April 9, 2003

SALON WATCH Our 'parent' magazine, Salon , continues to sustain its reputation for quality, insightful analysis and investigative journalism. Here are just four recent examples that show why Salon is the best magazine in the world right now, and why we need to do everything possible to help keep it going: Take Back the Airwaves: In The Myth of Interference , David Weinberger interviews Internet architect David Reed about the radiomagnetic spectrum. Key message: With appropriate technology, the communications spectrum, the bandwidth of the airwaves, is unlimited. There is no need to license it (or worse, privatize it), if we allow users to develop software that can parse it into infinitely smaller sections, and open the airwaves up to anyone and everyone that is able to operate in a sufficiently small part of the spectrum that they essentially do not 'interfere' with anyone else. We must take back the airwaves before they are privatized, or communications technology innovation will grind needlessly to a halt, and what should be 'public' property will be gone forever. The Illogic of War in Iraq: In Briefing for a Descent into Hell , Fred Branfman posits an imaginary conversation with an alien visitor who shows, objectively and hilariously, the insanity of the Iraq war and much of the rest of the Bush agenda. Bill Moyers on Bush: In a Salon Interview with Bill Moyers , Andrew O'Hehir draws out the tactful and grizzled media veteran to admit that he fears Bush and his 'cronies' threaten the very fabric of American democracy. He also talks about 'right-wing hegemony', growing inequality, the environment, and chicken feet. Consumer Mind Control: In Madison Avenue & Your Brain , Matthew Blakeslee explains how advertisers use your own physical and neurological responses to make you want to but what you don't need. Good accompaniment to my most recent post . 3:39:06 PM   comment []

	March 27, 2003

A DIAGNOSIS FOR GULF WAR SYNDROME There's been a lot of discussion lately about depleted uranium as an unlikely cause of Gulf War Syndrome. Now it appears there may be an explanation of why so many Gulf War vets, and so many Iraqi civilians, have come down with symptoms consistent with chemical poisoning. The New Scientist reports that as much as 10% of the population has a sensitivity to even miniscule traces of chemicals, and that as a result they suffer permanent brain damage with as much as a whiff of these substances. This susceptibility is exacerbated by stress, which is why, proponents of the theory say, it is so prevalent in war areas and war situations. This same 10% have negative reactions to the drug pyridostigmine given to U.S. troops during the Gulf War (and also in this war) to increase their resistance to nerve agents. This, of course, raises interesting ethical questions. If chemical weapons used by both sides in a war leave 90% of combatants and civilians unaffected but debilitate or kill the other 10%, is their use justifiable, and who's responsible for reparations? 7:05:47 PM   comment []

