3G Mobile Signals Can Cause Nausea, Headache

Weird science. From 3G Mobile Signals Can Cause Nausea, Headache:

The study, the first of its kind, compared the impact of radiation from base stations used for the current mobile telephone network with that of base stations for new third generation (3G) networks for fast data transfer, which will enable services such as video conferencing on a mobile device.
[...]
"If the test group was exposed to third generation base station signals there was a significant impact ... They felt tingling sensations, got headaches and felt nauseous," a spokeswoman for the Dutch Economics Ministry said.

There was no negative impact from signals for current mobile networks.

However, cognitive functions such as memory and response times were boosted by both 3G signals and the current signals, the study found. It said people became more alert when they were exposed to both.

Infants Given Antibiotics at Risk for Allergy

Interesting. From Infants Given Antibiotics at Risk for Allergy:

Treating infants with antibiotics seems to increase their risk of developing childhood diseases like eczema and allergic asthma, a new study suggests.
[...]
Her team reviewed the medical records of 445 children participating in an HMO-based study in the Detroit area. Almost half of the children had been treated with an antibiotic in the first 6 months of life. The children were followed for the development of allergic conditions until age 6 and 7 when they were evaluated by an allergist.

Children who had been treated with an antibiotic were 1.5 times more likely to have allergies and 2.5 times more likely to have allergic asthma by the age of 7, compared with children not given antibiotics in infancy.

The link between early antibiotic exposure and the development of allergy and asthma was stronger in children whose mothers had similar conditions, and among children who did not have pets in the home.

This finding on household pets supports the "hygiene hypothesis," which holds that early exposure in life to bacterial infection and bacterial products prevents the development of allergic disease. Early antibiotic use may influence the gastrointestinal tract and alter the development of the maturing immune system.

Iraqi Family Ties Complicate American Efforts for Change

The intro "hook" to Iraqi Family Ties Complicate American Efforts for Change did indeed hook me:

Iqbal Muhammad does not recall her first glimpse of her future husband, because they were both newborns at the time, but she remembers precisely when she knew he was the one. It was the afternoon her uncle walked over from his house next door and proposed that she marry his son Muhammad.

"I was a little surprised, but I knew right away it was a wise choice," she said, recalling that afternoon nine years ago, when she and Muhammad were 22. "It is safer to marry a cousin than a stranger."

It is safer to marry a cousin than a stranger. The point of the story isn't merely to culture-shock us though:

Her reaction was typical in a country where nearly half of marriages are between first or second cousins, a statistic that is one of the more important and least understood differences between Iraq and America. The extraordinarily strong family bonds complicate virtually everything Americans are trying to do here, from finding Saddam Hussein to changing women's status to creating a liberal democracy.

"Americans just don't understand what a different world Iraq is because of these highly unusual cousin marriages," said Robin Fox of Rutgers University, the author of "Kinship and Marriage," a widely used anthropology textbook. "Liberal democracy is based on the Western idea of autonomous individuals committed to a public good, but that's not how members of these tight and bounded kin groups see the world. Their world is divided into two groups: kin and strangers."

I actually discussed this exact idea a few months ago, while discussing The Cosmopolitan Illusion by Lee Harris:

Families and kin can clearly work well together, but the source of their cohesion is simultaneously the source of their weakness: Either one is a member of the family or the tribe or else one is not. If not, you never will be, and you know it. But this law does not apply to societies in which the primary unit is a group able to work together — a team, and not the family. This, according to Livy's account, is how we are to understand the secret of Rome's initial rise to greatness: It was made up of people who could work together precisely because family could not and did not matter to them. This meant that they were free to organize and cooperate without the structural tensions that arise when there are a number of different families, each vying for positions of prestige, prominence, and power, and leading in their contentious train all sorts of juvenile rabble-rousers.

As I said then, "Comparing America to Rome and Iraq to Scythia is left as an exercise for the reader."

The article points out that marrying cousins used to be the norm:

Cousin marriage was once the norm throughout the world, but it became taboo in Europe after a long campaign by the Roman Catholic Church. Theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas argued that the practice promoted family loyalties at the expense of universal love and social harmony. Eliminating it was seen as a way to reduce clan warfare and promote loyalty to larger social institutions — like the church.

N.J. Criminalizes Driving While Tired

One more reason not to pull an all-nighter. N.J. Criminalizes Driving While Tired:

Under Maggie's Law, police will not be pulling over drivers whose eyelids look heavy. But the law allows prosecutors to charge a motorist with vehicular homicide, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine, in the event of a deadly crash if there is evidence the accident was caused by sleepiness.

No driver has yet been charged under the law, which went into effect last month and was named for a 20-year-old college student killed in 1997 by a van driver who admitted having been up for 30 hours.

Recent studies estimate 51 percent of motorists feel drowsy behind the wheel, and about two of every 10 drivers say they have fallen asleep while driving in the past year.

