No Clapping, Dancing at Mass, Vatican to Warn

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2003

This Reuters story, No Clapping, Dancing at Mass, Vatican to Warn, points to a disconnect between the Vatican and its flock in what “abuses” demand attention:

No dancing in the aisles or applause in church, please, we’re Catholic. And we’d prefer altar boys to altar girls.

Those are some of the warnings contained in the draft of a document the Vatican is preparing to crack down on what it considers ‘liturgical abuses’ of the mass, the focus of Roman Catholic worship.

According to the authoritative Italian Roman Catholic monthly magazine ‘Jesus,’ a draft document urges the faithful to notify their bishop or the Vatican to report suspected abuses.

Make up your own joke:

According to the magazine, the draft says the use of girl altar servers should be avoided “unless there is a just pastoral cause” and that “priests should never feel obliged to seek girls for this function.”

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A Dream Takes Root: Treehouses for Kids With Disabilities

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2003

This strikes me as well-intentioned but vaguely…misguided. From A Dream Takes Root: Treehouses for Kids With Disabilities:

Mr. Allen is the founder of Forever Young Treehouses Inc., a nonprofit group that builds handicapped-accessible treehouses in camps, treatment centers and parks. Started in 1999, the organization has built four such structures, three in Vermont and one in Connecticut. Work has begun on a fifth: a $100,000 treehouse at the Crotched Mountain Foundation in Greenfield. It’s a treatment center for people with disabilities, including Ms. McIntosh.

The steep price reflects the difference between a garden-variety treehouse and one that’s accessible to wheelchairs. A Forever Young project includes two structures: the treehouse itself and a very long ramp that climbs gently from the ground into the forest canopy. The treehouse must be able to support both the children and their wheelchairs, including some motorized models that weigh 400 pounds. The ramps can be as long as a football field.
[...]
Mr. Allen says Forever Young is rooted in his own childhood love of treehouses. “I just think it’s a raw deal for a kid to be sick or disabled and not be able to play in trees,” Mr. Allen says.

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Earliest Modern Humans Found in Romanian Cave

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2003

From Earliest Modern Humans Found in Romanian Cave:

The jawbone of a cave-man living in what is now Romania is the oldest fossil from an early modern human to be found in Europe, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Primitive features such as heavy bone and tooth structure also support the controversial idea that Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals may have interbred, the researchers said.

The jawbone, found in southwestern Carpathian Mountains of Romania, was carbon-dated to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago, said Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis, who led the study.

A few thoughts:

From what I’ve gleaned from Hollywood movies (e.g., One Million Years BC), modern bikini models must have evolved directly from Neanderthal women. Neanderthal men, on the other hand, probably had much less luck interbreeding with Cro-Magnons.

Anyway, if I found an usual “human” jaw bone in the Carpathians, I’d immediately suspect that it belonged to a vampire — or maybe a werewolf. What kind of scientists come up with outlandish Neanderthal interbreeding hypotheses when Occam’s Razor clearly points to vampirism (or lycanthropy)?

OK, I couldn’t even type that with a straight face.

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Killing time

Monday, September 22nd, 2003

In Killing time, Theodore Dalrymple, a prison doctor in the UK, makes the case that “caring” attitudes have increased the suicide rate in British prisons:

A former director of the prison medical service once opined (in private, not for publication) that in France no one cared if a prisoner committed suicide; indeed, such a death was regarded by the public as a net gain for society. In Britain, however, we pretend both to be shocked and to care deeply. This pretence is not entirely harmless, for it results in a lot of official activity; and, as we have come to expect, official activity has the opposite effect to that intended.

In the 1980s, two measures seemed to coincide with the rise in suicide in prison. Until about 1986, the prison record of each prisoner who had ever attempted suicide was marked with a large red “F” (I can’t find out what the F stood for) so that the prison officers automatically knew who was vulnerable and could keep a special eye on them. For some reason, this simple system was stopped and was replaced a few years later by a form of much greater complexity for those deemed to be actively suicidal. The change represented the bureaucrat’s view that elaborate formal ways of dealing with a problem are always superior to simple informal ones. In a sense, this is true: they always give bureaucrats more work to do.

Until the 1980s, when the suicide rate rose, it was an offence in prison to harm yourself or to make a suicidal gesture. Unless the doctor considered that you had a bona fide illness that led you to act in this fashion, you were charged with wasting medical time, and lost remission. The abolition of this harsh-sounding regulation was replaced by a more “caring” attitude, and conferred certain advantages in prison upon those who claimed to be suicidal, which resulted — as any sensible person would have expected — in a large increase in acts of self-harm, of which there are now at least 20,000 per year in our prisons. But the abolition of punishment for self-harm achieved its most important end: the gratification of the reformers’ narcissistic urge to feel humane.

