EcoCyc: Encyclopedia of Escherichia coli Genes and Metabolism -- as seen in Wired News

A Good Sequence, Easy to Dance To

From The Ithaca Journal, May 25, 2002: "Fresh memories of war":

In an April interview with The Ithaca Journal at his family's Cayuga Heights home, [Army Private Matt] Guckenheimer, 22, shared his experiences during Operation Anaconda. He was sent on March 6 in a company of more than 100 soldiers to participate in the largest U.S.-led ground engagement in Eastern Afghanistan.

"We were told there were no friendly forces," said Guckenheimer, an assistant gunner with the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum. "If there was anybody there, they were the enemy. We were told specifically that if there were women and children to kill them."

Thanks to whatreallyhappened.com for the link.

From Andante Magazine, May 7, 2002: "A New Production of Idomeneo Prompts Outrage in Paris":

Perhaps it was the dancing jellyfish ... or the stuffed goat that spewed blood at the leading tenor ... or star mezzo-soprano Susan Graham being wrapped up like a mummy.

Greenpeace: take action against food dictators and plutonium shipments.

Just a reminder that Fathers' Day is June 16...

U.S. Troops murder villagers in BANDI TEMUR, Afghanistan, May 26

No warnings? From Newsweek, Sept. 24, 2001: Bush: ‘We’re At War’:

On Sept. 10, NEWSWEEK has learned, a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.

Thanks to buzzflash.com for the link.

From a Cableworld interview with Jamie Kellner, the chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting System:

"I'm a big believer we have to make television more convenient or we will drive the penetration of PVRs and things like that, which I'm not sure is good for the cable industry or the broadcast industry or the networks. [...] Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming."

At the EFF Action Center, you can send Jamie an email or (better) a fax telling him what you think. Or you can send snail mail to:

CEO Jamie Kellner
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
One CNN Center
P.O. Box 105366
Atlanta, Georgia 30348

From katecohen.com:

At Call To Protect, you can donate your de-activated [wireless] phone to victims of domestic violence, providing them with a lifeline to emergency help.

WTO to announce schedule for disbanding! Sounds almost too good to be true... hmm... seems to be a bit of a version skew or something between gatt.org and wto.org...

But gatt.org must be legit -- it's listed as a SUPRANATIONAL ORGANIZATION at
HierosGamos > Areas of Practice > Consumer Center.

And another thing... in wto.org's IMPORTANT COPYRIGHT NOTICE, it says:

"Other websites wishing to link to this site are also asked to inform us."

This made me curious, so I did 2 quick Google searches for:

• link:wto.org (pages linking to wto.org: 46)
• link:gatt.org (pages linking to gatt.org: 490)

peace-action.org: "Nuclear Reductions Treaty Offers Few Nuclear Reductions"

From Ray Bradbury Quotations:

Science-fiction is the law-abiding citizen of imaginative literature, obeying the rules, be they physical, social, or psychological, keeping regular hours, eating punctual meals; predictable, certain, sure. Fantasy, on the other hand, is criminal. Each fantasy assaults and breaks a particular law; the crime being hidden by the author's felicitous thought and style which cover the body before blood is seen. [...] Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.

(From the Introduction to The Circus of Dr. Lao)

Are you a "cat person"? Are you sure?

KnowledgeBooks.com -- Natural Language Processing Tools for text categorization, key phrase extraction, stemming, and part of speech tagging.

From NASA: Project Plan for Breakthrough Propulsion Physics (BPP) :

The BPP Project is required to: "Conduct research into potential in-space propulsion systems beyond the capabilities provided by Newtonian mechanics". [...] This includes the study of gravity and electromagnetism, vacuum fluctuation energy, warp drives and wormholes, and superluminal quantum effects.

Wired News: 'Lifters': An Idea in the Clouds -- DIY antigravity? See also:

• JLN Labs > Lifter Project:
  • How to Build yourself a Basic Lifter
  • Basic Lifter Demonstration
• American Antigravity > Gravity-Drive Testing Guide
• Transdimensional Technologies > Lifter Page

CNN Splash Page of Terror -- all terror, all the time.

From ZDNet News: "Psst... I know your password":

Many security administrators focus their efforts on teaching users how to use various mnemonics to create strong, but memorable, passwords. A common technique takes the first or last letter of each word in a saying or phrase familiar to the user. For example, by using random capitalization and substituting some punctuation marks and digits for letters, "Friends don't let friends give tech advice" might become "fD!Fg7a."

From forwarded email:

The following letter was read by its author, Claire Braz-Valentine, at this year's "In Celebration of the Muse" at Cabrillo College. A woman of 60+ years, conservatively dressed, she was the highlight of the evening.

An Open Letter to John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United States:

[On January 28, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he spent $8,000 of taxpayer's money for drapes to cover up the exposed breast of The Spirit of Justice, an 18-foot aluminum statue of a woman that stands in the Department of Justice's Hall of Justice.]

John, John, John...you've got your priorities all wrong.