Two of every 10 drivers say they have fallen asleep while driving in the past year? That's downright scary.

Girls Need Big Breakfast?

Here's an odd finding, from Girls Need Big Breakfast?:

Health experts at the University of Ulster said memory and attention tests found boys did better when they were a little hungry while girls were best after a satisfying morning meal.

The man who got inside al-Qa'eda

Fascinating. From The man who got inside al-Qa'eda:

Mohamed Sifaoui is an Algerian Muslim journalist who became incensed by the war of terror waged by Islamic fundamentalists against the Algerian people. Not a few of his friends, relatives and colleagues perished at their hands, and before leaving for Paris he himself was nearly killed in an attack on his newspaper.

The combination of cowardice and indulgence shown to the terrorists by bien pensant opinion in France heightened his disgust. To expose the truth he decided to pose as a terrorist sympathiser, and his book is a diary of the three months he spent infiltrating a Parisian cell of al-Qa'eda under an assumed name.

The portraits he provides are not of the suicide bombers or gunmen, but of the recruiters, brain-washers and organisers behind them, yet the book conveys a convincing picture of the terrorist milieu. And a dismal picture it is. The members of the network emerge as a bunch of inadequates and infantile fanatics, although they are not the less fearsome for that.

This factoid scares me:

Sifaoui's book has sold 60,000 copies in France. [...] The French book L'Effoyable Imposture (The Dreadful Fraud), which claimed that the 11 September attack was the work of the Jews and the CIA, sold over 100,000.

Man Uses Duct Tape for Bear Attack Wounds

I could probably read animal-attack stories all day. From Man Uses Duct Tape for Bear Attack Wounds:

A hunter attacked by a grizzly bear on a remote trail said he used duct tape to bind his bite wounds, then rode an all-terrain vehicle to his pickup truck and drove himself to a hospital.

Bill Murphy said the Sept. 17 attack happened after he surprised a grizzly cub and its mother on a trail about 50 miles northeast of Anchorage where he was hunting for moose and sheep.

"I didn't even have time to jump," Murphy said.

Murphy grabbed his rifle but before he could raise it, the mother bear pinned him face-down.

It then clamped her jaws around his right shoulder and started shaking him like a rag. He said he felt teeth pressing against his skin, then a pop as they sliced through.

At some point, the bear let go, then stood over Murphy, panting and drooling onto his head. All he could think about was a bear attack over the summer near the Russian River where a man was bitten on the face and blinded.

"I just lay perfectly still and said, 'God, don't bite my head,'" Murphy said.

Finally, the bear moved away. Murphy said he got up, planning to shoot the bear, but it had broken his rifle.

Murphy said he wrapped duct tape around his shoulder and cut up a cloth bag to wrap around his thigh. He hiked out to his four-wheeler, rode about 15 miles back to his pickup truck and drove a half hour to Valley Hospital in Palmer.

The 54-year-old said he has no idea how long the attack lasted, but it felt like "two lifetimes."

"I can laugh about it now, but I wasn't laughing then," he said.

A Conversation with Jim Gray

This conversation with Jim Gray is full of fascinating tidbits. I enjoyed this take on storage growing faster than access:

We have an embarrassment of riches in that we're able to store more than we can access. Capacities continue to double each year, while access times are improving at 10 percent per year. So, we have a vastly larger storage pool, with a relatively narrow pipeline into it.

We're not really geared for this. Having lots of RAM helps. We can cache a lot in main memory and reduce secondary storage access. But the fundamental problem is that we are building a larger reservoir with more or less the same diameter pipe coming out of the reservoir. We have a much harder time accessing things inside the reservoir.
[...]
What do you do with a 200-gig disk drive? You treat a lot of it as tape. You use it for snapshots, write-anywhere file systems, log-structured file systems, or you just zone frequent stuff in one area and try to waste the other 190 GB in useful ways. Of course, we could put the Library of Congress holdings on it or 10,000 movies, or waste it in some other way.

Kevin Kelly -- Recomendo

I just stumbled across Kevin Kelly -- Recomendo (via McGee's Musings), and his most recent recommendation is Simon Field's Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids:

Probably the coolest source of educational science demonstrations I've encountered is this very book-like website written and run by Simon Field. Field has 30 nifty toys and gadgets that can be made quickly, cheaply and will amaze adults as well as kids. This is the only place I've seen that tells you how to make a magnetic linear accelerator, also known as a Gauss Rifle — it uses magnetism to shoot tiny steel balls...

The whole list is interesting though. For instance, once you see some Griptwists, you know you need a few.

Dragonfly Trick Makes Missiles Harder to Dodge

Fascinating. Dragonfly Trick Makes Missiles Harder to Dodge:

A future generation of anti-aircraft missiles could be made far harder to dodge by a guidance system inspired by the flight of dragonflies and hoverflies. The missiles will mimic a strategy called motion camouflage, which predatory insects use to trick prey into thinking they are stationary.

