Shockley was dead: To begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

I'd get organized but I have this genetic malfunction, you understand--Bill Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, founding father of Silicon Valley and a serious son-of-a-bitch, destroyed his career on the notion that intelligence was genetic. He also claimed that blacks were genetically less intelligent than whites because they scored--as a group--lower on standard IQ tests than did whites. You know all of that, of course. The uproar in the scientific community against his assertion was one of the low points of American science in the 60s and 70s. Shockley insisted people actually go out and do the research and see if he was right; the scientific community (or at least the loud and politically correct) raged against it.

(Disclaimer: your obedient servent is Shockley's biographer and you can read all about it here. End of commercial)

As time goes--Shockley died in 1989--it turns out he was correct about the non-racial assertion. Over the years, scientists have found myriad examples of human traits hidden in the genes, including (and depending on how you define) intelligence. In a piece of research that got very little publicity, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine have even found a particular gene.

The gene activates a signalling pathway to the brain involved with organizing, certainly an aspect of intelligence. The gene CHRM2 is "not a gene for intelligence," says Danielle M. Dick, assistant professor of psychiatry and lead author of the study. "It's a gene that's involved in some kinds of brain processing, and specific alterations in the gene appear to influence IQ. But this single gene isn't going to be the difference between whether a person is a genius or has below-average intelligence." They did find, however, that several variations in the gene could slightly influence the results of IQ tests, particularly performance IQ scores.

The study, published in Behavioral Genetics, was the offshoot of a large study of alcoholism. Some of the subjects (2,150) also took the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised, and the results were matched with individual's DNA.

The study confirms others hinting at the same link

CHRM2 isn't the "intelligence gene." It appears that it affects only one aspect of what we call intelligence. Dick says there could be hundreds of genes involved in intelligence, which seems an entirely intelligent surmise.

Too bad Shockley was cremated--his corpse would be smiling.

Our president doesn't read, why the hell should you?--Decline of Civilization Part VIIII

I’m reading Gibbon. Please go away--Every one has their own measure for the health and well-being of a society. Mine is libraries. How a society treats its libraries (and its literacy) tells you a great deal about it. Folks, we are in deep doodoo.

Thanks to cutoffs in federal funding, 15 libraries in rural Oregon are going to shut down in April, the largest library closure in U.S. history. The libraries in Jackson County lost $7 million in federal funding, about 80 percent of their budget. They are all either brand new (Medford) or newly rebuilt. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, other library systems have been on the brink, including Salinas and Merced Counties in California and Niagara Falls in New York. They were rescued eventually. But this, according to the Chronicle, is different, at least in scope. There are political charges flying back and fourth, children are marching in the streets, and an effort to increase library funding through a property tax has triggered a backlash from the same kind of boar heads who helped destroy California's school system with Proposition 13.

The libraries will close April 7.

The origin of the problem was the failure of Congress (controlled then by Republicans, of course) to reauthorize $400 million for rural counties to goose their economies. Oregon was hit the hardest, and Jackson County lost $23 million. They had to cut everything in sight, including jail beds and first responders. The county was left with the choice of emergency services or books, so they chose the former. Otherwise "we won't be able to monior misdemeanor sex offenders anymore," the county administrator lamented. A crooked railroad deal a century ago--not uncommon in the West--also was involved but that is too complicated to get into, except to say Oregon thinks Congress reneged on funds promised in an agreement with Teddy Roosevelt. Trust me on this. Oh yes, the spotted owl gets involved too.

Three times the good citizens of Jackson voted against a tax to fund the libraries. It's coming up for a vote again and is unlikely to pass because of voting rules on tax increases. God forbid they should have to pay for government services.

The Medford library is brand new and just opened this week.

Just as well. It will be harder to figure out what to read. According to the Wall Street Journal (this one is free), separate book sections in newspapers are becoming a thing of the past. The latest one to fall will be the Los Angeles Times, a paper being sliced to death by its corporate owner and the barbarians on Wall Street. The section will be merged into an opinion section. The reason in this case can't be necessarily blamed on the owners of the newspapers--book publishers are no longer buying ads in these sections. That leaves only five newspapers with separate sections, down from a dozen 10 years ago. Other papers also are reconsidering, including the Washington Post (what will Bush do without a book section, you may ask), the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Only the New York Times, which has a book section too powerful for even the dumbest publisher to ignore, seems immune. The publishers have been putting their advertising money in paying bookstores to prominently display copies. The move from the newspapers, the Journal points out, however, doesn't seem to work--book sales are down.

Of course they are.

BULLETIN-Anna Nicole Smith Is Still Dead

Did you know that Fox News had 12 times the number of stories on Anna Nicole Smith than on Walter Reed Medical Center last week? See here.

