How Will the Universe End? - A cosmic detective story about the demise of the world, in three parts. By Jim Holt

How Will the Universe End? - A cosmic detective story about the demise of the world, in three parts. By Jim Holt

Before I was going to start worrying about the extinction of absolutely everything in some inconceivably distant epoch, I thought it would be a good idea to talk to a few leading cosmologists. Just how certain were they that the cosmos was undergoing a disastrous runaway expansion? Was intelligent life really doomed to perish as a result? How could they, as scientists, talk about the ultimate future of "civilization" and "consciousness" with a straight face?

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This guy is good. He covers a lot of fun cosmology in a very short essay, and he manates to talk with some great physicists. I really enjoyed this, and his prior essays are fun to. I was particularly struck by a phrase in his Christmas essay:

...You can believe, as I do, that the universe is presided over by a being that is 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective (which explains pretty much everything)

He's got a good point there. I'd tended to assume a disinterested deity, or trillions of short-lived deities with very odd interestes, but malevolence and ineffectiveness has a certain symmetry with human affairs.

Republican party: anti-gay yes, but also anti-adoption?

NYT: Senate Hears Testimony on a Gay Marriage Amendment

Lawmakers and other supporters of the proposed amendment disputed the notion that it amounted to discrimination and said that accusation was offensive. They said their goal was to place in the Constitution a recognition of the traditional view of marriage and family.

"Children are raised expecting to have a biological mother and father," said the Rev. Richard Richardson, president of a child welfare agency in Boston and a leader of the Black Ministerial Alliance of Greater Boston. "It is not just society — it is biology, it is basic human instinct."

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When John McCain ran for the 2000 republican presidential nomination in South Carolina, his daughter appeared beside him. She was born in Bangladesh and was adopted by McCains. The usual story is that he lost that race in part because of a Rove-inspired push poll that alleged his daughter was an illegitimate offspring of a liaison with a black woman. (Since it was widely understood in South Carolina that this was true of Strom Thurmond it may have had some superficial credibility.) I wonder, however, if the voters were really that uninformed. I wonder if they knew his daughter was adopted -- and perhaps that was the real problem for them.

Now, in the context of the anti-gay amendment, some of these sentiments are leaking out. Reverend Richardson, I suspect, is only speaking plainly what many socially conservative Republicans believe. Like tribalists everwhere they may find the concept of adoption profoundly unsettling -- particularly intraethnic adoption.

Child bearing and raising is undoubtedly the true tender issue in discussions of gay marriage. It's arguably a winning issue for Republicans ... but it has risk for them too. It will be hard to keep the message from straying into an attack on adoption by heterosexual couples. Many of those couples might vote Republican, but not if their family comes under attack.

Rove may not like how this goes.

Salon.com | Theocons vs. neocons: The contradictions within the republican party

Salon.com | Theocons vs. neocons

Theocons vs. neocons
With Mad Mel scaring the Jewish vote and Bush pandering to his theocratic base, the Republicans are quickly losing their secular swing voters.

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I like the term "theocons". It's definitely catchier than "religious right" and more specific than Evangelicals. This is a scary group. At their core they believe Bush is the "Anointed President", an agent of God's will who will lead the forces of righteousness against the armies of the Antichrist. He is the end time president.

The Republican party may, at last, be coming apart at the seams. The ultra wealthy think the Bush economic policy emperils their children, their society, and their fortune. Large corporations like the service they get as corporations, but their executives don't enjoy paying bribes, and don't like anti-Gay policies. Economic conservatives are in shock. Foreign policy conservatives feel Bush/Cheney blew it in Iraq, and vaporized American credibility around the world. Libertarians worry about loss of privacy and the reincarnation of "Total Information Awareness". Intelligent conservatives and historians look at Mel Gibson and think neo-Fascism.

For all the talk about Karl Rove's genius, Bush may be blowing his reelection. Since he's evidently a very stubborn ideologue, I can only hope he'll persist.

Building a better memory

Wired News: The Masters of Memory Lane

Hagwood said he wasn't born with an outstanding ability to memorize, and claims anyone can learn the skill. There are specific techniques that mnemonic masters use -- such as associating images with each number and suit when memorizing card positions -- but in general it all comes down to keeping your brain synapses in good working order.

