The Sensitive Cynic: 04/01/2005

Tired: local area networks; Wired: human area networks

Tell Microsoft to Reinstate Their Support for Workplace Fairness Legislation (HB 1515 in the Washington State Legislature)

From Boston Globe - NEW ENGLAND IN BRIEF, April 28, 2005:

SJC arguments will be shown online

Want to see the state's highest court in action without leaving your desk? If you have Internet access, you can do so starting on Monday [May 2], when Massachusetts will join about a dozen other states whose top courts broadcast oral arguments live on the Web. In a pilot project undertaken with Suffolk University Law School, the Supreme Judicial Court will begin webcasting oral arguments when the seven justices hold their May session next week. The gavel-to-gavel action can be viewed starting at 9 a.m. each day at www.suffolk.edu/sjc. One of the first cases to be broadcast on Monday will be a request by the executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts for the court to set aside its landmark ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.

That case is: SJC-09254: Doyle v. Goodrich:

Same-sex Marriage — This case deals with whether a citizen has standing to seek to stay the judgment in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health during the pendency of the process to amend the Massachusetts Constitution.

The Economics of Brains (aka "neuroeconomics")

This just in: Global terrorism rates are higher than any time since 1985. Thanks, Dubya!:

We are living in a nation run by overprivileged alcoholic frat boys and power-mad thugs. This much we know. This much we need to be reminded of, over and over again, until we finally wake up.

How many human genes can you add to rice before eating it makes you a cannibal?

Tired: cell towers; Wired: stratellites

Ocean Off Hawaii Filled With Wreckage:

"The Mahi, a scuttled Navy minesweeper off the Waianae Coast, has grown into a 190-foot artificial reef that is home to corals, leaf scorpion fish, pufferfish, triggerfish, eels and magnificent eagle rays. The nearby LCU, a 100-foot landing craft utility ship, houses two timid white-tipped reef sharks that flee when divers approach."

MIT Technology Review: Science Wants to Be Free -- an interview with Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a founder of the Public Library of Science, "a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource."

MIT Technology Review: 10 Emerging Technologies:

Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world:

"Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed."

This story has also been Slashdotted.

CTV.ca: Deadly influenza virus shipments missing: WHO:

"We don't know where these boxes got lost, but the investigation into what has happened between the shipment of these panels and their non-arrival is ranking very high on our 'to do' list," WHO influenza chief Klaus Stohr said, referring to the Mexico and Lebanon shipments.
[...]
The five other nations that had received the samples were Saudi Arabia, Bermuda, Brazil, Israel and Japan.

Stohr said four of the five labs in Saudi Arabia that received the samples had destroyed them. The other four countries had not yet confirmed that they followed up on instructions to destroy the samples.

Harboring biological weapons of mass destruction, eh? Better tell the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization to start drawing up their post-conflict plans.

ThisisLondon: Toothpaste cancer alert:

"Researchers have discovered that triclosan, a chemical in [many toothpastes and anti-bacterial cleaning products], can react with water to produce chloroform gas. If inhaled in large enough quantities, chloroform can cause depression, liver problems and, in some cases, cancer. "
[...]
Triclosan is in:

Dentyl mouthwash
Colgate Total fresh stripe
Colgate Total
Sensodyne Total Care
Tesco own brand toothpaste
Mentadent P
Aquafresh

Newsday.com: Slime-mold beetles wear politically prominent names:

Agathidium bushi Miller and Wheeler
Agathidium cheneyi Miller and Wheeler
Agathidium rumsfeldi Miller and Wheeler

From MIT Tech. Review: Picking Your Brain:

"Research is being funded by the Departments of Homeland Security and of Defense for things like lie detection technologies using functional MRI or near-infrared light. These technologies can be used coercively in a way that polygraphs, for example, cant. If you're not willing to cooperate with a polygraph, there's really nothing they can do. But you aren't necessarily going to need to cooperate for some of these technologies; they can, theoretically, be used covertly. They may be used on suspected criminals or enemies of the state, or on you and me when we're going through airports."

So don't even think about jokes about bombs when going through airport security.

Attention stalkers and pedophiles! If you type your target's phone number into Google, it will helpfully provide you with a map showing the location of their house!

TV TURNOFF WEEK 2005: April 25 to May 1. Can you do it?

The Nation: Detained Without Charge:

Several weeks ago, two 16 year-old Muslim girls, one from Bangladesh and the other from Guinea, were arrested in New York City on the specious grounds that they were potential suicide bombers. Neither of the girls has been formally charged with any crime, but both have been detained indefinitely in facilities far away from their homes and families.

Details and news at http://www.detainthis.blogspot.com/.

From Meridian Bioscience Targets Biodefense Market by Providing Contract Services for BEI Resources:

"CINCINNATI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 9, 2005--Meridian Bioscience, Inc., Cincinnati, Ohio (NASDAQ:VIVO) today announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Viral Antigens, Inc. (VAI) has entered the emerging biodefense market by providing contract services for Biodefense and Emerging Infections (BEI) Resources. BEI Resources was established by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to acquire, authenticate, and produce reagents for scientists to carry out basic research and develop improved diagnostic tests, vaccines, and therapies as tools against potential agents of bioterrorism or organisms that cause emerging diseases such as SARS, West Nile Virus, and Lyme Disease."

... and maybe also that pesky virus that caused the 1957 “Asian flu” pandemic that Meridian Bioscience has been sending out to labs worldwide since last October, until it was detected by a "socialist" medical lab in Canada.

NPR: The 'Conspiracy' Art of Mark Lombardi

From CBC News: Concerns Raised About 1997 U.S. Mad Cow Tests:

"There have been too many times where information or tissues or other evidence has just sort of disappeared, fallen through the cracks."

From theinquirer.net: Internet2 legally hacked by music industry:

"The question is how the music and film industry monitored file sharing in what is supposed to be a closed network environment. "

From Washington Post: Music Industry Sues Hundreds Of File Sharers At Colleges:

"The RIAA would not say how it infiltrated the Internet2 network but said it was alerted to its existence as a song-sharing hub by articles in college newspapers"

So now all the Internet2 users must be looking at each other sideways and squinty-eyed, trying to figure out which of their colleagues might be moles for the RIAA...

The Petroleum Price Fact Sheet from the Energy Information Administration at the U.S. Dept. of Energy charts the prices of gas, diesel, crude oil, fuel oil, and heating oil over time, all trending markedly upward since 2002, followed by improbably rosy projections for 2006.

From Army reservist witnesses war crimes:

"They opened fire on the prisoners with the machine guns. They shot twelve and killed three. I know because I talked to the guy who did the killing. He showed me these grisly photographs, and he bragged about the results. 'Oh,' he said, 'I shot this guy in the face. See, his head is split open.' He talked like the Terminator. 'I shot this guy in the groin, he took three days to bleed to death.' I was shocked. This was the nicest guy you would ever want to meet. He was a family man, a really courteous guy, a devout Christian. I was stunned and said to him: 'You shot an unarmed man behind barbed wire for throwing a stone.' He said, 'Well, I knelt down. I said a prayer, stood up and gunned them all down.' "