Does that mean it will crash tomorrow or yesterday?

Mayday, Mayday! I have the International Dateline on my tail—With all due respect to the men and women who are putting their lives on the line on orders from the most inept administration in modern American history, it still is refreshing to know that the military bureaucracy can be just as incompetent as always.

For example, the newest warplane in the U.S. arsenal is the F-22 Raptor, a stealth fighter. The plane cost $70 billion to develop and each one of the 180 on order will cost $361 million. Like all modern aircraft, it is largely computer controlled, some 1.7 million lines of code, most of which is used to process radar data. You would think that somewhere in those 1.7 million lines of code someone would have thought to enter the International Date Line. You would think wrong. They didn’t. When the Raptors were on their way to Japan for deployment, they flew over the date line and their computers crashed. Dead. According to Maj. General Don Sheppard, interviewed by CNN, the crash took out “all systems, their navigation, part of their communications, their fuel systems. They were--they could have been in real trouble. They were with their tankers. The tankers tried to reset their systems, couldn’t get them reset. The tankers brought them back to Hawaii.” It is sort of like the space ship NASA sent off to Mars and someone confused pounds with grams. Now think of what would have happened if the F-22 computer crashed during combat. Fortunately, it was fixed in 48 hours. No word on whether they were using Windows.

That’s a 404 error dude, now get your artificial leg off the table—It's a good guess you have been following the problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, uncovered by the Washington Post. (Dana Priest may be the best reporter working in America right now). Yesterday, they fired the general in charge and replaced him with the general who was apparently there when the problems were first noticed and did nothing about them. Well, it turns out the army isn't too thrilled with the publicity, as you can imagine. Keep in mind, this is where many of the men and women wounded in our two wars go for treatment, and you would think they would get care appropriate for heroes. You would think. According to the Army Times, the army has forbidden any of the patients to talk to the press, and the patients are getting early-morning inspections that one patient called harassment. If you go to the Walter Reed website you will find all contacts are missing and the link to "In the News" contains absolutely nothing about the scandal. If try to get info on the garrison commander you get a 404 error, "page not found." No telephone numbers are listed except the general one for the main switchboard, which would not do reporters much good.

Don’t you just love a free press?

[Thank you, Eliyahu]

It’s the South Philly cheesesteak diet

But they do lower the cholesterol in vampires--I believe that the three things medical science knows the least about are nutrition, sex and lower back pain.

Remember all those studies showing how vitamins, especially the antioxidants, prevented all kinds of diseases, from the heart break of psoriasis to actual heart break? Foolish of us to believe any of it.

A meta-analysis from Denmark by the respected Cochrane Hepato-Biliary Group in Copenhagen, published in JAMA [click here] finds absolutely no benefit in terms of longevity from taking the antioxidants. In fact, instead of living longer, subjects who took many supplements had a modest decrease in longevity. Meta-analysis--for those unfamiliar with the jargon--means they didn’t do the research themselves; they took published papers, extracted the ones they thought worthy, and then did a statistical analysis of them all to draw stastically valid conclusions. When done well, it is a valid form of tracking data.

They used all the studies up to October 2005 involving beta carotene, vitamins A, C and E as well as selenium, compared in blind tests with placebos or nothing, 68 studies worldwide, 232,606 subjects. They found no significant effect on mortality. In 47 studies they actually found an increase in mortality for everything except vitamin C and selenium. Subjects died earlier than those who did not take the supplements. They concluded: “treatment with beta carotene, vitamin A and vitamin E may increase mortality. The potential roles of vitamin C and selenium on mortality need further study.”

Criticism of the studies, of course, came immediately [here and here] but why critics bother, I don’t know. Just wait a few months and you will get another study contradicting this one. Meanwhile, I take vitamins.

Remember the studies on garlic and cholesterol? Another reported dud. Multiple studies now show no effect on cholesterol from taking garlic pills or garlic mash potatoes or garlic bread (damn!). All those other studies were all wrong. No study has yet disproven the effects of garlic on vampires although I can tell you I cook extensively with garlic and we have never been bothered by vampires. Nunca. Zero vampires.

As I said, the three things....