	March 26, 2003

CHOMSKY ON POLITICS AND LANGUAGE Since language and politics are two of the blogosphere's favourite topics, readers might like to know that there's a profile of Noam Chomsky that deals with both subjects in this week's New Yorker (not available, alas, in the online edition ). Chomsky has recently alienated many of his supporters on the political left. He refuses, for example, to talk about his opposition to war in terms of morality, and focuses purely on whether it is reasonable to achieve the intended result. His opposition to the war on Iraq is therefore predicated on these 'facts': (a) Few countries have ever (and America has never) successfully replaced a country's regime with one more acceptable to the people of that country. Only internal, civil revolutions have been successful in doing this (e.g. Marcos, Duvalier, Suharto, Ceausescu). (b) Iraq is an artificial construct imposed by the British, which means the only regimes likely to find enduring favour with the local populace are those that the U.S. could not tolerate (e.g. a Shiite muslim state closely allied with the similar state in Iran, and a Kurdish state allied with a break-away Turkish Kurdish state). Chomsky was recently in Turkey using his influence for the successful release of a Kurdish journalist charged with treason (for publishing Chomsky's articles condemning Turkey's treatment of the Kurds). Chomsky seems to be as inept in many of his actions as he is brilliant in his thoughts. He inadvertently lent his name and his credibility to an anti-Semitic tract when he defended the author's rights to free speech (his quote appeared as an 'endorsement' on the offensive book's cover). His book on 9/11 has been vilified for its moral indifference: He compared the 9/11 attacks to Clinton's bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant (the U.S. suspected it was a chemical weapons plant, and because of the error several thousand people died as a result of not getting their medicines). Regardless of intent or morality, he argued, neither attack could reasonably have been expected to have accomplished its objectives with minimal risk, so they were equally indefensible. He has alienated many people in his field of linguistics as well. He has radically changed his basic thinking on the subject three times, each time turning his back contemptuously on supporters of his previous theories. He still believes that language is hard-wired in the brain (which is why babies learn it so easily, and 'wild children' who don't learn language by adolescence spend the rest of their lives illiterate and culturally disconnected from the rest of the human race). He believes all human languages are intimately connected and remarkably and inevitably alike, although he has seemingly given up on the holy grail of a universal 'proto-language' or syntax. A passionate anti-behaviouralist, he thinks it possible that language could yet prove to be a Gouldian 'spandrel', an accident of human evolution that arose as a side-effect of some more  'purposeful' evolutionary development. The article left me with two unanswered questions: Is Chomsky's 'rational', morally neutral approach to looking at political events and public policy better or worse than approaches that invoke morality, humanity, and altruism? Is Chomsky a linguistic speciesist, blinded by his narrow study of human language to believe that only humans have sophisticated, 'hard-wired' innate language ability, and hence reasoning and cognition? If he studied dolphins or ravens would he really come to understand what language and consciousness and reason is, how and why they evolved and what they're for? Anyone have any thoughts on these two issues, or other thoughts about Chomsky? Seems to me this might be diablogue material. What do we make of his incredible worldwide popularity, everywhere except in the U.S.? And what should we make of his wife's weary comment that when he's asked what to do about everything that's wrong, he 'fakes' an answer rather than admit he has none? Post-script: Since I'm pimping the New Yorker, I should note that the magazine cover I reproduced on my To Be Nobody But Yourself post (also on Monday) was, by an amazing coincidence, featured in this week's New Yorker vintage cover collection ad. I now know the artist's name: Charles E. Martin, and the date of initial publication, 1971. You can buy it, as I'm going to do, from their Cartoon Bank . 4:01:36 PM   comment []

	March 2, 2003

OPEN SOURCE UTOPIA Part 1: Designing a Nation Recently Adam Greenfield proposed an open-source collaborative project to develop a manual for the (re-)construction of a nation. The premise is that no group of bureaucrats, military strategists and civil servants can possibly know how to rebuild a country, especially one whose citizens may have never known democracy, freedom, rule of law, or any of the other constructs that we think are essential to the functioning of a civil state. No one has been able to impose (Afghanistan) or quickly and painlessly evolve (ex-Soviet states) a nation-model that works. Even the best current systems have taken centuries of war, intermittant misery and inequity to emerge and are wildly imperfect and fragile. So the idea is: Design an open-source model using collaborative tools. Let all the people affected participate in its creation, so it's right for the culture and evolutionary state of those who have to live with it. Let those who think they have the answers write chapters or constitutions or bills of rights or judicial frameworks and submit them for immediate response, editing and referenda by the citizens. I think it's a wonderful idea. Now all we have to do is try it out in Afghanistan by setting up a mass of computers in communities around the country, equipped with multi-lingual collaborative and learning tools and facilitators to enable it to happen. Think Bill Gates might chip in for this? And, of course, the 'conquering nations' need to pony up the money needed to rebuild and bootstrap the infrastructure and institutions required by the people's design. That's a taller order. Part 2: Designing The Future State for Earth This idea got me thinking about the possibility of using blogspace to write a novel. I've already written the set-up chapter for a utopian novel, and skeleton descriptions of its twelve characters. The plan was to write twelve additional chapters, each written from the perspective of one of the characters. The novel is set in an Edenic future where, after a major viral plague, man has finally learned his place in the world and lives in peace with all the planet's creatures. It's not a cautionary tale. Instead, the idea is to show what's possible on our beleaguered planet if we were to deal with the underlying causes of the problems (e.g. overpopulation, lack of education etc.) instead of their symptoms (war, crime etc.) In business this type of construct is called a Future State Vision. It occurred to me that these fictional characters' stories might be richer and more believable if the chapters were actually written by different people. I've heard of other collaborative creative exercises working well (a superb example is Jonathan Elias' Prayer Cycle , which features overlays by Alanis Morissette, Salif Keita and other musicians from all over the world overlaying native-language vocal tracks on Elias' multi-lingual adagio compositions; the artists apparently never met in person). Advice, or lessons from other collaborative non-pornographic writing exercises, would be welcome. 12:53:54 PM   comment []

