sysrick.com

Comic-book grunts. The Unh project: colleted comic-panels with "guttural moans." Link Discuss (via The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the Twenty-First Century)
[Boing Boing Blog]

Psychologists dissect multiple meanings of "meow." Your dog wants steak [FARK]

Funny as the hell it actually depicts.

The Onion: Terrifying Bill Passed During NBA Playoffs. A sample:

Andy Guthridge of Savannah, GA, is among the estimated 240 million Americans unaware of the sweeping package of civil-liberties curtailments, voting-privilege re-qualifications, and mandatory relocation of the working poor to the Dakotas.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

If our allies don't like ... thy better learn to like it pronto!. Pentagon: space is for Americans only
At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, (NRO director Peter) Teets proposed that U.S. resources from military, civilian and commercial satellites be combined to provide 'persistence in total situational awareness, for the benefit of this nation's war fighters.' If allies don't like the new paradigm of space dominance, said Air Force secretary James Roche, they'll just have to learn to accept it. The allies, he told the symposium, will have 'no veto power.' Suckers! [MetaFilter]

Hubble Space Telescope finds giant, red rectangle in space (with pic) [FARK]

Iced Tea. Richard Blechynden's invention from the 1904 World's Fair is the quintessential summer drink. Not only is it good for you, it can also come in a multitude of flavors, or even with a little kick to it. [MetaFilter]

What He Said © 2003, John H. Farr ¡READ THIS!I don't need to do anything but point you here: James Carroll has just published a column for the Boston Globe that's a complete stunner. This one, entitled "The Bad Weather Over America," expresses my own feelings perfectly. Just look at the conclusion:

"An answer is apparent this very day in Iraq. The distance between what is and what ought to be is so vast there that only an act of communal self-blinding can keep Americans ignorant of it. The dark national mood has many causes, but one cries out to be reckoned with immediately. The Iraqi war was a pack of lies, and Washington's war on terrorism is a cynical manipulation of fears for the sake of power. So far, the citizens of the United States have willfully participated in this Bush-led charade. We have done so out of the very insecurity they tell us not to feel, as if the charade, however much it wrecks the world, will protect us. But our underlying sadness indicates what we need to know. America was not meant to be like this. We are no longer ourselves. The bad weather will not end until we face this cold truth and change it."

[FarrFeed]

Sci/Tech Web Awards 2003.

This is the third year that Scientific American gives these awards. This is a collection of 50 sites which have something really neat to offer: science. Here is the introduction.

It's a jungle out there. With more than three billion Web pages to sift through, finding great science sites is harder than ever. The good news is the editors at Scientific American have once again trawled the Internet for the best the Web has to offer. We think our list of winners has something for everyone..

These 50 sites are classified in ten categories:

• Anthropology & Paleontology
• Astronomy & Astrophysics
• Biology
• Chemistry
• Earth & Environment
• Engineering & Technology
• Great Minds
• Mathematics
• Medicine
• Physics

Here are my four favorite sites:

• Great Archaeological Sites

  Curated by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, this collection of web sites offers such wonders as a visit to the painted cave of Lascaux, virtual reconstruction of 450,000-year-old Tautavel Man and tutorials on shipwreck excavation. Explore archeological sites dating from prehistory to the Middle Ages, all searchable by period and geography, and most available in both English and French. Although decidedly stronger in French locales than elsewhere, each interactive adventure is a treat, accompanied by stunning photographs and meticulously detailed timelines, diagrams and textual explanations.

• Exploring Mars

  Get ready: You’re about to join the Diomedes Mission, the first to put humans on the surface of the Red Planet. You’ll be oohing and aaahing in 3-D as you explore the Mars Base, right down to the wall-mounted LCD screens, medical facilities and even the space habitat’s privies. With the aid of advanced technology, you’ll take a self-guided tour, tread the Kevlar floor of the Base’s laboratory, witness the deployment of a robot rover and even fling open the hatches to take a gander at the vast vermilion vista of the planet’s surface.

• Earth As Art

  In Australia, it looks like Monet’s Water Lilies seen through a rain-splashed window; in Alaska, it’s the vivid fire and ice of a Santana album cover. "It" is the Earth, and this NASA-sponsored site showcases snapshots of our Mother Planet not just from a scientific perspective, but from an aesthetic one. Often, satellite photos of Earth, although fascinating, can be a bit dull (they don’t call them "earth tones" for nothing). Here, however, wavelengths of light captured by the Landsat-7 satellite—but invisible to the human eye—are assigned false colors, bringing these images to life in resplendent rainbow hues.