Decline of Western Civilization--Part VI, or the decomposing Ms. Smith—UPDATED

We interrupt this newscast for a Fox exclusive: Anne Nicole Smith’s body is decomposing and Cheney blames Hillary--If you, like me, have been appalled at the coverage of Ms Smith’s untimely departure from celebrity and life, and wondered what would happen if one of the 24-hour news networks broke ranks and actually covered actual news, I have bad news for you

CNN, which has become less and less relevant in the U.S. in recent years with its slide into junk news, decided to cover the news (there is a war going on, there is another war being planned and the country is going to hell) with an exclusive interview with Condi Rice, while Fox and MSNBC stuck with the decomposing Ms Smith and the totally hilarious court case over who gets the increasingly offensive body. CNN got clobbered. In the afternoon cycle both MSNBC and Fox creamed them, with CNN getting a third of the ratings of the other two. See here. MSNBC even killed two news shows to continue covering the hearing. Unfortunately, they don’t do IQ tests on the audience and advertisers don’t seem to care if the famous youth age group they find so attractive can chew gum and masturbate at the same time.

If you get bored with Ms. Smith [that's her Houston police mug shot up there--I have no idea why she was arrested, being actively irrelevant is not a criminal offense], there is always Ms Spears. She shaved her head and went into therapy. Oh, and the Sunni insurgency is now using poison gas in Iraq

This is not a serious country. The Romans in the 3rd century are the closet match I can think of. Unlike the Romans, however, we are not going to be invaded by barbarians. We are going to become barbarians.

UPDATE—No, Ms. Smith is still decomposing. But on Saturday, the esteemed New York Times printed a half dozen letters defending all the folks who turned on cable to catch the latest contretemps over the corpse. The message was that the world is such a mess, and the country is such a mess, and there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do about it since the government is not responding, we are entitled to a break to worry about something unimportant and to be amused at the people who think it is important. Nonsense.

BULLETIN--Anna Nichole Smith is still dead.

Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot

Darwin, of course, changed his name for business purposes—In America, we have a president who thinks the Theory of Evolution is just another theory. In Britain they put Charles Darwin on their money, the £10 note. Here we still argue. The rest of the world—appropriately—laughs. It just got funnier.

Try this from a Texas newspaper:

By ROBERT T. GARRETT / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN - The second most powerful member of the Texas House has circulated a Georgia lawmaker's call for a broad assault on teaching of evolution. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, used House operations Tuesday to deliver a memo from Georgia state Rep. Ben Bridges.

The memo assails what it calls "the evolution monopoly in the schools." Mr. Bridges' memo claims that teaching evolution amounts to indoctrinating students in an ancient Jewish sect's beliefs.

"Indisputable evidence - long hidden but now available to everyone - demonstrates conclusively that so-called 'secular evolution science' is the Big Bang, 15-billion-year, alternate 'creation scenario' of the Pharisee Religion," writes Mr. Bridges, a Republican from Cleveland, Ga. He has
argued against teaching of evolution in Georgia schools for several years. He then refers to a Web site, www.fixedearth.com, that contains a model bill for state Legislatures to pass to attack instruction on evolution as an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

Mr. Bridges also supplies a link to a document that describes scientists Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein as "Kabbalists" and laments "Hollywood's unrelenting role in flooding the movie theaters with explicit or implicit endorsement of evolutionism." .....

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stori...

Naturally, you want to blame the Jews. Darwin’s real name, of course, was Chaim Darwinsky from Chelm, and this is a Jewish plot to undermine a Christian America. We had a speaker at the latest meeting of ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government. Sorry you missed it. We served cake. It was at my house. Nice turnout, by the way.

How weird is it? Well actually:

The theory of evolution accords with the secrets of Kabbalah better than any other theory. Evolution follows a path of ascent and thus provides the world with a basis for optimism. How can one despair, seeing that everything evolves and ascends? When we penetrate the inner nature of evolution, we find divinity illuminated in perfect clarity. Ein Sof [the essence or light of God] generates, actualizes potential infinity.

From The Essential Kabbalah; the heart of Jewish mysticism, by Daniel C. Matt.

You really gotta go the the fixed earth website cited above. Keep in mind this man was elected to a state legislature. Keep in mind that Chisum was too. When the story was published and was met with waves of hilarity, Chisum recanted and apologized Don’t you really miss Molly Ivins now? [Yes, that’s her line above]

As someone pointed out, if Darwinsky actually said only the fittest survive, Chisum, Hall and Bridges are living proof he was wrong.

The president of the Fair Education Foundation, Marshall Hall, said he had sent the memorandum to Mr. Chisum at the request of Mr. Bridges, whom he called a longtime friend and supporter. Mr. Chisum, in a letter accompanying the memorandum, said he distributed the memorandum “on behalf of” Representative Bridges. He said he knew Mr. Bridges through the National Conference of State Legislatures “and greatly appreciate his information on this important topic.”

The memorandum was condemned by some Texas lawmakers and by the Anti-Defamation League.