To do that, Hagwood, who gives seminars on how to improve memory skills, advises people to use their non-dominant hand in daily chores, do crosswords and puzzles, play chess, take a different route on your daily commute, learn to tango, play an instrument and speak another language.

No matter how challenging your job is, it isn't demanding enough. Brains thrive on constant challenge, so presenting them with the same activities that they already excel at doesn't keep the gray matter in top shape. You can, however, substitute the waltz for tango lessons -- just ensure that you have a good balance of fresh thinking and activities built into your life.

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I have wondered, is my deteriorating memory merely middle aged senescence, or has heavy use of PIMs, PDAs, and other data management systems accelerated the atrophy? Hmmmm.

The power of the internet combined with social networks ... it still stuns me

MacInTouch Home Page

John Faughnan emailed us about a QuickTime 6.5 EXIF problem he has been tracking down with Thorsten Lemke, author of Graphic Converter:

When you import an image using Image Capture or iPhoto, both of which use Quicktime 6.5, the EXIF header for image orientation is duplicated and one version is incorrect. You can see the two tags using EXIF Viewer.

A portrait image taken with a camera oriented vertically that supports the EXIF orientation tag, after importing via Image Capture, has these duplicate tags (comments mine):

Image Orientation: Top, Left-Hand [I think this is the misleading tag]
Image Orientation: Right-Hand, Top [I think this tag reflects the state of the image]

This image will display the following ways...

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The above was featured prominently on Ric Ford's Macintouch this morning. It was read by perhaps 10,000-100,000 Macintosh geeks, who in turn probably act as a knowledge resource for 50,000 - 500,000 Macintosh users. That's amazing enough, but the full story shows the power of the internet, of authentication and reputation, and of social networks. Here's a quick outline:

0. I've never met Ric Ford (Macintouch) or Thorsten Lemke (Graphic Converter). However, both men know me by correspondence over the past several years. I have a recognizable name, and I always make my identity clear. They have a certain degree of trust in what I write. Ric Ford and his co-editors at Macintouch know and respect Thorstent Lemke's reputation -- but they've probably never seen him.

1. I notice that my digital images are not being rotated or handled correctly during image import. After a month of dealing with this hassle, it really starts to annoy me. I correspond with Thorsten, but we don't yet understand the problem.

2. Google searches provide no explanation. I puzzle a bit and correspond some more. It occurs to me that the only possible explanation is that there are two orientation messages with different values. Thorsten confirms this is true (I don't know if he already knew the problem -- his english is far better than my German but it is not his first language). He sends me a version of his software to test -- it doesn't quite do the trick and I suggest an alternative approach. Twelve hours later he sends me a version of Graphic Converter with a good workaround for the bug in the Apple software -- not quite what I suggested, but very workable.

So in the space of several hours, across the world, 3 people who've never met one another identify an annoying bug in one of Apple's core software applications, educate most of the Macintosh users, put pressure on Apple to fix it, and adapt a well regarded image management application to fix the problem. It's not the internet alone, it's the internet plus social networks and reputations.

I'm old enough to remember when email was available only to researchers. This is such a different world.

And now, unleash the dogs of democracy ...

Big Margins in Key States Assure Kerry the Nomination

Senator John Kerry blazed to victories in Democratic primaries from New York to California today, according to early returns and surveys of voters leaving the polls, effectively capturing his party's presidential nomination and setting up an eight-month general election battle between President Bush and Mr. Kerry, the senator from Massachusetts.

and from the local paper

... [Caucus] Turnout was heavy, estimated at well over twice the 12,000 who turned out in 2000. DFL Party Chairman Mike Erlandson said it was the best caucus showing since the Vietnam era. At his own caucus, attendance was 177, compared to seven people four years ago.

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The war starts Thursday with a deluge of Bush attack ads. It will be one hell of a campaign. Most of us have been keeping our powder dry, waiting for the nominee.

I attended my first ever caucus (DFL) in Minnesota. The traffic was backed up for about a mile and most of us parked 1/4 to 1/2 mile away from the school. Inside the school rooms were packed. Kerry won handily in our precinct. There was little sign of surprise, nor of either celebration or disappointment. It was merely the start of a vast struggle.

