Tuesday, October 1, 2002 
Salon today went beyond an earlier correction and removed a story originally published on August 29:
Oct. 1, 2002 | After careful review, Salon's editors have decided to take down from our Web site an article titled "Tom White played key role in covering up Enron losses" that we published on Aug. 29. We took this unusual step because we have come to the conclusion that we can no longer stand by the story in its entirety. Though we have corroborated most of the reporting in the article, some unanswered questions remain.How usual is it for a publication to retract a story entirely? I presume it will be unavailable in the Salon archive? I saw this story in my aggregator so I don't know how prominently the headline is displayed on the Salon.com home page.
categories: salonika
3:27:25 PM 
say what []
Dave is obsessing on Google pagerank, trying to get Google to associate his page more rankfully with the search term weblog. He also got me thinking about this thing of being the top Dave or Adam or Jeremy or Jason on Google:
Adam Curry is the number three Adam on Google today, ahead of Adam Smith, Adam Sandler, and the guy who did the deed with Eve. [Scripting News]Try that with Christian and you'll never find me (I gave up after five pages of religion). But search for xian and Radio Free Blogistan is the second result (after Xi'an Jiaotong University).
As noted earlier, this site is (still, whatever changes to the pagerank algorithm don't seem to have affected this site much) the second result at Google for blogistan as well.
categories: metablog
3:14:14 PM say what []
An old philosophy buddy of mine sent me this e-mail message this morning, with the subject "Help me before I get hawkish":
Despite some fatuous chest-thumping about the greatness of American culture herein, I find this indictment of Arab/Islamist culture hard to argue with, along with the claims about possible Arab responses to the situation. Do the policy prescriptions follow? Of course not. But the author doesn't claim they do, exactly. He invites us to offer an intelligent alternative proposal. Anybody got one?So a punditblog meme jumps the rails and is now being communicated by email. Is this fairly common?
>>
>>http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/09/Whoisourenemy.shtml
categories: memewatch
11:21:51 AM say what []
What makes pornography (let's stick to visual porn for the sake of discussion) work the way it does? That is, how do images of bodies, body parts, or sex arts stimulate sexual arousal in a way that's useful for masturbation?
I would suggest that porn deliberates manipulates (pun intended) inherited, evolved, largely genetic but clearly somewhat socialized as well, impulses or tendencies in the mind. In other words, the porn images hack into your brain and fool it into thinking that procreation is imminent. Shwing.
If you look at that curve (is it a breast, the undercupping of buttock?) you are fiddling with your brain chemistry. The photographer or cinematographer and publisher of the porn are the hackers, in collaboration with the consumer.
This is not unusual. Most of contemporary human existence relies on these forms of interventions into animal drives, these layers of feedback loops and intentionality that feel like being conscious (I think). Drugs are the more obvious example (think aspirin as much as cannabis).
I once read Andrew Weil suggesting that the same power of visualizing that enables people to arouse themselves (with fantasies, the imagination, without props) can be applied to health: curing illness, transcending allergies, etc. I can foresee a time when our palette of brain-twiddling levers make today's interventions look like rocks tied with twine.
categories: x-pollen
11:19:01 AM say what []
The Spartaneity Project furthers the conversation about whether permalinks are an essential element of weblogs:
Much of what makes weblogs different from websites of old is structural. ... [W]e're inclined to believe that those which do not include permalinks through which the rest of us can refer directly to individual posts are not quite fully formed as weblogs.
(Deadline today, light blogging at best.)
categories: metablog
10:08:52 AM say what []