	February 28, 2003

PICKING A FUEL-EFFICIENT HYBRID CAR UCS has a thorough new report on how to select from the new breed of fuel-efficient hybrid cars .  Excerpt: Using new research into the cost and performance of hybrid technology, this report provides a comprehensive assessment of the technology, the fuel economy, and the costs associated with a fleet of passenger cars and trucks that rely on hybrid technology to more than double the fuel economy commonly available today. If they are designed well, these hybrids can equal or better the utility, comfort, performance, and safety we've come to expect, while saving us thousands of dollars at the gas pump. You can also download a consumer's guide to buying a greener vehicle. 8:57:26 AM   comment []

	February 27, 2003

EARTH OBSERVATORY Yahoo Science today publicized NASA's site that contains hundreds of high-resolution pictures of Earth from space, some of them so remarkably detailed you can pick out individual streets and houses. It's called Earth Observatory and it would be doing it a gross disservice to use a thumbnail shot in this post to exemplify its contents. Just go visit it, see the smoke trail from the Staten Island refinery fire (click on the 'large view' link), or the Etna eruption, or the Australian bush fires. These photos are breathtaking. I'm hanging up my Nikon. 2:47:44 PM   comment []

	February 25, 2003

ON HYDROGEN, FASCISM AND POWELL'S VIEW OF VIETNAM AlterNet explains why hydrogen is not , at least in the short run, a clean or renewable energy alternative, and may in fact detract from important renewable energy programs already getting traction. In the International Herald Tribune, 80-year-old Norman Mailer weighs in with a warning that the U.S. has already attained a "pre-fascistic atmosphere" and that, alas, fascism, not democracy, may be the natural state for nations. Robert Scheer brings to our attention this remarkable excerpt from Colin Powell 's 1995 autobiography: "I recently read Bernard Fall's book on Vietnam, 'Street Without Joy.' Fall makes painfully clear that we had almost no understanding of what we had gotten ourselves into. I cannot help thinking that if President Kennedy or President Johnson had spent a quiet weekend at Camp David reading that perceptive book, they would have returned to the White House Monday morning and immediately started to figure out a way to extricate us from the quicksand of Vietnam." 1:05:38 PM   comment []

MEANWHILE, IN OTHER NEWS The U.S. supreme court just sent the case of a black Texas death row inmate back to a lower court, ruling that the judge and the lower court unfairly allowed systematic racial bias in jury selection to go unchallenged. Three guesses who the only dissenting judge was? The Economist reports a breakthrough in fibre optics (subscriber-only story) called Photonic Crystal Fibres (PCFs) , which may enable tremendous advances in the miniaturization of testing equipment, increased efficiency and longevity of fibre cabling, and the manipulation of single atoms. In the search for blame for accounting regularities of Royal Ahold NV , the world's third largest retailer, which resulted in restatements of at least $500 million and the collapse of Ahold's share price, the BBC says the problem may lie in loose regulations governing foreign operations of Dutch parent companies. Many companies base their global or European operations in the Netherlands for tax reasons and to simplify regulatory requirements. The discrepancies involve overbooking of promotional allowances (amounts kicked back to the retailer by suppliers for promotion of their brands) in U.S. and possibly South American operations. 11:56:27 AM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Dave Pollard. Last update: 09/04/2003; 3:43:55 PM.