While men fly airplanes into skyscrapers, dive bomb the pentagon, while they stick explosives into their shoes, and then book a seat right next to us, while they hide knives in their luggage, steal kids on school buses, take little girls from their beds at night, drive trucks into our state capital buildings, while our president calls dangerous men all over the world evildoers and devils, while we live in the threat of biological warfare, nuclear destruction, annihilation, you are out buying yardage to save Americans from the appalling alarming, abominable aluminum alloy of evil, that terrible ten foot tin tittie.

You might not be able to find Bin Laden...but you sure as hell found the hooter in the hall of justice.

It's not that we aren't grateful.

But while we were begging the women of Afghanistan to not cover up their faces, you are begging your staff members to just cover up that nipple to save the American people from that monstrous metal mammary.

How can we ever thank you?

So, in your office every morning in your secret prayer meeting, while an American woman is sexually assaulted every 6 seconds, while anthrax floats around the post office and settles in the chest of senior citizens, you've got another chest on your mind.

While American sons arrive home in body bags and heat seeking missiles fly around a foreign country looking for any warm body, you think of another body.

And you pray for the biggest bra in the world John because you see that breast on the spirit of justice in the spirit of your own inhibited sexuality.

And when we women see our grandmothers, our mothers, our daughters, our granddaughters, our sisters, ourselves; when we women see that statue --- the spirit of justice --- we see the spirit of strength --- the spirit of survival.

While every day we view innocent bodies dragged out of rubble and women and children laid out like thin limp dolls and baptized into death as collateral damage, and the hollow-eyed Afghani mother's milk has dried up underneath her burka in famine...in shame...and her children are dead at her breast.

While you look at that breast John, that jug on the spirit of justice, and deal with your thoughts of lust and sex and nakedness, we see it as a testimony to motherhood.

And you see it as a tit.

It's not the money it cost. It's the message you send:

We've got the right to live in freedom.

We've got the right to cheat Americans out of millions of dollars and then just not want to tell Congress about it.

We've got the right to drop bombs night and day on a small country that has no army, no navy, no military at all, because we've got the right to bear arms, but we just better not even think about the right to bare breasts.

So now John you can be photographed while you stand there and talk about guns and bombs and poisons without the breast appearing over your right shoulder, without that bodacious bosom bothering you, and we just wanted to tell you in the spirit of justice, in the spirit of truth:

John there is still one very big boob left standing there in that picture.

Claire Braz-Valentine

commondreams.org: Riddle of the Spores: Why Has the FBI Investigation into the Anthrax Attacks Stalled? The Evidence Points One Way

savannahnow.com, May 16, 2002: Fort Stewart soldier jailed in Florida on $5 million bond

Where is Mary Williams? (formerly of the Cam Bey Senior Living Facility, Coupeville, WA)

From Wired News: "Why Does School Own Clone Patent?":

"The U of M[issouri] patent is for the process and not for the product," said R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and medical ethics at the University of Wisconsin. "It is akin to getting a patent on a new kind of manufacturing technique."

Looks like U of M and its shadowy patent partner Biotransplant, Inc. had better hurry up and sue the 5 research teams that are in the worldwide race to produce the first cloned human baby. Maybe they'll let it keep a humouse for a pet -- or a playmate.

Wired News: "Consciousness Based on Wireless?" Could Johnjoe McFadden's "CEMI (conscious electromagnetic information) field theory" provide an explanation for the apparently beneficial effects of trans-cranial magnetic stimulation in the treatment of depression?

Wired News: Help James Burke Build the Web of Knowledge

WAR and LAW LEAGUE: Bush must not scrap treaties without lawful authority; Ask the Senate to hold hearings

Amnesty International USA: Restrict Military Expansion in Colombia

From Infoshop News: "August Memo Focused on Attacks in U.S.":

What's a bigger priority? The thousands of Arab-Americans and visiting workers who have been rounded up? Or some inconsistencies in the government story? How about the war in Afghanistan, or the intervention in Colombia, or the assault on civil liberties in the U.S. I'd rather see the left focus on those important things than play some conspiracy game.

Tired: melatonin -- Wired: melanotan.
Future drug slang: "all-nighter" = melanotan + provigil + viagra.

My next cell phone is going to have a Fastap Keypad.

DRCNet.org: "Massachusetts Vote Imperils All of State's Methadone Clinics; Supporters Mobilizing"

Thank you, Katha -- one more reason why Katha Pollitt is a national treasure.

Hindustantimes.com, May 17: Ten killed as US warplane bombs [Bal Khel village] in eastern Afghanistan

Amnesty International USA: Urge President Bush to raise the issue of Russian human rights violations against civilians in Chechnya when he meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on May 23.

Want to See Some Really Sick Art?

infoAnarchy: "Freelance Writer Paul Trummel Jailed Indefinitely for Web Postings". Trummel's site is contracabal.org. See also National Writers' Union: "Defend Legitimacy of Freelance Journalists".