I did get to see the Minnesota DFL caucus in action. I now understand why the state party has such a bizarre collection of resolutions and "planks". By the time I left, fairly early in the evening, the residual group would have passed a resolution mandating lifetime employment and shutting down all trade with the rest of the world. I can see why democrats elected in Minnesota almost always win without the party's endorsement.

Krugman: The corruption of Alan Greenspan

Krugman, NYT: Maestro of Chutzpah

The Bush White House has made it clear that it will destroy the careers of scientists, budget experts, intelligence operatives and even military officers who don't toe the line. But Mr. Greenspan should have been immune to such pressures, and he should have understood that the peculiarity of his position — as an unelected official who wields immense power — carries with it an obligation to stand above the fray. By using his office to promote a partisan agenda, he has betrayed his institution, and the nation.

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The Bush administration is making the tax code less progressive and is reducing the subsidies that flow from the wealthy to the poor. This is ideologically consistent. They believe that that people should "stand on their own feet". The unstated corollary is that those who fall deserve their fate.

This is compassionate conservatism. I suppose the compassion part is tastefully looking away rather than tossing cake crumbs.

Krugman is angry about Greenspan's betrayals. Given Greenspan's heritage as a Randian (devotee of Ayn Rand, the apostle of libertarianism) I'd say he's returned to his roots. Rand would approve, she had no patience for the weak.

An end to spam? But not a new idea ...

iTNews

Microsoft is suggesting a new tactic in the fight against spam. Execs have proposed a broad industry plan to publish technical details about big companies' email servers, in an attempt to block fake email.

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Differential filtering based on reputation management of an authenticated sending service. I proposed this in usenet posts over two years ago and on my spam page. I suspect someone else proposed it about 8 years ago.

This will work. It doesn't require Palladium. It doesn't require all of us to have a Passport or manage personal keys. It doesn't require ePostage or load metering. It's not fancy, it's not automatic, but it will work. It moves the user authentication problem to the sending service, which is where it belongs.

In big complex world, authentication and reputation are fundamental. With spam as with junk products as with brands -- it's a recurrent pattern.

Mars probe Opportunity -- plop into a martian swamp?

Mars: A Water World? Evidence Mounts, But Scientists Remain Tight-Lipped

[UPDATE: unless you're a geologist, the actual news conference on 3/2/04 was a bit of a downer for we overly exciteable space nuts. There was lots of water at the landing site .... once.]

PASADENA, California -- Evidence that suggests Mars was once a water-rich world is mounting as scientists scrutinize data from the Mars Exploration rover, Opportunity, busily at work in a small crater at Meridiani Planum. That information may well be leading to a biological bombshell of a finding that the red planet has been, and could well be now, an extraterrestrial home for life.

There is a palpable buzz here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California that something wonderful is about to happen in the exploration of Mars.

... what has truly been uncovered by the robot at Meridiani Planum is under judicious and tight-lipped review.

Those findings and their implications are headed for a major press conference, rumored to occur early next week ...

It is clear that Opportunity's Earth-to-Mars hole in one -- bouncing into a small crater complete with rock outcrop -- has also proven to be a scientific bulls-eye. The robot is wheeling about the crater that is some 70 feet (22 meters) across and 10 feet (3 meters) deep.

It is also apparent that there is a backlog of scientific measurements that Mars rover scientists working Opportunity have pocketed and kept close to their lab coats.

For one, the rover found the site laden with hematite -- a mineral that typically, but not always -- forms in the presence of water. Then there are the puzzling spherules found in the soil and embedded in rock. They too might be water-related, but also could be produced by the actions of a meteor impact or a spewing volcano.

A few spheres have been sliced in half and their insides imaged. Patches of these spherules, or "berries" as some call them, have undergone spectrometer exam to discern their mineral and chemistry makeup. Close-up photos of soil and rock have also shown thread-like features and even an oddly shaped object that looks like Rotini pasta

There is speculation that the soil underneath the wheels of both Spirit and Opportunity rovers contains small amounts of water mixed with salt in a brine. That brew of dissolved salts keeps the mixture well below the freezing point of pure water, permitting it to exist in liquid form...