Insects that use this technique sneak up on their prey in a way that makes them seem stationary even though they are in fact moving closer. They do this by keeping themselves positioned between a fixed point in the landscape and their prey.

It has long been suspected that male dragonflies and other flying insects use this technique during aerial battles, and this has recently been confirmed (New Scientist print edition, 7 June).

Akiko Mizutani and Mandayam Srinivasan of the Australian National University in Canberra used two video cameras to track duelling dragonflies and worked out the trajectories they used on attack runs. They found that they do indeed adjust their flight paths to appear stationary.
[,,,]
The remarkable thing, says Anderson, is that these complex trajectories can be worked out by a neural network computer program based only on the movement of the target as seen from the viewpoint of the missile. There is no need for sensors to keep track of the fixed spot. "You can train a system to estimate its relative position without giving it 360-degree vision," says Anderson.
[...]
"If you put multiple missiles behind one another on the same motion camouflage trajectory, only the very first missile would be picked up by radar or infrared." The target would never know how many missiles were behind the first one.

The technology could also be used to outfox heat-sensors. A missile could detach and explode its rear stage a small distance from the target, creating a backdrop of infrared radiation. Then the rest of the missile would continue on a motion camouflage trajectory against this noisy backdrop, making heat sensors effectively blind to it. "It'd be like coming out of the Sun," says Anderson.

Lewis and Clark Rediscovery Project

According to Lewis and Clark Rediscovery Project, Jefferson thought Lewis and Clark might encounter elephants in the wilds of North America:

Bones and teeth from giant elephant-like creatures called mastodons, often referred to as "mammoths," had been found in several locations across the northern part of the United States in the late 1700s. The large size of the fossils implied huge animals many times larger than any known elephant.

Mammoths and mastodons are two different species but Jefferson and others of the time spoke of them in the same terms. Paleontology at the time was not advanced enough to distinguish a difference between the two.

The existence of such mammoth animals excited the interest of many people, including President Jefferson, who summarized what he knew about mammoths in 1780 in his Notes on the State of Virginia. In 1797 as president of the American Philosophical Society, he and others organized expeditions to find "one or more complete skeletons of the mammoth" and other unknown animals. Later Jefferson used his own funds to hire William Clark to look for mammoth fossils along the Ohio.

We now know that mammoths and giant sloths became extinct about 10,000 years ago, but Jefferson thought that Lewis might find them alive and well in the unexplored west. First, Jefferson knew of Indian tales that suggested that mammoths in particular still lived in the distant West. In addition, Jefferson and many others rejected the possibility that sloths and mammoths could be extinct based on the idea of the "great chain of being," in which everything in Heaven and on Earth were links in a beautiful, harmonious chain of creation. Should any link disappear, the chain would be broken and chaos would follow.

However, the question of whether any species of plant or animal could become extinct was being heatedly discussed in the early 1800s. French paleontologist Georges Cuvier and others were just getting started on their work that eventually established the reality of extinctions.

As it was, Lewis and Clark found no traces of living mammoths. The extinctions had indeed happened.

Begging the Question

Yesterday I found myself stuck in a seemingly endless conference call, listening to a particularly grating voice exclaim, "that begs the question..." over and over again. But the original person's point did not beg the question — because begging the question does not mean raising a question; it means presuming your conclusion or using circular reasoning. From Begging the question - Wikipedia:

Part of the reason for the misunderstanding over what 'begging the question' means may be due to the confusing term itself, which was translated into English from Latin in the 16th century. The Latin version, Petitio Principii, would be translated more accurately as 'Petitioning the Principle,' or 'Claiming the truth of the very matter in question,' but the more pithy 'Begging the question' has become the well-known translation.

I found myself so very close to adopting my Inigo Montaya accent and saying, "You keep using that [term]. I do not think it means what you think it means."

The Bondo Mystery Ape

Karl Ammann, a Swiss wildlife photographer, has been searching for the mystery ape of Bondo. His page on The Bondo Mystery Ape starts with the Economist article on his efforts:

A hundred years ago, on October 17th 1902, Oscar von Beringe, a German explorer, 'suddenly noticed a troupe of large black monkeys' while climbing a volcano in eastern Congo. 'We were able to shoot two of these monkeys,' he wrote, 'which hurtled down the gorge of the crater with an incredible rumble.' That von Beringe then found himself 'unable to classify the monkey' is not surprising. He was the first European to come into contact with a mountain gorilla.

Gorillas, mountain and otherwise, are rare now. Poachers kill the adults for their meat, and sometimes to make knick-knacks for foreigners. Youngsters are taken from the wild to adorn private zoos. But even after a century, that diminished population may yet hold a surprise.