In a letter to Mr. Chisum dated Feb. 14, Mark L. Briskman, director of the league’s North Texas-Oklahoma regional office, said, “We are shocked and appalled that you would share this outrageous anti-Semitic material with your colleagues in the Texas House.”

Questioned Friday about his apparent endorsement of the memorandum, Mr. Chisum appeared to back away from it. “I read it, but he didn’t ask me to edit his memo,” he said. “It does not reflect my opinion.”

I’m not making any of this up. Ignorance is an equal opportunithy characteristic. See Darwin and the Zoo Rabbi here.

Special thanks to the folks at SCJM for calling this to my attention.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, contractor

We've got everyone we need but a couple of history majors--After seven months engaged in actual employment, I’m back (on the streets) freelancing and blogging. I missed you all. I will miss the paychecks.

But, I had an interesting experience in a milieu most people are unaware of: it’s not clear to me why this doesn’t get more attention. After spending the seven months working in northern Virginia (otherwise known as the “Commute from Hell”), I am convinced our government hasn’t a clue what is happening in the world or what to do about it. Instead, it is pouring money at as many people as it can find, hoping some of them will think of something. As one of the people I met described it, the government funding--from Defense, Homeland Security, and the intelligence community--is like being at the end of a fire hose. Come up with anything even vaguely resembling a good idea and the hose turns your way.

I was lucky enough to run around with my little bucket for a while. We got to pay for my daughter’s bat mitzvah and finish the basement. This fiscal phenomenon is the reason the three Virginia counties outside the district have become the richest counties in America. All federal money in unspeakable amounts. Drive around and check the parking lots, the upscale restaurants (try Capri in McLean) , the upscale supermarkets (Balducci’s). In my next life, I’m going to be a BMW dealer in Herndon. The government sponsored-boom has been reported on; what hasn’t is the frantic cause or the amounts.

They measure the money in the billions and that is only the stuff they can tell you about, not what’s in the black budget. We are talking obscene amounts of money pouring into contractors from a government that can’t afford health care for its citizens, or decent treatment for its wounded veterans, or funds for schools that are failing, and is in debt to the Chinese up to its rectum. We’re talking not about the cost of the Iraq war, but about the ancillary expenditures of the War on Terror you know nothing about. Billions, people! And no one seems to be watching.

The place is full of office buildings with no names on them; blank lobby registers; floors that elevators don’t seem to stop at, people hiding ID badges as they leave the buildings; security people rummage through dumpsters to see what other people threw away; secret rooms; there’s a service for shredding classified documents, normal shredders aren’t good enough. [By the way, know how to destroy a CD with classified information on it? Two minutes in a microwave]. It's a whole world most people know nothing about. One joke is that even the waiters at the pizza places need clearances.

From my experience, they are bright, patriotic, dedicated people, all of whom are at the end of the federal hose, and bless them for it. Some of them even do come up with bright ideas from time to time. They work very hard. I’m just dismayed at the notion that if the government knew what the hell it was doing, Reston would still be an interesting housing development and that part of Virginia would return to the obscurity it richly deserves.

And I’m also dismayed that no one is watching. Or seems to care.

Oh God! He's coming back. Get your daughters' off the streets

It is the end of the world as we know it.

After a brief return to actual paid work in an actual office with supervisors, bosses, h.r. departments, forms, limited vacation schedules and a commute from hell, your obedient servant is returning to blogging. Watch this place next week. We are going to have some fun.

Hello! Anyone Home? It's Getting Hot in Here!

I'm driving my Hummer over to see the Al Gore movie, but don't worry, I'll drive slowly--The latest outrage in the wingnut culture is Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," about the effects and dangers of global warming. Conservative commentators are predictably foaming at the mouth at this latest liberal outrage. It and the scientists who support the idea that humanity is about to really screw up planet Earth, have been called unAmerican. I can't comment as I haven't seen the film yet, but we are going to next week.

So how accurate is the film? Apparently, very.

The National Geographic Society took environmental scientist Eric Steig of the University of Washington to the movie. Steig reports: "I was looking for errors. But nothing struck me as overblown or wrong." Gore claimed that the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had doubled last year. True. Heat waves are increasing. Also true. Deaths from global warming will double in just 25. A reasonable extrapolation. More than a million species will be driven to extinction in 50 years. Ditto. Sea levels could rise more than 6 meters and Central Jersey would become beach front property. Yup. Move upland.

Then the Associated Press, about as neutral a news sources as you are likely to find, did a survey of more than 100 climate researchers to ask them if they thought the film accurate, including the few remaining skeptics. Those who saw the film or read Gore's book agreed he nailed it. "I sat there and I'm amazed at how thorough and accurate [it was]. I was blown away," said Robert Corell, chairman of the worldwide Arctic Climate Impact Assessment.