... One scientist eagerly awaiting the news from Mars, particularly from Opportunity, is Gilbert Levin. He is Chairman of the Board and Executive Officer for Science of Spherix Incorporated in Beltsville, Maryland.

Levin is a former Viking Mars lander investigator. He has long argued that his 1976 Viking Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment found living microorganisms in the soil of Mars....

Levin points to Opportunity imagery that offers conclusive proof of standing liquid water and running water on a cold Mars. 

Other images show the rover tracks clearly are being made in "mud", with water being pressed out of that material, Levin said. "That water promptly freezes and you can see reflecting ice. That's clearly ice. It could be nothing else," he said, "and the source is the water that came out of the mud."

As for the spherical objects found at the Opportunity site, Levin has a thought.

"I wonder on Mars if it can rain upwards," he said. The idea is that subsurface water comes up through the soils and then freezes when it gets to the surface.

"Maybe these little spherules form just like raindrops form up above," Levin explained.

Levin said that brine on Mars is a code word for liquid water. He senses that great care is being taken by rover scientists because the liquid water issue starts the road to life.

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The author of this space.com article is rather excited. He's on the verge of declaring that Opportunity is sitting atop a Martian swamp infested with extremophile bacteria. We'll see soon enough if Levin receives a vindication rare in history.

Seymour Hersh (New Yorker) The spring offensive for bin Laden, and the nuclear chasm opening up ...

The New Yorker

This Hersh article may explain a few things, including why the military is more confident about getting bin Laden, and why bin Laden's rumored to have fled Pakistan for Afghanistan. Bin Laden aside, the nuclear black market story is going from big to unprecedented, with astonishingly little popular excitement. This may be one of those "I really prefer not to know" situations for most Americans. As I've noted before, the Malaysian connection is extremely interesting and very scary. They have the technology to do miniaturized bombs.

The spring offensive has been rumored for months. It sounds bigger all the time; it may be driving the hurried exit from Iraq almost as much as Bush's reelection campaign. Of course Iraq was supposed to have been such a cakewalk that our forces were to have been freed up last year and rested by now.

As with all Hersh exclusives, one wonders who in the CIA is leaking this and why ... How much is real and how much deception ...

Emphases mine. Note bin Laden's goatherds are now all dead.

THE DEAL by SEYMOUR M. HERSH - The New Yorker
Why is Washington going easy on Pakistan’s nuclear black marketers?
Issue of 2004-03-08
Posted 2004-03-01

On February 4th, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is revered in Pakistan as the father of the country’s nuclear bomb, appeared on a state-run television network in Islamabad and confessed that he had been solely responsible for operating an international black market in nuclear-weapons materials. His confession was accepted by a stony-faced Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s President, who is a former Army general, and who dressed for the occasion in commando fatigues. The next day, on television again, Musharraf, who claimed to be shocked by Khan’s misdeeds, nonetheless pardoned him, citing his service to Pakistan (he called Khan "my hero"). Musharraf told the Times that he had received a specific accounting of Khan’s activities in Iran, North Korea, and Malaysia from the United States only last October. If they knew earlier, they should have told us, he said. Maybe a lot of things would not have happened.

It was a make-believe performance in a make-believe capital. In interviews last month in Islamabad, a planned city built four decades ago, politicians, diplomats, and nuclear experts dismissed the Khan confession and the Musharraf pardon with expressions of scorn and disbelief. For two decades, journalists and American and European intelligence agencies have linked Khan and the Pakistani intelligence service, the I.S.I. (Inter-Service Intelligence), to nuclear-technology transfers...

A Bush Administration intelligence officer with years of experience in nonproliferation issues told me last month, One thing we do know is that this was not a rogue operation...The intelligence officer went on, We had every opportunity to put a stop to the A. Q. Khan network fifteen years ago. Some of those involved today in the smuggling are the children of those we knew about in the eighties. It’s the second generation now.

...Musharraf, who seized power in a coup d’état in 1999, has been a major ally of the Bush Administration in the war on terrorism. According to past and present military and intelligence officials, however, Washington’s support for the pardon of Khan was predicated on what Musharraf has agreed to do next: look the other way as the U.S. hunts for Osama bin Laden in a tribal area of northwest Pakistan dominated by the forbidding Hindu Kush mountain range, where he is believed to be operating...