• Archimedes' Lab

  The tagline of this site is "Puzzles: Can you believe it?" And your answer will almost certainly be "Absolutely not!" once you get a look at the number of IQ tests, optical illusions, droodles (that’s a combo doodle/riddle) and other creative games, curiosities, crafts and whirligigs. Archimedes, that Sicilian wonder who, among many other discoveries, figured out the weight of a body in water, must have had quite a busy laboratory in which he conducted his experiments. This virtual lab borrows the empirical spirit and creative curiosity that Archimedes brought to his work and invites visitors to explore with the same expectations for mind-blowing discovery. Perfect for kids, this hands-on wonderland puts young scientists in the driver’s seat for endless learning and fun.

Source: Scientific American, May 27, 2003

[Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

Trademarks can ruin your life. This is an astonishing story about a disabled veteran/information studies grad husband-and-wife team in Florida who set up a noncommercial website called "Virtual Office Team." Robert Half International, a California company, sicced its New York lawyers on the poor couple, who have $100 in the bank and live on VA benefits. Robert Half International asserts a trademark on OFFICETEAM, and their lawyers want the couple to cough up $10,000 and forswear their use of the phrase "Office Team," or they will seek a farcically gigantic judgement against them in a New York court, which the couple cannot afford to set foot in.

And it turns out that Robert Half International has made a racket out of this. A single mom in Texas who registered virtualgalfriday.com is also being shaken down for thousands by these white-shoe aggro lawyers on behalf of their carpetbagging clients.

IP law is out of control, that much is clear. Intellectual Property suits have become a kind of meteor strike, a random event that interrupt your daily round by punching a flaming hole through your roof and striking you dead where you stand. Link Discuss (via Lessig) [Boing Boing Blog]

Legal TiVo hacking... er, upgrades.

TiVo has been notoriously cool about people hacking their digital video recorders to add extra hard drive space, but for anyone who wants to, say, bump up their TiVo box to 240 hours without actually busting it open and doing the upgrade themselves, there's a new authorized service center that'll do it for you. (There are also few other "less authorized" companies, like WeaKnees, that have been offering TiVo upgrades for a while.)
Read

[Gizmodo]

Robert Abbott, Games and Mazes. I first met Robert Abbott when I was reviewing games for Games Magazine. I was amazed then as I am now by his ability to invent games and puzzles that are innovative, and profoundly challenging. One of the first and best of his games is the card game "Eleusis. [Major FUN's Daily Briefing]

Then and Now: Tech Prices. There's an interesting article at the Mercury News about how low the DVD player prices have fallen and the amazing drop in prices in general for technology over the past 6 years... Here's the interesting bit:

I took a nostalgic journey to our newsroom library, pulling out microfilm for the Friday, May 23, 1997, Mercury News, and printed out the eight-page Fry's Electronics advertising section. Then I placed the copies next to the eight-page Fry's Electronics section from last Friday's paper.

Then-and-now comparisons are astounding:

San Jose-based Fry's sold a 2.1-gigabyte hard drive for $179 in 1997; this year, a 200-gigabyte hard drive -- 100 times bigger! -- cost $139 after mail-in rebate.

A 27-inch color TV was $249 in 1997, $129 in 2003.

A digital camera with a measly 76,800 pixels of resolution was $199 in 1997; a digital camera with 1 million pixels is $97 in 2003.

A Sony desktop computer with a 200 megahertz processor, 32 megabytes of random-access memory (RAM), 3.8 gigabyte hard drive and a CD-ROM drive cost $2,199 in 1997; a Sony desktop PC with a 2.4 gigahertz processor, 256 megabytes of RAM, 80 gigabyte hard drive, DVD recorder and CD-ROM drive is $799 in 2003.

There's also a long list of products advertised this year that didn't exist in 1997, including flat-panel LCD displays for desktop PCs, high-definition televisions, MP3 music players, satellite radio receivers, digital video camcorders, WiFi wireless networking equipment and USB thumb drives.