In 1908 two apes were shot near a place called Bondo, in northern Congo. Their skulls (and two others found in local dwellings) had the crests characteristic of gorillas, but they were unusual enough for taxonomists of the time to classify them as a separate subspecies. Since then, no further specimens of this subspecies have been recorded. Four years ago, Karl Amman, a Swiss wildlife photographer, took up the quest to rediscover the missing gorillas. What he has found is not yet clear. But it might just be a new species of ape.

Mr Amman's expeditions into the forest of Bili, near Bondo (the latest of which, accompanied by this correspondent, has just returned from the bush) have not seen a live ape. But they have found a lot of ground nests. Such nests are characteristic of gorillas. Chimpanzees, the other species of ape that lives in this area, prefer to sleep in trees. Other spoor point to the presence of gorillas, too. Feces in the area resemble those of gorillas, as does the way that saplings are broken down around nest sites. As if to clinch it, Mr Amman has also found another crested skull lying around.

Some of the nests, however, have hairs in them. And hairs contain DNA. That yielded a surprise. The DNA looks like that of a chimpanzee, not a gorilla. Moreover, a re-interpretation of the skull Mr Amman found has pronounced it to be that of a chimp, albeit a crested one. And analysis of the feces suggests that whatever dropped them was eating a fruit-rich diet. That is also characteristic of chimps. What Mr Amman seems to have found is a chimpanzee that behaves like a gorilla.

Local hunters' reports point to something unusual, too. Bondo's hunters do not distinguish between gorillas and chimpanzees. Instead, they divide the local apes into "tree-beaters" and "lion-killers." These two types look the same, and both flee hunters. But lion-killers, say the hunters of Bili, are much bigger and are difficult to kill, even with a poisoned arrow. Several enormous chimp footprints seem to confirm the hunters' reports of an out-sized chimp. And, in a photograph recently obtained from a hunter, the body of one chimp appears to be about 1.8 metres tall (five feet or so). Indeed, to nest confidently on the ground in forest thick with lions and leopards, the lion-killers would probably have to be of such a size.

Whether such lion-killers really are a distinct population, corresponding to Mr Amman's ground-nesting "chimpanzees" and whether they are so different from other great apes that they constitute a separate species, remains to be seen. But it is surprising that in the early years of the 21st century such a discovery could even be contemplated. Apparently, the jungle has not given up all its secrets yet.

Ammann makes some interesting comments:

In 1898 a Belgian officer returning from the Congo provided the Trevuren Museum in Bruxelles with three gorilla skulls which he had collected near Bondo in Northern Congo and a village further south near the Itumbiri River.

This Bondo location is about half way between the extreme edges of the Western and Eastern distribution of any gorilla populations.

In 1937 based on the skulls anatomical differences and their unique origin Henri Schouteden named an new subspecies: Gorilla Gorilla uellensis.

I did a first survey of the forests around Bondo in 1996 returning with a skull which had a pronounced sagittal crest (as male gorillas do). However all the rest of the measurements associated with the skull were those of a chimpanzee.

In the subsequent years the war situation in most of the Congo made travel to the Bili/Bondo area very difficult. I recruited a Cameroonian bush meat hunter to visit and survey the area. This guy had killed dozens of chimpanzees and gorillas in his life and would be able to assess any tracks he would find.
[...]
The local population told tales of large and normal chimps. The normal ones could be hunted with the poisoned arrows when feeding in trees, the big ones however hardly climbed trees and would not succumb to the poison fast enough before fleeing and getting lost in the forests. The Azande translation for names used for apes include: The ones which beat the tree! and The one which kills the lion.

Early mitochondrial DNA tests point to the same conclusion:"The ground nesting chimps are clearly of the schweinfurthii subspecies." (He presents a phylogenetic tree.) I enjoyed the quoted morphologist's take on genetic analysis:

There is a general misunderstanding about genetics including by those that are working with it. Genetic analysis is not presently a very accurate method for determining relationships of populations. Moreover it is long, labrious and costly and necessitates a large sample to make any sense of it.

Cute.

Seeking answers to big 'mystery ape'

I simply had to look up more stories on the mystery ape. From Seeking answers to big 'mystery ape':

'It doesn't look much like a gorilla, it doesn't look like a chimpanzee,' said primatologist Shelly Williams, who captured a bit of video of the female mystery ape with a baby.

Pictures of the rare ape are scarce. Wildlife photographer Karl Amman, who was first to spot the mysterious mammals a few years ago, said the animal has feet that are about two inches bigger than the average gorilla and is more flat-faced than other apes. Its behavior also sets it apart from other apes, researchers say.

The mystery ape often sleeps in big ground nests. Chimpanzees, for example, usually nest in trees to stay away from predators. And the mystery apes hoot when the moon rises and sets, something chimps don't do for fear of attracting lions and hyenas, Williams said.