Musharraf has proffered other help as well. A former senior intelligence official said to me, Musharraf told us, ‘We’ve got guys inside. The people who provide fresh fruits and vegetables and herd the goats’ for bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers. It’s a quid pro quo: we’re going to get our troops inside Pakistan in return for not forcing Musharraf to deal with Khan.

The spring offensive could diminish the tempo of American operations in Iraq. It’s going to be a full-court press, one Pentagon planner said. Some of the most highly skilled Special Forces units, such as Task Force 121, will be shifted from Iraq to Pakistan...

A large-scale American military presence in Pakistan could also create an uproar in the country and weaken Musharraf’s already tenuous hold on power. The operation represents a tremendous gamble for him personally (he narrowly survived two assassination attempts in December) and, by extension, for the Bush Administration -- if he fell, his successor might be far less friendly to the United States. One of Musharraf’s most vocal critics inside Pakistan is retired Army Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, a fundamentalist Muslim who directed the I.S.I. from 1987 to 1989, at the height of the Afghan war with the Soviets. If American troops start operating from Pakistan, there will be a rupture in the relationship, Gul told me. Americans think others are slaves to them. Referring to the furor over A. Q. Khan, he added, We may be in a jam, but we are a very honorable nation. We will not allow the American troops to come here. This will be the breaking point. If Musharraf has made an agreement about letting American troops operate in Pakistan, Gul said, he’s lying to you.

The greatest risk may be not to Musharraf, or to the stability of South Asia, but to the ability of the international nuclear monitoring institutions to do their work. Many experts fear that, with Khan’s help, the world has moved closer to a nuclear tipping point. Husain Haqqani, who was a special assistant to three prime ministers before Musharraf came to power and is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted, with some pride, that his nation had managed to make the bomb despite American sanctions. But now, he told me, Khan and his colleagues have gone wholesale: Once they had the bomb, they had a shopping list of what to buy and where. A. Q. Khan can bring a plain piece of paper and show me how to get it done -- the countries, people, and telephone numbers. ‘This is the guy in Russia who can get you small quantities of enriched uranium. You in Malaysia will manufacture the stuff. Here’s who will miniaturize the warhead. And then go to North Korea and get the damn missile.’ He added, This is not a few scientists pocketing money and getting rich. It’s a state policy.

... Last October, the Iranian government, after nine months of denials and obfuscation, and increasingly productive inspections, formally acknowledged to the I.A.E.A. that it had secretly been producing small quantities of enriched uranium and plutonium, and had been operating a pilot heavy-water reactor program, all potentially in violation of its obligations under the nuclear-nonproliferation treaty. Some of the secret programs, Iran admitted, dated back eighteen years...

... On a trip to the Middle East last month, I was told that a number of years ago the Israeli signals-intelligence agency, known as Unit 8200, broke a sophisticated Iranian code and began monitoring communications that included talk between Iran and Pakistan about Iran’s burgeoning nuclear-weapons program. The Israeli intelligence community has many covert contacts inside Iran, stemming from the strong ties it had there before the overthrow of the Shah, in 1979; some of these ties still exist...

The Israeli intercepts have been shared, in some form, with the United States intelligence community, according to the former senior intelligence official, and they show that high-level officials in Islamabad and Tehran had frequent conversations about the I.A.E.A. investigation and its implications. The interpretation is the issue here, the former official said. If you set the buzzwords aside, the substance is that the Iranians were saying, ‘We’ve got to play with the I.A.E.A. We don’t want to blow our cover, but we have to show some movement. There’s no way we’re going against world public opinion, no way. We’ve got to show that we’re coöperating and get the Europeans on our side.’ (At the time, Iran was engaged in negotiations with the European Union on trade and other issues.) It’s clear from the intercepts, however, the former intelligence official said, that Iran did not want to give up its nuclear potential. The Pakistani response, he added, was Don’t give away the whole ballgame and we’ll look out for you. There was a further message from Pakistan, the former official said: Look out for your own interests.