It's insane really. I ran into this recently when my parents bought a run-of-the-mill PC at Walmart and it was easily four times the computer that I'm using right now. My goodness, 200GB for $140? I've got to get out of the house more, I hadn't realized the prices had gone that low.

That scariest part is thinking about what it's going to be like in ANOTHER 6 years...

-Russ

Comment

[Russell Beattie Notebook]

Orson Scott Card, Greensboro’s most famous author since O. Henry, is writing the story for a video game, which he will then turn into a book and, he hopes, a movie (via thoughtsignals). After that, he can write a book about synergy.

 

I don’t know Card, although we’re neighbors, and I read his column every week in the Rhino Times. He’s such a good writer and thinker that I wish he’d aim a little higher in his subject matter, but even when I shrug at stuff like his reviews of potato chips or, for that matter, his chip on the shoulder about perceived slights to regular folks—which leads him to champion awful movies like Sweet Home Alabama, which actually is an insult to regular folks—he’s opinionated and entertaining.

[EdCone.com]

Panoramic view from top of Everest. Panoramic view from top of Everest (requires QuickTime) [via kottke.org] [MetaFilter]

Douglas Adams. "Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of." [Quotes of the Day]

Sign on Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court office door reads "SAVE AMERCIA, BOMB YALE LAW SCHOOL" [FARK]

"You are either with us or against us on this.". BBspot: Bush Proposes Universal Time Zone  [via Follow Me Here...] [jenett.radio]

Vancouver bureaucrats are funny as hell. Now this is how to advertise your local by-laws. Link Discuss (Thanks, Airtime!)
[Boing Boing Blog]

Ed Cone: "The blogosphere should be crackling over the story of Tom DeLay and the runaway Texas legislators, but it’s not, at least not yet." [Scripting News]

Scientists Find Key to Spice Sensitivity [Scientific American]

Earth from Mars. Pale Blue Dot: The Earth and Moon as photographed from Mars. Just in case you needed a bit of perspective. [MetaFilter]

Lily Tomlin. "No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." [Quotes of the Day]

Ommm you rough beast, Ommm...... Buddhism tames the amygdala Covered recently on Metafilter (here), new research at the University of California San Francisco Medical Centre ( into the "Happy Buddhist" phenomenon ) shows that Buddhist meditation techniques "can tame the amygdala, an area of the brain which is the hub of fear memory." [BBC] -Is this the Rx for a nation of Americans gripped by fear? Do Christianity, Islam or Judaism have effective techniques to tame the amygdala too? [MetaFilter]

The Old-Fashioned Cocktail. You've Come A Long Way, Baby: Unfortunately, you picked the wrong one, dear old Old-Fashioned, dean of cocktails. Robert Hess's definitive essay on the ever-changing ways of making one shows just how contentious a cocktail recipe can be. It also bears sad testimony to how the great classics are being fruited up, iced up, fizzed up, shaken till obliteration and generally girlied, dumbed and boozed down. So how do you stand on the cherry, the pineapple and the orange? And don't even bother commenting if you're a seltzer fan! ;) [MetaFilter]

Travel Research and Dublin Hotels

Pre-trip research isn't everybody's idea of a good time, but it's a great investment.  Rick Steves typically opens his travel guides by calculating the expense of each hour of your vacation (on page two of his 2003 Ireland guide he calculates $10 per waking hour).  Rick Steves aptly uses this point to justify the purchase of his guidebook, as well as to stress the importance of pre-trip research generally.   For me, I like pre-trip research.  It sets the mood, helps me focus on what I want to see and gets me worked up for the journey.  I'm going to Ireland in a couple of weeks and visiting Dublin for the first time.  Dublin, if you don't know, can be a tough place to book a room, particularly when they are having conferences, like they are when I arrive.  Like most cities Dublin has some touchstone rules for hotel finding.  The location has importance, I'm reading over and over.  Temple Bar lively but noisy.  You want to stay central.  Ideally you want to be south of the river in a post code with an even number because the odd-numbered addresses are in the traditionally rougher part of town.  