How to get footage of the mystery apes:

"One of my trackers made the sound of a duiker, a small antelope, as if it were in pain," said Williams. Four or five of the mystery primates fell for the ruse and came running to kill it.

Chimpanzees and bonobos both are carnivorous. Chimps are known to eat monkeys, and at times other chimps; bonobos catch and eat fish.

This all sounds very "Big Foot" to me:

Williams also has a fascinating anecdote from a longtime resident of the region, an 84-year-old Norwegian Baptist missionary known as "Madame Liev."

"Years ago, she was driving an old truck and one of these apes walked by in front of her. It was walking bipedally (upright) and was taller than her, and she's six feet tall," Williams said.

Wife Reckless? Hubby Morose? Blame the Cat

Wild. Wife Reckless? Hubby Morose? Blame the Cat reports on a cat parasite that affects humans in a subtle but measurable manner:

Czech scientist Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague told Reuters his research showed a parasite called toxoplasma gondii in cats, rabbits or raw meat, may make women reckless and friendly while making men jealous and morose.

Just contracting the bug might not be life-threatening but infected women behind the wheel can be fatal, and those out for a stroll in busy traffic may be a hazard, he said.

'It is not much fun. Our research has shown that toxoplasmosis raises 2.6 times the risk of a traffic accident by prolonging the reaction time of infected people,' he said.

'It is not only about driving accidents but also about the probability of being run over by a car.'

Flegr said his research shows men infected by the bug tend to be quiet, withdrawn, suspicious, jealous and dogmatic. He said he could not find a reason for the different reactions.

The illness could be responsible for up to one million of deaths on the roads worldwide, making it the one of the deadliest parasitic diseases, second only to malaria, he said.

No Clapping, Dancing at Mass, Vatican to Warn

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."

A Dream Takes Root: Treehouses for Kids With Disabilities

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.

Earliest Modern Humans Found in Romanian Cave

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.

Killing time

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.

Omaha Zoo Testing DNA of Mystery Apes

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."

U.S. Soldier Kills Baghdad Tiger After Attack

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.

Princess Stephanie of Monaco Weds Circus Acrobat

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.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

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.

'Forgotten' Malaria Still Kills Millions

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.

A Guinea Pig No Cage Would Hold

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.

'Pristine' Amazon Hosted Large Cities, Study Finds

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.

Living Clean in Santa Fe While St. Louis Has Blues

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...

Spanish Navy Shocks Blamed for Giant Squid Deaths

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.

Singapore Targets Late Wedding Guests

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.

Docs' Cell Phones May Spread Hospital Infections

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?

Capuchins Don't Settle for Any Monkey Business

Sarah Brosnan, a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, recently discovered that capuchin monkeys have a strong sense of fairness. From Capuchins Don't Settle for Any Monkey Business:

She and her colleague Frans de Waal uncovered the sense of fair play in a study of the small brown primates from central and South America while giving pairs of monkeys who knew each other well jobs to perform.

They received food in exchange for doing a certain task. But each partner did not always get the same quantity or quality of food for equal amounts of effort.

'We showed the subjects compared their rewards with those of their partners and refused to accept a lower-value reward if their partners received a high-value reward,' said Brosnan.

If both members of the pair did not get the same reward, the monkey that was short-changed refused to accept it or threw it away, in a reaction similar to that of humans.

'That active response toward reward is really unusual. They were clearly not pleased with the way things were going,' Brosnan added.

Naturally, this points to our own sense of fairness having evolved:

She believes the findings, which are reported in the science journal Nature, settle the question of whether a sense of fairness is something that is taught or an evolved behavior.

"Finding this in capuchin monkeys does indicate that a sense of fairness has evolved. Clearly it is an extremely beneficial behavior," Brosnan added.

K Street Cred

I enjoyed Julian Sanchez's take on HBO's new K Street, in K Street Cred — particularly this bit:

The promise of camera-hungry politicos doing unscripted cameos had Beltway junkies feverishly dreaming of an unholy Crossfire/Temptation Island hybrid that would make Dr. Moreau blush.

He nails one of the show's problems:

What we see on the screen is a second-order simulacrum — people playing out ultra-self-conscious reproductions of public personas that are already elaborate constructs. The result is not only unconvincing, but vaguely eerie. In one scene, Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) is supposed to be at least mildly peeved to learn that James Carville, an analyst at a consulting firm Nickles employs, has taken on a pro bono gig prepping Howard Dean for the Democratic primary debate. Yet even the lines in which he's meant to be voicing his severest displeasure are delivered in unnaturally serene, modulated tones, and he manages to keep a wide shit-eating grin plastered on his mug the whole time.

I also strongly agree with another issue: "There's also an enormous amount of inside baseball here." I don't "breathe politics," so most of the subtext was lost on me.