.. analysts throughout the American intelligence community, he said, are asking, How could it be that Pakistan’s done all these things,-- developed a second generation of miniaturized and boosted weapons -- and yet the investigation has been shorted to ground?

... Libya had been able to purchase hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of nuclear parts, including advanced centrifuges designed in Pakistan, from a firm in Malaysia, with a free-trade zone in Dubai serving as the main shipping point. It was a new development in an old arms race: Malaysia, a high-tech nation with no indigenous nuclear ambitions, was retailing sophisticated nuclear gear, based on designs made available by Khan.

... I.A.E.A. inspectors, to their dismay, even found in Libya precise blueprints for the design and construction of a half-ton nuclear weapon. It’s a sweet little bomb, put together by engineers who know how to assemble a weapon, an official in Vienna told me. No question it’ll work. Just dig a hole and test it. It’s too big and too heavy for a Scud, but it’ll go into a family car. It’s a terrorist’s dream.

... One Arab intelligence operative told me that Libyan intelligence, with Qaddafi’s approval, then quickly offered to give American and British intelligence details about a centrifuge deal that was already under way. The parts were due to be shipped aboard a German freighter, the B.B.C. China. In October, the freighter was seized, and the incident was proclaimed a major intelligence success. But, the operative said, it was the Libyans who blew up the Pakistanis, and who made the role of Khan’s black market known. The Americans, he said, asked questions about those orders and Libya said it had them. It was, in essence, a sting, and was perceived that way by Musharraf. He was enraged by what he called, in a nationally televised speech last month, delivered in Urdu, and not officially translated by the Pakistani government, the betrayal of Pakistan by his Muslim brothers in both Libya and Iran. There was little loyalty between seller and buyer. The Pakistanis took a lot of Libya’s money and gave second-grade plans, the Arab intelligence operative said. It was halfhearted.

... There is a nuclear network of black-market centrifuges and weapons design that the world has yet to discover, a diplomat in Vienna told me. In the past, he said, the I.A.E.A. had worked under the assumption that nations would cheat on the nonproliferation treaty to produce and sell their own nuclear material. He said, What we have instead is a black-market network capable of producing usable nuclear materials and nuclear devices that is not limited to any one nation. We have nuclear dealers operating outside our front door, and we have no control over them...

This is a question of survival, the diplomat said, with a caustic smile. He added, Iraq is laughable in comparison with this issue. The Bush Administration was hunting the shadows instead of the prey.

Nonetheless, a senior Pentagon adviser told me in mid-February, the spring offensive is on...

The operation, American officials said, is scheduled to involve the redeployment to South Asia of thousands of American soldiers, including members of Task Force 121. The logistical buildup began in mid-February, as more than a dozen American C-17 cargo planes began daily flights, hauling helicopters, vehicles, and other equipment to military bases in Pakistan. Small teams of American Special Forces units have been stationed at the Shahbaz airbase, in northwestern Pakistan, since the beginning of the Afghanistan war, in the fall of 2001.

The senior Pentagon adviser, like other military and intelligence officials I talked to, was cautious about the chances of getting what the White House wants: Osama bin Laden. It’s anybody’s guess, he said, adding that Ops Sec (operational security) for the planned offensive was poor. The former senior intelligence official similarly noted that there was concern inside the Joint Special Operations Command, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, over the reliability of intercepted Al Qaeda telephone calls. What about deception? he said. These guys are not dumb...

We’ve got to get Osama bin Laden, and we know where he is, the former senior intelligence official said. Osama bin Laden is communicating through sigint -- talking on satellite telephones and the like -- and his wings have been clipped. He’s in his own Alamo in northern Pakistan. It’s a natural progress -- whittling down alternative locations and then targeting him. This is not, in theory, a ‘Let’s go and hope’ kind of thing. They’ve seen what they think is him. But the former official added that there were reasons to be cautious about such reports, especially given that bin Laden hasn’t been seen for so long. Bin Laden would stand out because of his height; he is six feet five. But the target area is adjacent to Swat Valley, which is populated by a tribe of exceptionally tall people.