The suicidal are now rewarded with various privileges that can include better material conditions, admission to the hospital wing (where the regime is easier), daily visits from nurses and “listeners” (prisoners deputed to allow fellow-prisoners to air their problems), increased medication irrespective of whether it is strictly indicated, and so forth. But in order to prove their bona fides as potential suicides, and to preserve their privileges, some prisoners feel obliged eventually to make a serious gesture. I have known prisoners who have been laughing and joking companionably with their fellow-prisoners attempt to hang themselves a few minutes later if told that their status as suicide risks was being removed. And such gestures sometimes go wrong.

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Omaha Zoo Testing DNA of Mystery Apes

Monday, September 22nd, 2003

Unbelievable. Scientists may have discovered a new species of ape, five to six feet tall, with 14-inch-long feet. It has the face of a chimp and the body of a gorilla — and it may be a hybrid of the two. From Omaha Zoo Testing DNA of Mystery Apes:

Scientists hope DNA analysis will reveal the origins of large, mysterious apes discovered in the heart of Africa by an Atlanta primatologist.

Genetics research has begun at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo on fecal samples collected this summer from the rare apes to determine if they make up a new species, a new subspecies or some form of hybrid — possibly a mix between a chimpanzee and a gorilla.

“It’s a new, mystery ape and we are doing the DNA fingerprinting to find out more,” said Dr. Lee Simmons, zoo director.

The apes, which stand five to six feet tall and have feet nearly 14 inches long, were first documented last year by primatologist Shelly Williams in a forest in the northern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

They have bodies similar to those of gorillas, but generally the facial characteristics of a chimpanzee. Williams said the animals sleep on the ground at night like gorillas, but eat a fruit-rich diet like chimpanzees.

“I can’t speculate yet as to what they are. Their behavior is so unusual. It’s a puzzle. … I feel like Dr. Doolittle in the land of Oz,” said Williams, who has captured some video of the animals but no photographs.

Because of their size and elusiveness, the apes have no predators — not even poachers hunt them, Williams said. With no fear of lions, leopards or hyenas, the large animals hoot at the moon as it rises and sets, which is extremely unusual for apes, she said.

“The people are very afraid of them. They call them the ‘lion killers’ because they are huge creatures,” Williams said. “The folklore is they could kill lions.”

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U.S. Soldier Kills Baghdad Tiger After Attack

Saturday, September 20th, 2003

Drunk soldiers and hungry tigers should not mix. From U.S. Soldier Kills Baghdad Tiger After Attack:

A U.S. soldier shot dead a rare Bengal tiger at Baghdad zoo after the animal injured a colleague who was trying to feed it through the cage bars, the zoo’s manager said on Saturday.

Adil Salman Mousa told Reuters a group of U.S. soldiers were having a party in the zoo on Thursday night, after it had closed.

‘Someone was trying to feed the tigers,’ he said. ‘The tiger bit his finger off and clawed his arm. So his colleague took a gun and shot the tiger.’

The night watchman said the soldiers had arrived in military vehicles but were casually dressed and were drinking beer.

Posted in Animals, War | No Comments »

Princess Stephanie of Monaco Weds Circus Acrobat

Friday, September 19th, 2003

Sometimes the tabloids don’t have to make up a thing. From Princess Stephanie of Monaco Weds Circus Acrobat:

Princess Stephanie of Monaco has married a Portuguese circus acrobat, the royal palace said, in the latest of a series of turbulent love affairs that have included liaisons with an elephant tamer and a bodyguard.

Stephanie, 38, and Adans Lopez Peres, 29, tied the knot at Eaux-Vives near Geneva Friday, a spokesman for the palace said Tuesday evening. The wedding was a private affair, with none of the royal family present.

Stephanie has a reputation as the enfant terrible of the Grimaldi family, often causing concern to her royal relatives.

But the palace press office said her marriage to Peres took place ‘with the total agreement and good wishes of Prince Rainier who wants only the happiness of his children.’

It could not confirm that the princess, a mother of three, was pregnant again.

Stephanie was a passenger in the 1982 car crash which killed her mother, former Hollywood actress Grace Kelly (news), and she has made regular appearances on tabloid front pages ever since.

She is divorced from ex-bodyguard Daniel Ducruet after the Belgian was filmed cavorting beside a swimming pool with a striptease dancer. She also had a liaison with Franco Knie, an elephant tamer, whose circus employs Peres.

Stephanie regularly spends months at a time living in a caravan as part of the circus troupe. Stephanie and Peres met at the Monaco circus festival in 2001, where the princess gave the acrobat a ‘silver clown’ award.