Avocado/Soybean Product May Help Treat Osteoarthritis

I may have to eat more guacamole (and an occasional soybean). From Avocado/Soybean Product May Help Treat Osteoarthritis:

Osteoarthritis, which is caused by wear and tear on the cartilage that lines joints, appears to improve with a novel French product containing elements of avocado and soybean oils.

In an effort to find out how the product, known as A1S2 or Piascledine, works, Dr. Yves E. Henrotin from University Hospital in Liege, Belgium, and colleagues studied its effects on cartilage-producing cells — chondrocytes — taken from the joints of patients with osteoarthritis.

As the researchers report in the Journal of Rheumatology, A1S2 significantly enhanced the production by chondrocytes of aggrecan, a key component of cartilage, beginning after 9 days of treatment and increasing through day 12.

The individual avocado and soybean components worked as well as A1S2 in boosting aggrecan production.

However, A1S2 but not the individual components, also restored aggrecan synthesis blocked by an inflammation-causing compound called interleukin-1-beta, which is present in arthritic joints. In fact, A1S2 reduced levels of several inflammatory factors produced by the chondrocytes.

SPACEWAR - Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums

I stumbled across a copy of a Rolling Stone article from 1972, SPACEWAR - Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums, describing the first video game (Spacewar, from 1960) and early "computer bums":

I'm guessing that Alan Kay at Xerox Research Center (more on them shortly) has a line on it, defining the standard Computer Bum: "About as straight as you'd expect hotrodders to look. It's that kind of fanaticism. A true hacker is not a group person. He's a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship... They're kids who tended to be brilliant but not very interested in conventional goals. And computing is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around."

The hackers are the technicians of this science — "It's a term of derision and also the ultimate compliment."

Timeless — and yet so very, very dated.

I love the description of how Spacewars came to be:

"We had this brand new PDP-l," Steve Russell recalls. "It was the first minicomputer, ridiculously inexpensive for its time. And it was just sitting there. It had a console typewriter that worked right, which was rare, and a paper tape reader and a cathode ray tube display, [There had been CRT displays before, but primarily in the Air Defense System.] Somebody had built some little pattern-generating programs which made interesting patterns like a kaleidoscope. Not a very good demonstration. Here was this display that could do all sorts of good things! So we started talking about it, figuring what would be interesting displays. We decided that probably you could make a two-Dimensional maneuvering sort of thing, and decided that naturally the obvious thing to do was spaceships."

Naturally?

"I had just finished reading Doc Smith's Lensman series. He was some sort of scientist but he wrote this really dashing brand of science fiction. The details were very good and it had an excellent pace. His heroes had a strong tendency to get pursued by the villain across the galaxy and have to invent their way out of their problem while they were being pursued. That sort of action was the thing that suggested Spacewar. He had some very glowing descriptions of spaceship encounters and space fleet maneuvers."

"Doc" Smith:

The Boise leaped upon the Nevian, every weapon aflame. But, as Costigan had expected, Nerado's vessel was completely ready far any emergency. And, unlike her sister-ship, she was manned by scientists well-versed in the fundamental theory of the weapons with which they fought. Beams, rods and lances of energy flamed and flared; planes and pencils cut, slashed and stabbed; defensive screens glowed redly or flashed suddenly into intensely brilliant, coruscating incandescence. Crimson opacity struggled sullenly against violet curtains of annihilation. Material projectiles and torpedoes were launched under full-beam control; only to be exploded harmlessly in mid-space, to be blasted into nothingness or to disappear innocuously against impenetrable polycyclic screens.

— Triplanetary (1948)

Check out this early ARPA Net history:

The next (and current) director at ARPA-IPT was Larry Roberts, a brilliant researcher who had developed the first 3-D vision programs. His major project has been getting the ARPA Network up. ("Up" around computers means working, the opposite of "down" or crashed.) The dream for the Net was that researchers at widely separated facilities could share special resources, dip into each other's files, and even work on-line together on design problems too complex to solve alone.

At present some 20 major computer centers are linked on the two-year-old ARPA Net. Traffic on the Net has been very slow, due to delays and difficulties of translation between different computers and divergent projects. Use has recently begun to increase as researchers travel from center to center and want to keep in touch with home base, and as more tantalizing, sharable resources come available. How Net usage will evolve is uncertain. There's a curious mix of theoretical fascination and operational resistance around the scheme. The resistance may have something to do with reluctances about equipping a future Big Brother and his Central Computer. The fascination resides in the thorough rightness of computers as communications instruments, which implies some revolutions.

Twenty major computer centers...