Two former C.I.A. operatives with firsthand knowledge of the Pakistan Afghanistan border areas said that the American assault, if it did take place, would confront enormous logistical problems. It’s impenetrable, said Robert Baer, who visited the Hindu Kush area in the early nineties, before he was assigned to lead the C.I.A.’s anti-Saddam operations in northern Iraq. There are no roads, and you can’t get armor up there. This is where Alexander the Great lost an entire division. The Russians didn’t even bother to go up there. Everybody’s got a gun. That area is worse than Iraq. Milton Bearden, who ran the C.I.A.’s operations in Afghanistan during the war with the Soviet Union, recounted, I’ve been all through there. The Pashtun population in that belt has lived there longer than almost any other ethnic group has lived anywhere on earth. He said, Our intelligence has got to be better than it’s been. Anytime we go into something driven entirely by electoral politics, it doesn’t work out.

One American intelligence consultant noted that American forces in Afghanistan have crossed into Pakistan in hot pursuit of Al Qaeda suspects in previous operations, with no complaints from the Pakistani leadership. If the American forces strike quickly and decisively against bin Laden from within Pakistan, he added, Musharraf could say he gave no advance authorization. We can move in with so much force and firepower -- with so much shock and awe -- that we will be too fast for him. The consultant said, The question is, how deep into Pakistan can we pursue him? He added, Musharraf is in a very tough position...

... Robert Gallucci, a former United Nations weapons inspector who is now dean of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, calls A. Q. Khan the Johnny Appleseed of the nuclear-arms race. Gallucci, who is a consultant to the C.I.A. on proliferation issues, told me, Bad as it is with Iran, North Korea, and Libya having nuclear-weapons material, the worst part is that they could transfer it to a non-state group. That’s the biggest concern, and the scariest thing about all this -- that Pakistan could work with the worst terrorist groups on earth to build nuclear weapons. There’s nothing more important than stopping terrorist groups from getting nuclear weapons. The most dangerous country for the United States now is Pakistan, and second is Iran. Gallucci went on, We haven’t been this vulnerable since the British burned Washington in 1814.

Stupid journalism:| Breast milk 'does cut heart risk'

BBC NEWS | Health | Breast milk 'does cut heart risk'

Breast-feeding does have a positive long-term effect on reducing blood pressure, research has suggested.

The study, by Bristol University, suggests that breast-fed babies grow up to have lower blood pressure than their bottle-fed counterparts.

If true, the finding, published in the journal Circulation, could mean breast-fed babies are less likely to develop heart disease.

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I suspect the authors are somewht guilty, the journalist worse, and the headline writer worst of all. A typical pattern. This probably means absolutely nothing. Wake me up when they randomize the infants to bottle vs. breast then study them 20 years later.

Hyperlexia: an explanation of why we can read? (washingtonpost.com)

Studying Hyperlexia May Unlock How Brains Read (washingtonpost.com)

Understanding hyperlexia may also help explain how normal brains accomplish the feat of reading. Unlike seeing and hearing, skills acquired through evolution, reading is usually not acquired naturally. Humans have been reading for only a few thousand years, and the pressure for everyone to become good readers has become intense in only the past couple of centuries.

Reading involves a complex series of brain activities: Visual centers must first perceive variable, tiny features of printed symbols on a page, then those changes must be mentally converted into strings of sound, and finally the patterns of sound must be interpreted by language centers in the brain to register their meaning.

'Hyperlexia is the antithesis of dyslexia,' said Guinevere Eden, director of Georgetown University's Center for the Study of Learning, who has studied Alex. 'We spend all our time studying individuals who have a hard time learning to read, and here are these children who acquire reading in a spontaneous way. It's as if they know it already.'

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Twenty years ago, when I first did a neuropsych course, I thought the "miracle of reading" was the most interesting question in human evolution. I guessed, as have many, that it developed from sign language. Indeed, if sign language preceded fluent verbalization, it may be that reading is more fundamental than speaking.

That would fit this story -- hyperlexic children often have difficulty with speech. We know from brain injured patients that speaking and reading abilities are likewise somewhat independent.

It would be very interesting to know how quickly hyperlexic children learn to sign, and whether there's a relationship in deaf children between signing ability and reading ability.