When scouting for a room I've always made good use of Fodor's guide because I've come to trust that their choices will be fair, descriptive, and when they make a special recommendation it's worth considering regardless of price.  Fodor's isn't foolproof - their review of the Hostellerie Bai-Bleue in the wilds of Canada's Gaspe' Peninsula caused me to make horrible mistake planning our driving route.  I can forgive the hotel's own website for airbrushing out the garish powerlines that run between the building and the ocean.  But when a guidebook I've paid for takes pains to describe a bastion of culinary excellence that "snuggles up against a mountain" and what you get is a plain, highwayside motor court with a carpeted diner, then something is wrong with your research formula.  Fodor's whole Gaspe' team must be smoking something because their mild review of the Gite du Mont-Albert sells short a great and memorable accomodation in the middle of the desolate Chic-Choc Mountains of Quebec.  Anyway, the wonky Gaspe' reviews are unusual for Fodor's, which I generally find reliable and illuminating.

Rick Steves' travel advice is useful because he has the brass to ignore whole parts of a country instead of hawking sub-prime locations the way they do in many travel books.  But Rick Steves' hotel and restaurant advice is only serviceable.  He apparently isn't into luxuriating in hotels, he just wants convenient digs to rest his head so he can get up early in the morning and go adventuring.  More and more I'm turning to tripadvisor.com to rate hotels.  It's a website that cross references travel guide write ups and articles in order to rate the hotels a city has to offer.  Then it hands you all the links to the source material so you can decide for yourself.  Cross referencing tripadvisor with other sources, I have this working list of hotel prospects for Dublin:

Best for a splurge: Fitzwilliam Hotel

Best modest-priced standbys: Kilronan House and Number 31

Best north-of-the-river-in-a-pinch: Cassidy's Hotel and Maple Hotel

Best oasis by the airport: Belcamp Hutchinson

Let's check back after a few weeks to see what my research is worth after I've actually visited Dublin and looked over these properties.

[cloudtravel]

Democracy in the U.S. in 2003.

Only 6 large metro newspapers remain independent of giant media conglomerates.

 

Religious zealots in Texas set standards for most school text books throughout the nation, banning many words and phrases that they find do not fit their religious or political view.

 

The FCC will soon allow public airwaves to be owned virtually 100% by the five or six remaining media giants.

 

Local news for thousands of radio stations and profit driven networks is now produced in a single location, with simulated local content, to increase profitability.

 

Courts seriously entertain the idea that the only sacrosanct individual right is the right to spend money for private gain as one sees fit.  Thus corporations have legal primacy over individuals, since individuals can be arrested and prosecuted for thoughts and intentions, while corporations are only prosecuted if their accounts bend rules too far.  Courts hold there are no such thing as public goods, only individuals, and private goods.

 

America has the highest percentage of its population in prison of any country on earth.  Politicians accept this rate of incarceration as normal.

 

Orwellian thought police turn on any celebrity or person of public stature who questions the government’s  political line of the day.  Thus, persons who speak against the war are hooted from stages, have their advertising contracts cancelled, and their TV shows dropped or their speaking engagements cancelled.  Their “crime”?  Raising a political issue outside of the accepted setting of carefully proscribed, anesthetized, debate.

 

Congress perpetuates itself with 95% of incumbents reelected when they choose to run—similar to the political orthodoxy of communist bosses  in what were formerly communist countries.

 

Money has become the single idea allowed in politics.  If it can’t be bought, it does not deserve to exist.

 

U.S. workers are now working more hours per year than virtually any other industrialized nation on earth. 

 

Despite the large GDP and the high average per capita income, the U.S. has the greatest inequality of wealth seen since medieval times. 

 

Like the original Roman republic, our country was founded by peasant farmers and educated land owners, who sought to organize a society where they could be left alone to prosper as best they could. 

 

Our country has become a parody of the ideal of participatory democracy, as developed in ancient Greece and Rome.  Today, our democracy is like the cult of the emperor—a religious idea enforced in name only, with no intrinsic meaning except to perpetuate the rule of those in power.

 

Take me back to 1984.  We earned more, had more freedom, better health care, less anxiety, and certainly we did not fear terrorist reprisals for the sins of our government.  Plus our air was cleaner, our climate had not warmed, and there were still large fish in the oceans and no off road vehicles in national parks. [Toby's Political Diary - 'Let it Begin Here']

TIA now stands for Terrorist Information Awareness. The Pentagon has renamed its $54 million "Total Information Awareness" program to "Terrorist Information Awareness." Link, Discuss (Thanks, Burk) [Boing Boing Blog]

Two Tontines.