Actually, I wasn't surprised. About 15 years ago, Gore came to Stanford to talk about the environment in general and global warming. I was blown away. He really, truly knew his stuff and was articulate and impassioned. What happened to the articulate and impassioned guy during the 2000 campaign is another story, but anyone who messes with Gore on this issue comes up looking like an idiot. He has been at it for almost a generation and has it nailed.

This, of course, doesn't stop the idiots. See here and here. Part of the problem, I maintain, is the the media (usually not science writers), still cover the issue as if it was controversial. It isn't. The number of scientists who reject Gore's premise can be counted on the fingers of one hand and most of them take coal industry money. The other problem for the wingnut critics is that the film is doing extremely well for a not terribly action-packed documentary. (Jon Stewart says it has the record for the most people who went to see a PowerPoint presentation). It has already grossed $131 million!

Unfortunately, the one man who we most need to see the film says he won't. Of course not.

Your world. Delivered. Straight to an illegal database.

This is the AT&T Operator. Can you type a bit slower? the NSA is have a difficult time keeping up--AT&T, the ghost of Ma Bell, which used to be SBC or something, is in the cross-hairs of a serious controversy and lawsuit and has responded by--how shall we say this--well, lying. And it gets worse. The company (I get tired of looking for the ampersand), as you know, has an operation in San Francisco dedicated to spying on its customers for the National Security Agency, which, as you also know, hasn’t bothered to get subpoenas for their eavesdropping. Now, it turns out, there is yet another operation in Missouri, probably spying on Internet traffic. If you are using AT&T to read this, congratulations, you’ve probably made a probably illegal government database. Salon reports that two former AT&T employees say the company has a highly secured room in Bridgeton, Mo., that may contain another operation. But not to worry. It gets worse.

The company has now notified its customers (and I wish I were one so I could tell them to shove it) that your Internet records on its network are the company’s property and they will give out the details to whomever the hell it feels like. The policy will go into effect tomorrow. Asked to explain, a spokesman said that was nothing new, they were just updating the policy and that was always the deal. They are just trying to make the policy easier to read. He is lying. No, it wasn’t part of the previous contract.

The company also is the subject of a law suit by the State of New Jersey (ray!) demanding to know if AT&T was compromising its customers’ privacy. The Justice Department has now sued New Jersey to stop them from proceeding with the suit, claiming of course, national security, the excuse given by every despotic regime in history for hiding illegal activity.

I’m waiting for the people to get really pissed. I may wait a while. I’m mad as hell! Why aren’t you?!

Liar, liar, pants on fire. OK, maybe not

Did you ever play cards with Aldrich Ames? Yes? Why is your heart racing? Why is my heart racing--The Washington Post has an interesting if somewhat incomplete story on the confusion over polygraph tests in the intelligence community. The National Security Agency doesn’t trust the polygraphers at the CIA, the Pentagon doesn’t trust the FBI’s, and the courts don’t trust any of them. The story, by Shankar Vedantam depicts several people caught in the confusion and distrust. The story mentions that master spy Aldrich Ames fooled CIA polygraphs three times. He is hardly the first or last person to fool the machines or their operators.

The story doesn't mention that polygraphs reached the status of religious belief in the intelligence community years ago and challenging them can be dangerous to your peace. See below. The operators essentially are their own cult.

Missing most of all in the story is that polygraphs are crap science. They do not measure truthfulness; they measure anxiety. They are not permitted as evidence in court for that reason and the courts are right. With the exception of Israel (and they may no longer use them either), no intelligence or law enforcement agency in the world uses them or gives them any credibility. They can not only be fooled--and apparently are regularly--but produce false positives at an alarming rate. A false positive means they (or more likely the operators) say someone is lying when they are not. Exact figures are classified (now I wonder why that is) but according the best estimates I was able to reach for a story I did several years ago, it runs about 15%. The article linked to above from Wikipedia, says 10%. That means that people are accused of lying 10-15% of the time when in fact they are being truthful .

Much of the efficacy is determined by factors other than technology. The nastier the polygraph operator is the better the test; intimidation is the juice polygraphs run on. More important, the more convinced you are that the machines work, the better they work, although that does nothing about the false positive problem. On the other hand, if you believe something is true even if it is not, you will fool the machine because you are fooling yourself. Again, it measure anxiety not truthfulness. In some cases, people can be taught to fool the machines, and it is not difficult, experts say, to guarantee an ambigous result. There are even websites that advertise ways of beating the machines. I don't know if those sites actually offer anything useful, but the machines are stupid things to hang national security on.