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Talk Like a Pirate Day

Friday, September 19th, 2003

You may or may not have known that today was Talk Like A Pirate Day. I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t even arrr once today — but I did do a little research, and I came across this:

Top Ten Pickup lines for use on International Talk Like a Pirate Day
10 . Avast, me proud beauty! Wanna know why my Roger is so Jolly?

9. Have ya ever met a man with a real yardarm?

8. Come on up and see me urchins.

7. Yes, that is a hornpipe in my pocket and I am happy to see you.

6. I’d love to drop anchor in your lagoon.

5. Pardon me, but would ya mind if fired me cannon through your porthole?

4. How’d you like to scrape the barnacles off of me rudder?

3. Ya know, darlin’, I’m 97 percent chum free.

2. Well blow me down?

And the number one pickup line for use on International Talk Like a Pirate Day is…

1. Prepare to be boarded.

Actually, I was more impressed with some of the alternate pickup lines that didn’t make the list:

They don’t call me Long John because my head is so big.

You’re drinking a Salty Dog? How’d you like to try the real thing?

Wanna shiver me timbers?

I’ve sailed the seven seas, and you’re the sleekest schooner I’ve ever sighted.

Brwaack! Polly want a cracker? Oh, wait. That’s for Talk Like a PARROT Day.

That’s the finest pirate booty I’ve ever laid eyes on.

Let’s get together and haul some keel.

That’s some treasure chest you’ve got there.

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‘Forgotten’ Malaria Still Kills Millions

Friday, September 19th, 2003

We sometimes forget that malaria kills a million people per year. From ‘Forgotten’ Malaria Still Kills Millions:

Malaria, the ancient mosquito-borne disease that was rolled back by medical advances in the mid-20th century, is making a deadly comeback.

Strains of the disease are becoming increasingly resistant to treatment, infecting and killing more people than ever before — sickening as many as 900 million last year, according to estimates by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

More than 1 million people — and as many as 2.7 million by some estimates — of those victims died. The vast majority of the deaths were in Africa.

I wouldn’t say that malaria was rolled back by “medical advances” though; it was rolled back by DDT.

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A Guinea Pig No Cage Would Hold

Friday, September 19th, 2003

I’m reminded of the classic kangaroo-as-giant-mouse cartoons. From A Guinea Pig No Cage Would Hold:

The fossil of a 1,500-pound animal, 9 feet long, belonged to a rodent — an early ancestor of modern guinea pigs, researchers reported on Thursday.

Living 8 million years ago in what is now Venezuela, the animal would have grazed and from a distance would have resembled a buffalo, the researchers report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

Found in a remote area in 2000, the fossil mystified scientists who finally determined it was a specimen of Phoberomys pattersoni.

‘Imagine a weird guinea pig but huge, with a long tail for balancing on its hind legs and continuously growing teeth,’ research team leader Marcelo Sanchez-Villagra of the University of Tubingen in Germany said in a statement.

At the time the area, 250 miles west of Caracas, was lush, with monster turtles, huge crocodiles and giant catfish in the rivers.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

‘Pristine’ Amazon Hosted Large Cities, Study Finds

Friday, September 19th, 2003

Suburbs in the Amazon? From ‘Pristine’ Amazon Hosted Large Cities, Study Finds:

Brazil’s northern Amazon region, once thought to have been pristine until modern development began encroaching, actually hosted sophisticated networks of towns and villages hundreds of years ago, researchers said on Thursday.

Archeological evidence and satellite images show the area was densely settled long before Columbus and European settlers arrived, with towns featuring plazas, roads up to 150 feet wide, deep moats and bridges, the researchers found.
[...]
Nineteen evenly spaced villages were linked by straight roads, and the cluster could have supported between 2,500 and 5,000 people, said the researchers, led by Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida.

The villages were all laid out in a similar manner — and the roads were mathematically parallel. “This really blew us away,” Heckenberger said in a telephone interview. “It’s fantastic stuff.”

Heckenberger, who worked with indigenous chiefs from the Upper Xingu region as well as a team at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, said the settlements dated to between 1200 A.D. and 1600 A.D.

“Every 3 km to 5 km (mile and a half to two miles) there is another village or town,” he said. “Some of these villages are 50 hectares in size … maybe 150 or so acres in total size,” he added.

Posted in Science, Urbanism | No Comments »

Living Clean in Santa Fe While St. Louis Has Blues

Thursday, September 18th, 2003

I guess this shouldn’t be too surprising. From Living Clean in Santa Fe While St. Louis Has Blues:

According to a survey conducted by the magazine Organic Style, Santa Fe has the best scores of any city in the United States for being free of toxins in the environment, while St. Louis, Missouri, was at the bottom of the list, at slot number 125.
[...]
The top five cities in the survey were Santa Fe; Rapid City, South Dakota; Grand Junction, Colorado; Olympia, Washington; and Fort Myers, Florida. At the bottom of the list were Cleveland, New York, Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis.
[...]
But having a healthy environment does not necessarily mean having a healthy life.