Science fights back: Citizens for Science vs. the Discovery Institute

NYT: Montana Creationism Bid Evolves Into Unusual Fight

[Update May 2004]:

The June 2004 issue of Wired has an essay by Bruce Sterling on the societal disease of Lysenkoism. I'll try to remember to link to it when it's available online. Lysenkoism is what happens when political pseudoscience, as in evangelical biology, wins. Lysenkoism played an important role in the collapse of the old Soviet Empire. Same topic as this one. [EndUpdate]

In early December, a local Baptist minister, Curtis Brickley, put up handbills inviting residents of this town, population 754, to a meeting in the junior high school gym. The topic was the teaching of evolution in the Darby schools.

Two hundred people from Darby and surrounding Ravalli County, which nurtures a deep vein of conservative religious sentiment, filed into the gym on Dec. 10. There, the well-spoken minister delivered an elaborate PowerPoint presentation challenging Charles Darwin's theories.

There was nothing particularly unusual about Mr. Brickley's message. For years, opponents of evolutionary theory have been pressing their case, with similar arguments, in statehouses and school systems around the country. What was unusual was the response.

Within days, a group of parents, business people, teachers, students and other residents mobilized to defend Darwin against Mr. Brickley's challenge. The group, Ravalli County Citizens for Science, phoned a biotechnology firm in nearby Hamilton asking for help and was connected with Dr. Jay Evans, a research immunologist. He began looking into Mr. Brickley's claims, which were drawn in part from materials from the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based organization affiliated with many conservative causes.

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This is not a particularly well written article, but it appears the Citizens for Science movement started with the Kansas Chapter. Citizens for Science is state based, but the National Center for Science Education is, well, national.

Minnesota is following the path of Montana. Evangelical Republicans are moving on many fronts here to attack the models of natural selection and the theories of biological evolution. They are winning, but it is good to learn that a counter-attack is stirring. Of course if these Evangelicals really do manage to destroy science education, they'll also end up destroying the public school system as secular scholars move en masse to private schools.

Natural selection is one of the most powerful theories in the past two hundred years. It has been applied to a variety of systems, including political systems, economics, corporate behavior, and a very wide range of biological systems from the molecular level to the species level. It's even been applied to cosmology and the evolution of black holes.

Ironically, and this is the point that often gets missed, natural selction and Darwin's work are not inconsistent with "intelligent design". Indeed, were the universe designed, it's likely that the designer also experienced the effects of natural selection in action ...

The Russian nuclear fuel trade

Uranium Traveled to Iran Via Russia, Inspectors Find

In a report on Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that its inspections had found that centrifuge equipment made indigenously in Iran — but not imported gear — showed many traces of the concentrated fuel, leading experts to doubt the Iranian explanation and suggest that Iran had enriched the uranium itself. Its purity was 36 percent U-235 — short of the 90 percent needed for most nuclear bomb designs but greater than that needed for most nuclear reactors.

On Friday, however, European diplomats said the agency's laboratory at Seibersdorf, Austria, had discovered a likely match between the atomic signatures of Russian uranium and samples agency inspectors had gathered from Iranian centrifuges.

In its sleuthing, the lab studies such things as a sample's isotopes — atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons. A distinctive mix of such isotopes can amount to a fingerprint that experts check against atomic databanks.

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One day Malaysia, the next Russia. I emphasized the word most above. What enrichment level is needed for the Pakistan/North Korea design? Does anyone think this trade can be contained -- or just slowed?

Putin must worry about a Chechen bomb.

How GWB boosts manufacturing and overall employment -- the ketchup maneuver

Molly Ivins, Star Telegram | 02/26/2004 | No bad idea left behind

Reagan famously reduced the federal cost of school lunches by defining ketchup as a vegetable. GWB extends the master's legacy:

My personal favorite among Bush's recent moves is the proposal in his economic report to Congress to reclassify fast-food restaurants, moving them from the service sector to 'manufacturing.' This is a concept. In case you're puzzled over why your burger-flippers should now be classified with autoworkers, it's so when the administration has to report the statistics on how many manufacturing jobs we've lost, they won't look so bad.

This administration is very clever about redefining its problems. For example, when the figures indicated that the Bushies had lopsidedly benefited huge corporations as compared to small business, they just changed the definition of 'small business' to include some of the biggest corporations in the country.