"H"

A tontine, as you know, is a kind of Ponzi scheme in which the contributions of the losing participants pay for the gains of the very few winners. Human nature being what it is, we enter willingly, seeing ourselves as winners, and exit dejectedly blaming only ourselves.

1. "There are always jobs for good people." Said to a Ph.D candidate or Adjunct. What this means is that you will likely work as an Adjunct providing $35,000 -$50,000 of  work for $15,000 of  pay, so that a few tenured professors at the top can make $150,000 and the administrators twice that. It also means that you are a loser, a slave whose servility is visible every pay day. And that you have no one to blame but yourself, and so deserve no compassion. The alternative is suicide, or to throw your life away in business, among the heathens. So, all things considered, take the $15,000, says the Prof making $150,000.

2. "Our top sales reps retire after 20 years on as much $35,000 a month." And they do, but they are one in 1,000. 85 of 100 go broke.

Neither scheme is corrupt, both are legal, open to scrutiny, and honest; but to take either to heart, as a loser is a tragic misunderstanding. Both systems take the gullible in at one end, and excrete the self-hating losers at the other, while those riding on top prosper and pontificate. I have worked under both systems, and prefer being a boss in the second to a dupe in the first, all else equal. (For Dorothea, Invisible Adjunct, and Frogs & Ravens.) 

The statement that "good people get tenured positions" is either an empirical falsehood, or an analytic remark, forced to be true by a brutally arbitrary definition. As far as I can see some of the best and most stubborn minds of my generation, and the generation younger, are on the lamb. We lit out with Huck for the country, and have learned to survive among the Wordly Winners by blogging like crazy with exemplary losers like Matrullo, Waggish, Weinberger, Mark Woods, and Ray.  You can't sing the blues, no matter how hard you study the licks, until you chop cotton without hope of reprieve. I hear in the voices of my online friends the sound of loss, and they hear it in mine; we don't have to talk about it; you hear it in the way the voice breaks. We are the better for it as writers, and probably as people. We would never say, "the good people get good jobs," or if we said it, it would be with a good blues chord, and a lonely harmonica, and someone like Ray thumping the bottom of an old tin tub, and wheezing, a cigarette dangling from his laughing lips. You want a good job, take Option 2, because they pay me a finder's fee on every head. Play it, Ray.

[Wealth Bondage]

Your kid is not an empty storage container, ready to be filled with curricular content.

Stories like this creep me out, even if they say Primary school testing and targets are to be streamlined to make exams for seven-year-olds less formal and part of a wider teacher-led assessment yada yada.

Testing programs are not about educating kids. They're about perpetuating the bell curve. As a kid who spent most of his formative years at the back ends of nearly every bell curve the system could throw at him, and who regarded his school experience as a 13-year prison sentence that commenced at age 5, I can tell you there isn't a damn thing in any top-down government-mandated educational testing program that answer's any kind of market demand from kids themselves — who are born with extravagantly unique souls, each with its own agenda and an endless set of questions for the purposes of its own education. Few if any of those questions are addressed by official curricula, testing programs, or even compulsory school attendance.

The unintended agenda of bureaucratized education was laid out very well in The Six Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto in 1991. Dig it.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Who's the Patron Saint of Pancakes?. Patron Saints Index Topic List. Because you never know when you might need the Patron Saint of Haemorrhoids or Gravediggers. This actually is a very nice resource for the history of the Saints, their (known or presumed) backgrounds, and when and why they were beatified. Enjoy. [MetaFilter]

O'Reilly TiVo Hacks!. O'Reilly has announced its "TiVo Hacks" book, written by my pal, Raffi -- I love the idea of distilling all the little tricks and tips for the TiVo into one inch-thick brick of paper. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rael!) [Boing Boing Blog]

The Shallowing of American Taste. The Shallowing of American Taste First tastebuds and palates fall to McDonalds, now the eyes, ears, and minds fall to Wal-Mart, according to this NY Times article (free registration required)...

"The growing clout of Wal-Mart and the other big discount chains ? they now often account for more than 50 percent of the sales of a best-selling album, more than 40 percent for a best-selling book, and more than 60 percent for a best-selling DVD -- has bent American popular culture toward the tastes of their relatively traditionalist customers...But with the chains' power has come criticism from authors, musicians and civil liberties groups who argue that the stores are in effect censoring and homogenizing popular culture. The discounters and price clubs typically carry an assortment of fewer than a thousand books, videos and albums, and they are far more ruthless than specialized stores about returning goods if they fail to meet a minimum threshold of weekly sales."