Even critics of polygraphs point out they are not entirely useless. If you have a small store and someone is raking off profits in the cash register, polygraphs probably can find the culprit because they are honing in on a specific incident among a small number of people and they are all scared to death. If, on the other hand, you use it the way the CIA, FBI, NSA and all the other places do--general screening--you are essentially running a scam. The operators will do every thing they can to convince you this is science, this works, and if you lie to them they will nab your ass. It isn't and it doesn't but they may nab your ass anyhow, perhaps even falsely. If you walk in convinced the tests are crap, you will get a negative or contradictory result or get caught in the 10-15%. Intimidation by the operators is key. One subject in the Post story had an argument with a polygraph operator over the bra size of a teenager he did not abuse.

The Post quotes someone as saying that analyzing polygraphs is more art than science. Actually it is not science at all and art is in the eyes of the beholder. There is no published scientific study supporting polygraphs.

By the way, the piece I did on polygraphs was for a major science magazine which, because of outside pressure on the editor, did not print the article. She is deceased now and refused to tell me what happened to the story before she died, but the pressure was clear and unambiguous. I never forgave her. I must add that the defenders of polygraphs were the most aggressively offensive people I’ve met in almost 40 years of journalism. My opinion above is not unbiased.

Putting the good doctor back together

My son, the doctor, the philosopher, the rabbi, the lawyer. And you still don’t call--He was one of history’s great geniuses. He was a world-famous physician and scientist at a time when Christianity did it’s best to suppress science and scientific medicine. In his spare time, he codified Jewish law and for all practical purposes, created the Judaism of the last 800 years. He absorbed Aristotle and influenced Aquinas. He may even be the reason why there are so many Jewish doctors. And he would love what’s about to happen.

Moses Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon), the 12th century philosopher-physician, left a good bit of his life’s work in a hole-in-the-wall storage room in a Cairo synagogue. Fragments of his life’s work are scattered in libraries around the world after being recovered from the receptacle or genizah, along with the works of other Jewish philosophers. Now, thanks to the Internet, scholars in Britain are going to piece the fragment together to see what they contain.

There is neither the space nor the time to go into his work and influence. I’ve begun a course on him and know little. [He’d like that] Click here for a start. The man is huge. His influence on the world in general, Judaism in particular, is hard to exaggerate. He is referred to in yeshivot in the present tense as if he was in the next room. Actually, he may be. He not only codified Jewish law, he produced the 13 Articles of Faith that underlies post-sacrificial Judaism. Back to the science.

The genizah is the place they hid manuscripts that contained God’s name and therefore could not be thrown out. The Cairo genizah was discovered in 1896 and is one of the great treasure troves of Jewish literature. Scraps of documents in the genizah were widely distributed. About 10,000 pieces are in the University of Manchester’s John Rylands University Library, but 300,000 tiny fragments are known to exist.

Using a $670,000 grant from the British government, the Manchester Center for Jewish Studies researchers will post images of the fragments on the World Wide Web. Others around the world will post what they have and then the community will try to reassemble the pieces into a coherent whole on the Internet, a bit from here and a bit from there. Until current imaging technology, that was impossible. No one has any idea what we will learn from this, which is exactly the point.

Maimonides would love it. “Teach thy tongue to say 'I do not know,' and thou shalt progress.” Yes, doctor.

Do not put strawberries on whale meat, whatever you do--UPDATED WITH THE VOTE

Today we are going to talk about eating. Maybe it is because I’m coming off a birthday in which virtually every present was edible. We’re talking brownies and cherry tarts and cookies.… Nevermind. Oh, yes. And there will be whales.

Hand me that six-pack of Guiness. I’m under doctor’s orders. Maybe you have to be a guy to appreciate the delicious irony (pun intended) but new research shows that a main ingredient in that brew you have in your hand, could deter prostate cancer. It’s a guy thing. Researchers at Oregon State University, a party school of course, believe that xanthohumol, found in hops, inhibits a specific protein in the cells lining the prostate gland. They have been researching this for about 10 years, and I doubt they've had problems signing up sophomores for test subjects. The protein acts as a signal switch in turning on attacks on cancer cells. Xanthohumol is a flavanoid that can trigger cell death in cancer cells. The Germans, who know beer, now have a brew with 10 times the xanthohumol and it’s advertised as a health drink. The good news is you have to drink a lot of beer to get the benefit, about three six packs. While three six packs of Miller Lite may be offensive, there is always Guinness.

UPDATE: It gets better: seems the same stuff is in pizza sauce. Remember I wrote recently how all those guys who dropped dead jogging would have lived longer had they been lounging on a couch eating pizza and drinking beer? You read it here first!

