions. — Katagiri Roshi, as quoted in Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones

[Originally posted to Death Upon My Shoulder; subsequently merged into MemeMachineGo!]

So what do women in San Francisco really want?

Forget men with hobbies. Honesty, compassion and sensitivity are nice. But what single females here want even more are men of means, according to a Cornell University biologist who recently took a look at human mating behavior by analyzing daily newspaper personal ads from 23 U.S. cities.

About four and a half years ago, I was in non-stop pain from shoulder to fingertip in both arms from RSI (a repetitive stress injury). An article I wrote about RSI a couple of years ago for Speculations, a science fiction writing magazine is available online.

We've all read countless stories in which the heroes struggled against impossible goals, insurmountable obstacles, and unbearable pain. But because our heroes were unswerving in their dedication to their cause, they triumphed against all odds. Most of us have probably even written that, too — it makes a good story.

Unfortunately, in real life, struggling your hardest is no guarantee of everything coming out all right in the end. The same workplace that's willing to overwork you to injury does not care about your well-being. They won't reward you for hurting yourself to meet your deadline. They'll only punish you for your now-diminished capacity to work.

Working yourself to injury is a game you can't win. Walk away from the game in time, and you can find a new job. Stay in it, and you might well find yourself in need of a new career.

I would probably emphasize some different things if I were writing it today, from a perspective of basically total recovery, and some day I will write more on the subject, but I still think the article is pretty good for its length.

The Exploratorium's Science of Cycling:

...cycling is more efficient than any other method of travel-- including walking!

[...] It takes less energy to bicycle one mile than it takes to walk a mile. In fact, a bicycle can be up to 5 times more efficient than walking. If we compare the amount of calories burned in bicycling to the number of calories an automobile burns, the difference is astounding. One hundred calories can power a cyclist for three miles, but it would only power a car 280 feet (85 meters)!

And much other cool info there!

If you're like me, you loathe spam. Spamgourmet is one of my favorite anti-spam measures.

Q. How does spamgourmet stop spam?
A. Simple. We delete all of our users' email.

It allows you to generate a functionally unlimited number of disposable email addresses that automatically expire after forwarding to you a number of messages you specify in advance, so you can give a working email address to a given site with impunity.

If you're even more like me, you'll want to use Mail::Audit to customize your own spam filter in Perl. But you're probably not that much like me.

I realize I haven't mentioned this here, yet. I passed my exam of 5/4 and I'm a certified personal trainer.

[Originally posted to Death Upon My Shoulder; subsequently merged into MemeMachineGo!]

And you won't find me admitting to many.

Being out late and biking home several miles leaves me too pumped up to sleep.

[Originally posted to Death Upon My Shoulder; subsequently merged into MemeMachineGo!]

Well he's a legend to those in a time of need
Yeah he's my dumpster diver dealer, recycler supreme
The man of the world is in the garbage can
My dumpster divin' man

There's treasure out there you just wouldn't believe
It oughta be a crime what some people leave
Post-modern man is goin' to survive
He'll just dumpster dive

— "Dumpster Diver" by Rebecca Riots

Salon has a dumpster diving article that gets it.

Dumpster divers also are siphoning off the one thing consumer capitalism cannot live without: waste. Without waste, consumer capitalism cannot charge for the luxury of the flawless tomato or the freshly baked bagel. According to Adam, there is "so much tied up in what I call the 'perfect capitalist vegetable.' If there's a blemish it's thrown out." Similarly, everything baked is tossed at the end of a day so that fresh things can be baked in the morning. In other words, without waste, conspicuous consumption becomes far less conspicuous.

(Via Eclectica)

Liars abound:

Most people lie in everyday conversation when they are trying to appear likable and competent [...] 60 percent of people lied at least once during a 10-minute conversation and told an average of two to three lies.

"Gonzo Science is the critical thinking of the skeptics crossed with the fearlessness and progressive thinking of the iconoclast." Cool critical science site.

The keepers of the scientific faith are the professional skeptics, represented by the unfortunately named organization CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal) and other groups. They fancy themselves the most rational rationalists, the most mechanical mechanists, and the most reductive reductionists. Their mission is to save us from the kook, the crank, the crackpot, and the pseudoscientist. But in their zeal to defend the mundane, they've developed a pathological aversion to the anomalous.

A gas giant in an orbit equivalent to Jupiter's has been found in a solar system 41 light years away, making its inner system a place to watch.

Jupiter "gravitationally vacuumed most of the debris out of the inner solar system. This made it possible for life to evolve" with only occasional collisions from asteroids compared with the outer planets.

Moreover, he continues, Jupiter would eject any planet with the highly elliptical, or eccentric, orbits typical of many extrasolar planets found so far. Thus the giant planet could have helped stabilize Earth in its life-favorable location.

Scientists have also spotted the smallest extrasolar planet yet, at just 40 times Earth's mass.

I'll be performing in a comedy improv show at Cafe Eclectica in Albany, CA (just north of Berkeley) at 8 PM on Saturday, June 22 as part of the Student Drivers troupe (the East Bay Improv Performance Improv Class). It's free. You're invited.

[Originally posted to Death Upon My Shoulder; subsequently merged into MemeMachineGo!]

An interesting hypothesis:

Ask any liberal to identify the force in American politics most intent on destroying progressive prospects and causes and you're sure to hear that it's the Bush administration or the Republican right or some such reactionary power. Let me gently suggest, however, that a very different force has wormed its way onto this list, and may indeed be right at the top: the Green Party.

I'm reminded of a Nina Paley cartoon which is [updated] right here. (Thanks, Jym! It's copyright Nina Paley, of course, with appropriate permission granted for its use here.)

unfortunately not on-line so I'm working from memory here. Nina's wearing an anarchy-symbol t-shirt, holding a sign saying "down with capitalism" and shouting "Smash the state! Power to the people!" A well-dressed hippie tells her "You'll never get anywhere with that oppositional attitude, Nina. If you want change, you've got to work within the system." Finally, we see Nina wearing a Garfield t-shirt, holding a sign saying "Maintain the Status Quo" and shouting "Oppress the poor!" The hippie returns, exclaiming "Nina! You've won!"

(American Prospect link via Follow Me Here)

Bush was the commencement speaker at Ohio State University. Some students and others planned to turn their back on him to protest some of his policies.

The Washington Post reports:

But immediately before class members filed into the giant football stadium, an announcer instructed the crowd that all the university's speakers deserve to be treated with respect and that anyone demonstrating or heckling would be subject to expulsion and arrest. The announcer urged that Bush be greeted with a "thunderous" ovation.

Here's a first-hand account by a back-turning attendee:

I asked him if I was under arrest, and he did not answer me. When we reached the exit, I asked the SS man why we had been ejected, and he told me we were being charged with disturbing the peace. If we chose to leave, the charges would be dropped immediately.

(Via Met4filter)