Add in Clear Channel Radio and sanitized text books, and all I can say is that the internet has come along at the time it's needed. With the fingers of big commerce all over our culture, the web can serve to reverse an old mega-trend to "high-touch, high-tech." With Wal-Mart, et al, touching our minds, we need to resort to tech to add some depth and breath to their narrow and shallow offerings. (From Unfocused.) [MetaFilter]

Bush and God, church and state

I have never quite understood New York Times columnist Bill Keller's take on George W. Bush. Every time Keller tries to zero in on the president -- as in a long Times Magazine piece a while back, or in a column today about Bush's God thing -- he starts shuffling his feet, hedging and making apologies. He tells us that he understands important criticisms of the president, but then he finds some grounds upon which to explain that they don't matter, or they're not the point, or we shouldn't worry about them.

In today's column, Keller tries to argue that, yes, George Bush is driven by his religious belief, but that -- since he does not have an overt agenda of converting the heathen or deriving specific political policies from his born-again faith -- we should not worry too much. The president's sense of divine mission? His apparent belief that every decision he makes is the right one because he is fulfilling God's plan? No fear, says Keller -- what's wrong with self-confidence? Then he cites "John Green of the University of Akron, a scholar of religion in politics," who "sees it as a perfectly ordinary way for a religious man to understand a task history has presented him." "For Bush to conclude that this was God's plan," Green declares, "is not a whole lot different from a plumber in Akron deciding that God wants him to serve lunch to homeless people."

Huh? I mean, I'd be delighted if Bush concluded that God wanted him to serve lunch to homeless people! The point that eludes Mr. Green is that the plumber in Akron is not making life-or-death decisions for millions of people, and devising policies that will shape the world economy for a generation. We worry when national leaders assume a mantle of divine destiny. The worry is based on history, not faith.

But the most bizarre passage in Keller's column is his citation -- with what I can only guess is approval -- of a particularly ridiculous quote from the writer Gregg Easterbrook, trying to explain how Bush's Christian faith shapes his policies: " 'I suspect Bush takes the view (which may prove right) that the ultimate argument will be between people who believe in something larger than themselves, and people who believe that it's all an accident of chemistry,' Mr. Easterbrook said."

First, note the way Easterbrook -- whom the article describes as "a liberal Christian" -- stacks his language. If he'd said, "the ultimate argument will be between people who believe in supernatural mumbojumbo, and people who believe in their own powers of observation and reasoning," we'd complain, rightly, that he'd injected a wildly unfair bias in his description of the disagreement between people of faith and nonbelievers. Instead, he's turned that bias around and made it invisible -- draping all the contradictions and difficulties of religion in the high-flying rhetoric of selfless dedication, and casually denigrating all the insights of the scientific worldview.

Easterbrook, on behalf of Bush, chooses to draw a wildly oversimplified spectrum of personal belief: There seem to be no other choices besides "belief in something larger than yourself" or belief that "it's all an accident of chemistry." Yet the two positions are hardly exclusive. I can forthrightly say that I have no belief in any traditional deity; put me firmly in the "accident of chemistry" camp. Yet such an accident is hardly trivial -- it is itself full of beauty and wonder. It is very much "something larger than ourselves." Indeed, there are many things "larger than ourselves" that I, despite my failure to be a "person of faith," can and do embrace: Empathy, justice, generosity, creativity -- none of these require the walls of a church, or trust in a "higher power." Participants in institutional religions have no monopoly on the possibility of belief.

The real arrogance in Easterbrook's stance -- and one that I think also undergirds Bush's worldview -- is this implication that only people who have accepted Jesus, or Yahweh (or, Bush will add, opening the flaps of his "big tent," Mohammed), can possibly find meaning in life. And only they can be trusted to find a moral path through life.

This is more complex, and probably more dangerous, than simple religious chauvinism of the "my god is better than your god" brand. Rather, it reflects a wistful desire, if not an active campaign, to turn back the clock to an era when being a non-believer actively disqualified one from participation in civic life. Of course Bush isn't about to propose religious belief as a qualification for public office; but if we believe former speechwriter David Frum's statement (repeated by Keller) that, in Bush's White House, "attendance at Bible study was, if not compulsory, not quite uncompulsory," then it's also hard not to believe that Bush would be happy to impose such a requirement if he thought it had any chance of passing constitutional muster.