Liars, liars, flukes on fire--An environmental group in Japan says that despite what the Japanese government and the whaling industry says, the Japanese are eating much less whale meat and the stuff is piling up in freezers. The Japanese have long opposed limits on whaling because, they claim, it is part of their normative diet. According to the Tokyo-based Dolphin & Whale Action Network, that ain’t so. "The Fisheries Agency continues to carry out whaling based on a fictitious public opinion," the writer of the report, freelance writer Junko Sakuma told a news conference, showing data released by the agency pointing to an increase in stockpiles of whale meat. Many people think the Japanese like whale meat and therefore continue whaling. That's not true." The Japanese oppose the 20-year ban on whaling. Meanwhile, the International Whaling Commission, which will meet later this month in the Caribbean, is likely to chip away at the restrictions. For the first time, pro-whaling countries are in a majority.

UPDATE--The vote reached a plurality for dropping restrictions but failed to get the 75 percent necessary to actually lift the ban. It is the first time that has ever happened. If you are a whale, be frightened. Be very frightened.

Strawberry fields for ever and ever--I’m one of the few people in the world who moved to California to be near strawberries. I am delighted to report they are good for you. They help the heart and some diseases. Well, maybe. Sometimes you just run into science that you really want to be true. According to a story in the Santa Cruz Sentinel [click headline], a couple miles north of all those luscious strawberry fields, research at UCLA shows that the antioxidant attributes of strawberries are good for the heart and help fight some neurological disease. There have been lots of stories about which foods, particularly fruits and vegetables, fight what diseases--and I’ve written some myself--and the science is really murky. But they are delicious, they are cheap at the moment, and as my sainted grandmother once said, they can’t hurt. Mangia! Mangia!

And finally, the grapefruit mystery--I earlier pointed out that some of my medicines come with a warning not to eat grapefruit while taking the medicine. I wondered what the hell could be in grapefruits that interfered with drugs. The answer appears to be furanocoumarin. Furanocoumarin in grapefruit juice,interferes with the enzyme CYP3A, that breaks down the drugs so the body ends up absorbing more of the drug. That comes from the University of North Carolina. It may, the researchers say, be possible to produce grapefruit juice without the stuff. More important, furanocoumarin could also be added to drugs to improve their absorption into the body. [Corrected, I think.]

Google me this, Google me that--UPDATED Goggle me chicken

Look, if you are going to acquire a conscience, I’m going to invest elsewhere--Sometimes business leaders get hung on their scruples. Take for example, Google. Google, the world’s largest search engine, agreed to rules from the government of China that essentially censored the Internet, removing things the government did not want its citizens to see. Google, founded like most everything else in the world in the Stanford dorms, had long bragged that it had rules to do no harm in the world, and when it got out that they had agreed to censorship, they had a small hypocrisy problem. At first, the company defended the move. But this week, in an appearance in Washington that got surprisingly little publicity, one of the young founders of Google, Sergey Brin, admitted they may have made a mistake. Brin said Google agreed to censorship demands only after the Chinese blocked its service in the country. Want to do business in China? Obey the rules, “a set of rules we weren't comfortable with.”

"We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference," Brin said. “Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense..." It's perfectly reasonable to do something different, to say, 'Look, we're going to stand by the principle against censorship and we won't actually operate there.' That's an alternate path," Brin said. "It's not where we chose to go right now, but I can sort of see how people came to different conclusions about doing the right thing."

The danger is real. Reporters Without Borders in Paris said Tuesday Google’s site in China was blocked in most Chinese provinces by the government and the whole operation was down May 31. The Chinese may be paying attention.

Meanwhile, more attention must be paid. Google was one of the few American corportions to tell the Justice Department to shove it in their illegal attempt to eavesdrop on citizens without warrants, so maybe they actually mean what they say.

UPDATE: After several writers, including moi, concluded that Brin was having a fit of conscience, he went out of his way to assure us this wasn't necessarily so. They are not making any changes. Chinese customers currently have two choices to Google. If they use the world-wide site www.google.com, they can get uncensored content but at very slow speeds. The Chinese ISP companies go out of their way to screw it up and make it unusable so the Chinese will migrate to www.google.cn, which is very fast and censored. Almost everyone in China uses the regular, uncensored site presently.

All the world hates finks, or at least someone else’s finks--If Google was leaning toward the high road, Yahoo was paying a penalty for taking the low road. The union representing journalists in the United Kingdom and Ireland called on its members to boycott Yahoo for its actions in China. The company apparently gave the Chinese government information that led to the jailing of pro-democracy writers. In a letter to Yahoo’s European headquarters, the National Union of Journalists denounced the company and said it would stop using all Yahoo services. "The NUJ regards Yahoo!'s actions as a completely unacceptable endorsement of the Chinese authorities," wrote Jemima Kiss, chairman of the NUJ new media council in the letter to Yahoo. Yes, Jemima Kiss. I think I'm in love. That's an actual picture of her.