Liberal Pieties

Joann Wypijewski starts Liberal Pieties, her review of McGreevy's Catholicism and American Freedom: A History and Jenkins' The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, with an eye-opening piece of history from McGreevy's work:

John McGreevy begins his book with an emblematic story. The year is 1859; the place, Boston. The public schools, dominated by the Protestant elite who also write the law, start each day with obligatory reading of the King James Bible and recitation of the Ten Commandments. Glorious as the King James version is, it is not taught as literature but, with the commandments, is intended to build moral fiber in the students, a great many of whom are Catholic. It disturbs twenty-first-century assumptions to imagine Catholics opposing school prayer, but the church doesn't subscribe to the Protestant Bible, or to private Bible reading in general, and was even more hostile to it in the nineteenth century. Nor are Catholic and Protestant versions of the Ten Commandments the same, the latter proscribing 'graven images,' an affront to the whole Catholic rococo of crucifixes and icons, Virgin shrines, reliquaries and sacred art.

Returning to our story, one day a 10-year-old Catholic boy at the Eliot School, Thomas Whall, is instructed to recite the commandments. He refuses. Days of urgent meetings follow, but the school committee decides it will not compromise. Again the boy is asked to read the commandments and again refuses, upon which an assistant to the principal declares, "Here's a boy that refuses to repeat the Ten Commandments, and I will whip him till he yields if it takes the whole forenoon." A half-hour later the child's hands are ripped and bleeding from the blows of a rattan stick; by one account he faints during the torture. All boys unwilling to recite the commandments are ordered out of the school; hundreds leave. Because they had been urged in church to resist Protestant conformity, to "recite their own Catholic prayers" and "not to be ashamed," they are seen in some quarters as mindless slaves to priestcraft. The most important Republican Party newspaper in Boston (Republicans were the liberals then) editorializes: "We are unalterably, sternly opposed to the encroachments of political and social Romanism, as well as to its wretched superstition, intolerance, bigotry and mean despotism." When Whall and his father sue the assistant for excessive force, the court vindicates school authority, ruling that the child's disobedience threatened the stability of the school, hence the foundation of the state.

Her review then turns into something Ellsworth Toohey might write:

Fascinating as that all is, ultimately McGreevy does something more valuable: prompting a meditation on power, and its shadow, marginality; on freedom, and its inevitable price, unfreedom; on faith, particularly the kind dressed up as secular rationalism.

Blast Kills Three in Japan Hostage Incident

Japan's financial crisis has led to disputes over money — disputes resulting in hostage-takings! Blast Kills Three in Japan Hostage Incident:

Three people were killed and 34 injured in an explosion after a man, wielding a knife and cross bow and demanding back pay, took hostages in an office in the Japanese city of Nagoya on Tuesday and set the area alight.

Paper and glass flew and screams could be heard as the blast ripped through the third floor office of a delivery firm in the industrial city, 170 miles west of Tokyo.

Public broadcaster NHK said the three dead were the hostage-taker, the manager of the office and a police officer.
[...]
Media reports said 52-year-old Noboru Beppu, thought to be a contract driver with the firm, had stormed into the office about three hours before the blast, doused the area with a liquid and threatened to set the building on fire if he was not paid three months' wages of about 250,000 yen ($2,129).

He then used a sofa and desks to barricade himself in the office along with eight hostages, all but one of whom were released before the explosion.

When the man set off the explosion by setting fire to the liquid, fire fighters, police and television crews were already on the scene.

By the way, it looks like he was plenty dangerous without a gun.

Rats Train in Tanzania to Sniff Out Mines

I find these stories endlessly fascinating. Rats Train in Tanzania to Sniff Out Mines:

Far from the outbreak of monkeypox that shed light on a worrisome increase in exotic pets in the United States, Mathias and his African pouched rat pals are hard at work in rural Tanzania learning how to locate land mines.

In their little red, black and blue harnesses, they look like miniature sniffer dogs. But their trainers at Sokoine University of Agriculture say the giant rats can do a much better job.

"Rats are good, clever to learn, small, like performing repeated tasks and have a better sense of smell than dogs," said Christophe Cox, the Belgian coordinator of the rat training project.

When they succeed, they get bits of ripe bananas.
[...]
Some 30 trainers put the rats through their paces in the simulated minefield where anti-personnel and anti-tank mines have no detonators.

"People are happy when I tell them I am working with the rats because they think I will help to eliminate them," project veterinarian Mwambewe Martin said. "But when I tell them I am training them, they don't understand how rats can be trained."

Harnessed rats are hitched to a sliding rail mounted on a metal grid about 3 feet high and 20 feet wide.

Two human handlers roll the grid over a suspected minefield. When a rat scratches and sniffs at a mine, the handler activates a clicker and pulls the rat over to the side by his lead to reward him with a banana bit.

When fully trained, the rats sniff out a mine, then sit and scratch at the spot until they are rewarded with food. A human de-miner destroys the mine. The rats are not heavy enough to detonate active mines.

AEI - News & Commentary

AEI - News & Commentary lists some of the findings of American Enterprise magazine's survey of the Iraqi people:

• Iraqis are optimistic. Seven out of 10 say they expect their country and their personal lives will be better five years from now. On both fronts, 32 percent say things will become much better.