Seattle Mariner's pitcher Jeff Nelson's Bone Chips were up for grabs -- briefly -- on ebay ("Winning bidder will agree to not use bone chips for cloning or DNA extraction purposes"), and bidding had reached $23,600.00 when management pulled the plug, intoning that "EBay does not allow the listing of body parts on its site". Note that skulls and skeletons that are used for educational purposes may be listed on eBay. But celebrity bone chips for charity -- no, that's just going too far.

Mark my calendar: Boston premiere of "Screamin' Jay Hawkins — I Put a Spell on Me", by Greek filmmaker Nicolas Triandfyllidis. When: Monday, 6/17 at 7pm. Where: Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard Street, Brookline, MA

Salon.com: "Use the blog, Luke", by Steven Johnson

If you combine Siemens with Ovum, do you get a whole new generation of cell phones?

Strangelets from outer space attacking Earth!! Where's that Tiny Cosmic Missle Defense (TCMD) when you need it?? Well, at least it isn't planet-sterilizing radiation from the collapse of a nearby supermassive star.

Patient's Hunger Strike for Medical Cannabis Enters Fourth Week

New Scientist: "US non-lethal weapon reports suppressed" by the National Academy of Sciences.

Amnesty International USA: Send a message to His Excellency Ayatollah Sayed 'Ali Khamenei, Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran: Stop the Execution by Stoning of Two Women, Ferdows B and Sima, in Iran

Immigrant Detention: Action Alerts

Meet Mr. Virgiliu Pop, PhD Candidate at Glasgow University, known to officials from the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs as "The Man who Owns the Sun". Not to be confused with his arch nemesis Mr. Dennis Hope, Head Cheese at the Lunar Embassy ("leaders in extraterrestrial real estate"), who owns the Moon.

From NYTimes: May 4, 2002: "The Place for Trips of the Mind-Bending Kind":

Kathleen Harrison, a California ethnobotanist who ate salvia [divinorum] leaves in a traditional ceremony near Huautla [de Jimenez, Mexico], described being transported into "the presence of a great female being, a 20-foot-high woman," and feeling like a plant in this spirit's garden. Daniel Siebert, another California ethnobotanist, had a different reaction to a concentrated extract of salvinorum. Reporting on a scholarly Web site he maintains on the plant, www.sagewisdom.org, he said it plunged him into "a confused, fast-moving state of consciousness with absolutely no idea where my body or for that matter my universe had gone."

Infoshop News: May 7, 2002: Kristen Schurr's report from inside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem

ACLU Press Release: 05-02-02 -- ACLU of MA Sues Holliston School Officials for Punishing Students Over Protest Signs

Enron Forced Up California Energy Prices, Documents Show

From nydailynews.com, May 06, 2002: "INS, in a Panic, Wants List Back":

The Immigration and Naturalization Service gave congressional investigators a top-secret list of Sept. 11 detainees in an apparent breach of Justice Department policy. Now, frantic department officials are beseeching the General Accounting Office to give it back. The GAO is probing the treatment of the hundreds of detainees at the request of Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.).

But wait there's more:

From caller.com, May 10, 2002: "It's time to come clean about those detainees":

On behalf of members of Congress, GAO had been pressuring the Immigration and Naturalization Service for the list, and, coincidentally or not, on the same day the administration lost another court case on the secret detentions, the INS turned it over - without checking with the Justice Department. When Justice squawked, the GAO, which answers to Congress, not the executive branch, returned the list without letting members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees see it.

RealVideo file of Dubya claiming that Japan and America have been allies for "a century and a half". Thanks to whatreallyhappened.com for the link.

From Boston Globe, May 5, 2002: Race barrier at prom ends:

"The school has 420 students, 226 of them black. Nearly 75 percent of the juniors and seniors supported the proposal for one [integrated] prom."

commondreams.org: "Profiles in Courage: US Lawmakers Stand Up for Moral Justice in Middle East"

IndyMedia: 11 INTERNATIONALS JOIN PALESTINIANS TRAPPED IN CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY. See also International Solidarity Movement (ISM)

Workers World: Boston protest defends immigrant workers

"A Cartographic Approach to Visualizing Conference Abstracts" (PDF), by André Skupin, University of New Orleans. Found via the Visualising Information Spaces page of The Geography of Cyberspace Directory.

washingtonpost.com: "The Nocebo Effect: Placebo's Evil Twin"

My visit to the The Boston Wort Processors page led me to NERAX 2002, May 1-5, at the George Dilboy VFW Post, 371 Summer Street, Davis Square, Somerville, MA.

Slashdot: "Deep Linking" Controversy Renewed in Texas. See also:

• Public Citizen, May 9, 2002: "Texas Newspaper Attempts to Stifle Free Speech"
• chillingeffects.org/linking
• discussion at MetaFilter

Take a close look at Item B.4 in DallasNews.com's Terms of Service page. Then contact DallasNews.com and/or its corporate masters at Belo corporation, to tell them what you think.

Alison and Andy's wedding webpage -- counting down to September 14, 2002, in Sudbury, MA.