The article cites the case of Robert Weinhold, the author of a book on healthy metropolitan areas. He moved to Santa Fe only to discover that he became ill in the city with the healthiest environment in the United States because he was allergic to the plants and dust of the high desert.

Santa Fe was looking good until that last bit about allergies…

Posted in Urbanism | No Comments »

Spanish Navy Shocks Blamed for Giant Squid Deaths

Thursday, September 18th, 2003

Spanish Navy Shocks Blamed for Giant Squid Deaths:

Shockwaves from scientific tests carried out by the Spanish navy have killed four giant squid — one the length of a bus — off Spain’s coast in recent days, the head of a marine protection agency said on Thursday.

“The navy ship the Hesperides is working in the area…and the shock waves (are the cause of death),” said Luis Laria, president of marine protection agency CEPESMA. The giant squid, mythologized as the monster that attacked Captain Nemo’s Nautilus in the Jules Verne adventure “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” is the world’s largest invertebrate and lives at depths of up to 6,562 ft.

The reporter should do some more research. The giant squid isn’t quite as large as the colossal squid — only we’ve never found an intact colossal squid carcass. (I blogged on this back in April.) Also, the giant (or colossal) squid wasn’t mythologized by Verne’s 20,000 Leagues but by Disney’s movie, very loosely based on Verne’s book.

Josep Gallard, a leading scientist working on the ship, denied techniques used to study the ocean floor were harmful.

“This hypothesis is far from being proven,” Gallard told Reuters from on board the Hesperides. “We use this technique because of its minimal environmental impact…the changes in pressure are very slight.”

In the last few days three giant squid, creatures that are still largely a mystery to scientists, have washed up on Spain’s northern Asturias coast and a fourth was still floating offshore on Thursday, Laria said. One was 12 meters long.

Last year, three of the deep-sea giants washed up in the same area and scientists said a range of reasons, from military operations to global warming could have been to blame.

It doesn’t seem clear just what is killing off these creatures.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

Singapore Targets Late Wedding Guests

Wednesday, September 17th, 2003

Singapore provides an endless stream of darkly comic government programs. From Singapore Targets Late Wedding Guests:

Singapore on Wednesday began its latest behavior modification campaign — a wedding “punctuality drive” — to encourage guests to turn up on time for couples’ big day.

The government-backed Singapore Kindness Movement said it would provide 400,000 cards for couples to insert into their invitations as “gentle reminders.”

Previously the group has led efforts to encourage the city-state’s citizens to smile more, wave at fellow motorists and switch off mobile phones in cinemas.

“Wedding couples are held back from starting their wedding dinners when the majority of their guests turn up late,” the Singapore Kindness Movement said in a statement.

Posted in Policy, Singapore | No Comments »

Docs’ Cell Phones May Spread Hospital Infections

Wednesday, September 17th, 2003

Docs’ Cell Phones May Spread Hospital Infections reports that mobile phones provide “a large dry surface” for germs to grow on:

Mobile phones used by healthcare personnel in the hospital can spread dangerous infectious agents, according to investigators in Israel.

In 2002, Dr. Abraham Borer, of Soroka University Medical Center in Beer-Sheva, and others randomly screened 124 hospital personnel for the germ Acinetobacter baumannii, a common source of in-hospital infections.

They found that 12 percent of healthcare providers’ cell phones were contaminated with the bug, the researchers reported here during the annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

The results are disturbing because Acinetobacter baumannii has the propensity to develop resistance to almost all available antibiotics. It is especially dangerous because it “can survive on dry surfaces for a long period of time,” Borer told Reuters Health.

“Cell phones provide a large dry surface that allows survival of A. baumannii — it requires no nutrients,” he added.

A. baumannii is found in intensive care units, and the mortality rate among infected patients is very high — between 50 and 60 percent — Borer explained.

Certainly A. baumannii sounds bad, but how much worse is it to add phones into the mix?

The bacterium was found not only on phones but also on 24 percent of the hands of the people tested, who included 71 physicians and 53 nurses.

Wait; it’s on 12 percent of healthcare providers’ cell phones but on 24 percent of their hands?

“You can wash your hands correctly, as the guidelines recommend, but ‘autoinfestion’ commonly occurs” when cell phones are used by medical personnel in the hospital, the investigator said.

OK, I guess there is something to the phones being a vector.

Before this study was conducted, cell phones had completely replaced the traditional pagers among physicians and nurses. “We are now exploring the possibility of using pagers again or some type of device that can be worn on the wrist that doesn’t require hand contact,” Borer said.

Huh? Don’t doctors touch pagers? And don’t they then make a phone call?

Posted in Science | No Comments »

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