• The toughest part of reconstructing their nation, Iraqis say by 3 to 1, will be politics, not economics. They are nervous about democracy. Asked which is closer to their own view"Democracy can work well in Iraq," or "Democracy is a Western way of doing things" — five out of 10 said democracy is Western and won't work in Iraq. One in 10 wasn't sure. And four out of 10 said democracy can work in Iraq. There were interesting divergences. Sunnis were negative on democracy by more than 2 to 1; but, critically, the majority Shiites were as likely to say democracy would work for Iraqis as not. People age 18-29 are much more rosy about democracy than other Iraqis, and women are significantly more positive than men.


• Asked to name one country they would most like Iraq to model its new government on from five possibilities — neighboring, Baathist Syria; neighbor and Islamic monarchy Saudi Arabia; neighbor and Islamist republic Iran; Arab lodestar Egypt; or the U.S. — the most popular model by far was the U.S. The U.S. was preferred as a model by 37 percent of Iraqis selecting from those five — more than Syria, Iran and Egypt put together. Saudi Arabia was in second place at 28 percent. Again, there were important demographic splits. Younger adults are especially favorable toward the U.S., and Shiites are more admiring than Sunnis. Interestingly, Iraqi Shiites, coreligionists with Iranians, do not admire Iran's Islamist government; the U.S. is six times as popular with them as a model for governance.


• Our interviewers inquired whether Iraq should have an Islamic government, or instead let all people practice their own religion. Only 33 percent want an Islamic government; a solid 60 percent say no. A vital detail: Shiites (whom Western reporters frequently portray as self-flagellating maniacs) are least receptive to the idea of an Islamic government, saying no by 66 percent to 27 percent. It is only among the minority Sunnis that there is interest in a religious state, and they are split evenly on the question.


• Perhaps the strongest indication that an Islamic government won't be part of Iraq's future: The nation is thoroughly secularized. We asked how often our respondents had attended the Friday prayer over the previous month. Fully 43 percent said "never." It's time to scratch "Khomeini II" from the list of morbid fears.


• You can also cross out "Osama II": 57 percent of Iraqis with an opinion have an unfavorable view of Osama bin Laden, with 41 percent of those saying it is a very unfavorable view. (Women are especially down on him.) Except in the Sunni triangle (where the limited support that exists for bin Laden is heavily concentrated), negative views of the al Qaeda supremo are actually quite lopsided in all parts of the country. And those opinions were collected before Iraqi police announced it was al Qaeda members who killed worshipers with a truck bomb in Najaf.


• And you can write off the possibility of a Baath revival. We asked "Should Baath Party leaders who committed crimes in the past be punished, or should past actions be put behind us?" A thoroughly unforgiving Iraqi public stated by 74 percent to 18 percent that Saddam's henchmen should be punished.

Mold Outbreak Plagues New England Schools

Evidently, this has been a very moldy year — at least on the east coast. Mold Outbreak Plagues New England Schools:

An unprecedented mold outbreak, following the region's rainy, humid summer, has delayed the opening of school for thousands of youngsters across New England and left some districts with six-figure cleanup bills.
[...]
"Mold growth has been at a rate that we have never seen in history," Condon said.

The tiny spores, nurtured by a soggy and steamy July and August, also have vexed homes and other buildings across the Northeast. For classrooms left vacant for weeks, all the fungus needed to multiply into big problems was a leaky roof, a loose window, condensation from an air conditioning system or a section of shampooed rug left damp.

In healthy children, mold typically causes no more than hayfever-like symptoms in the eyes, nose and throat, but those with asthma and other breathing difficulties and immune system problems can be affected more severely, Condon said.

A spritz of household bleach or a good scrub with detergent will clean mold from hard surfaces, but cleaning other materials is a difficult, expensive task for districts already strapped for cash.
[...]
New construction techniques aimed at reducing noise, such as carpeting and dropped ceilings, have made schools more difficult to clean than when walls were plaster and floors were tile, Condon said.

Sexual Frolics Spark Massive Police Hunt

This story starts off bad and gets worse. Sexual Frolics Spark Massive Police Hunt:

The sadomasochistic sex games of two Germans prompted a massive police hunt involving over 40 officers and fire services after witnesses mistook their frolics for a violent crime, authorities said on Thursday.

Police in the western city of Duesseldorf began a search for a black Porsche after alarmed callers reported seeing a man in the car battering a blindfolded person on her hands and knees with a stick. By the time police arrived, the car was gone.

Fire services and a police helicopter assisted in the hunt until police tracked down the car's owner, a 31-year-old man.

'The interview with the 'suspect' revealed he had met with a woman and that the two indulged their sexual appetites together in the Porsche,' police said in a statement.

The man said he had met the 51-year-old woman on the internet. The woman confirmed his story, police said.