Keller, of course, is way too muddled to point out the final absurdity in the Easterbrook argument: its dichotomy plainly puts George Bush on the same team as the Sept. 11 killers. Warped and vicious they undoubtedly were; but who can question that they committed their suicidal act on behalf of "something larger than themselves"? No, Mohammed Atta and his crew did not see human life as an "accident of chemistry." They believed in Allah. Their belief may have been a perversion of mainstream Islam. But belief it was, nonetheless.

So, pace Keller, I'll continue to put my moral antennae on alert any time a leader starts using his or her own religious faith as a touchstone of civic virtue. It's not always and inevitably a bad thing -- the obvious and legitimate counterargument is the Rev. Martin Luther King. But it's usually a sign to watch out.

[Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

Religious urban legends [FARK]

Southwestern United States Rock Art Gallery. Southwestern United States Rock Art Gallery. 'This page is devoted to Native American Rock Art of the Southwestern United States. Currently, most images on this page are from Utah. This will change as time permits.'
Related :- this Precolumbian Collection from Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (which has an interesting history itself). [MetaFilter]

George W. Bush's Home State Politics Foreshadow Ugly National Trends. Molly Ivins: Bucking the Texas Lockstep. What planet do these people come from? Carl Parker of Port Arthur used to... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

"The Bug"'s life
One of the things I'm proudest of from my tenure as Salon's technology editor was whatever role we played in helping the writing of Ellen Ullman -- some of the most thoughtful, accessible prose on programming you'll find anywhere -- reach a wider audience. We excerpted her "Close to the Machine" when it came out in 1997, and I had the pleasure of interviewing her at the time. She later did some more memorable writing for Salon.

Now she's written a wonderful novel called "The Bug." You can read the excerpt here, and my new interview with her here.

[Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

If Philip Morris or Seagram had a patent on pot - which is less addictive than nicotine, booze, or caffeine - would it still be illegal?... [Arts & Letters Daily]

Atlanta Journal Constitution, GA - Editorial Op-Ed - Ideological foes agree: Privacy rights in danger .

When you live in a country founded on fundamental principles of freedom, individuality and privacy, and those rights begin disappearing, unusual things begin to happen. Perhaps none so unusual as a forum in Washington last month, where the left and right wings came together to discuss prominent legislation in the nation's war on terrorism.

The topic: government responses to Sept. 11 that go beyond fighting terrorism and infringe on the privacy rights of ordinary Americans. Rarely, if ever, do groups as far apart on the ideological spectrum as the American Civil Liberties Union and Eagle Forum come down on the same side of an issue. But apparently, when it comes to preserving those core American ideals, there is rare common ground to be found.

The overwhelming consensus of the group was that in 1890, when a young lawyer named Louis Brandeis and his law partner, Samuel Warren, first laid out the case for a constitutional right to privacy, they just might have stumbled onto something.

For once, the right and left wings agreed: What Brandeis and Warren termed the "right to be left alone," the "most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men," apparently remains indispensable -- especially in the post-Sept. 11 world -- and recent government surveillance and law enforcement measures that run counter to it require quick reform and teamwork.

Panelists singled out the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program and the proposed draft legislation, commonly known as Patriot II, as especially troubling.

[Privacy Digest]

Folkloric history of those "Calvin peeing" car stickers. This site explores the evolution of those annoying and ubiquitous "Calvin peeing" stickers stuck on truck windows all over America. Explores the variations and corruptions, includes an excellent photo gallery.

My favorite part: the "generate-a-Calvin-peeing" engine, where you select who he hates (la Migra? The Navy? Ford trucks? "Fat chicks"?), whether it's the real Calvin or not, then generates a sticker for you on the fly. At left, the variant I probably see most often when I'm tooling down the freeway between L.A. and the border. OK, that and the "praying to Jesus" one, which actually does not involve peeing, rather, praying. Link, Discuss, (Thanks, Steve)
[Boing Boing Blog]

WMD 404. Here is an amusing page. Note: Read it a little more closely before assuming that the link is broken.... [Joho the Blog]