Someday you’re gonna wake up and we’ve stolen the bed-sheets, the bed, the house, your car and your daughter--Meanwhile, there is more Google news and they sure as hell better be paying attention in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft, fat, stupid, disorganized and lazy as it is, got another wake-up call this week from Google. Google announced it was posting a beta of a spreadsheet program on the web. Excel it isn’t. It is nowhere as complex or as good a program as Microsoft’s spreadsheet but that’s not the point. It is on the web. It permits multiple users to access and use it--and it’s free. And things can be added and improvements made. It is part of Google’s move to put most of the programs most users need free on the web, challenging one of Microsoft’s main revenue sources. They posted a calendar program last month. Their gmail is stupendously successful, and rumors have it they are working on a word processing program. All of which makes Microsoft Office look like an endangered species. Add to that the problems Microsoft is having getting Vista, it’s new operating system, out the door, and you things may get fun out there.

[Picture of Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google via AP, Jemima Kiss from NUJ, and fat and stupid by way of Donar Animations.]

Fields of screams, fields of dreams

Hey, let’s make up another disease. We haven’t done that in a while. Why are you throwing that chair?--The psychiatric community has discovered another disease. They do so every couple of weeks. It means they have something else to treat and the drug companies love it: they get to sell more drugs. This disease is called intermittent explosive disorder, or IED. It is defined as uncontrollable anger attacks often leading to violence, things like spousal abuse and road rage. Naturally, they have found it is not as rare as one might think--4-5% of the people in a study at Harvard and the University of Chicago, have it. See Archives of General Psychiatry here. They have physically assaulted someone, threatened bodily harm or trashed something. We’re not talking simply being pissed off here, we’re talking repeated acts of violence. Since the psychiatric community discovers “an unrecognized major mental health problem” regularly, it should be taken with a grain of salt. If 4 to 5% of people really had such a thing, I’d stay home every day. And don’t bother me there. I’m warning you. I'm working! I’m getting really steamed. Now GET OUT.

Sorry.

But if we drug the little bastards early, we can stop IED--I’m sure this makes the world a safer place. Psychiatrists [their day in the barrel, apparently] are prescribing anti-psychotic drugs to children five times in the years between 1993 and 2002. In a report in the Archives of General Psychiatry [they are having a busy month], researchers said that these medications were prescribed at a rate of 1,438 per 100,000 children, up from 275 in the period from 1993-1995. In part, one suspects, it is because there are more anti-psychotic drugs out there and if you make it they will prescribe it. Another reason is that children and adolescents now have problems given new psychiatric labels and as new labels are invented, why more patients show up. See above. It needs to be pointed out there is very little data on what those drugs do to children as such studies are simply--and happily--not done. Except that’s what we are doing now, isn't it, one giant experiment to see if the drugs do any harm.

“I didn’t realize that that was the only day”--This story is only tangentially about medicine, but it is too sad to pass up. In Phil Robinson’s screenplay to W.P. Kinsella’s book Shoeless Joe, "Field of Dreams," a fictional Ray Kinsella goes searching for a baseball player who appeared only once in a major league game, Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, played by Burt Lancaster. [The screenplay was better than the novel, by the way]. There was such a player, who played for the New York Giants in one game in 1905. See page 275 of the Baseball Encyclopedia. He was called up to play the outfield against the Brooklyn Dodgers but never got an at-bat. He was in the batting circle when the game ended and he never played again. His entry contains nothing but zeros. “Back then, I thought, ‘Well, there’ll be other days,’” he says in the film. “I didn’t realize that that was the only day.” There is a contemporary counterpart to Graham. Meet Adam Greenberg, who has yet to appear in the Baseball Encyclopedia. Last year, Greenberg, 24, was called up from the minors by the Chicago Cubs. Last July 9, Greenberg went to bat against Valerio de Los Santos of the Florida Marlins, his first at-bat in the “Bigs.” De Los Santo’s first pitch hit him on the batting helmet and knocked him down. In the days before batting helmets, he might have been killed. For months he suffered from dizziness, benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. The dizzy spells have gone away, but he hasn’t played since. The Cubs released him last week at his request. He is looking for a team. The real Moonlight Graham did indeed become a doctor in Minnesota, as Kinsella wrote, but probably never met “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, or played with ghosts in an Iowa corn field. Robinson pays no attention to dates in the film and scrambles chronology. Graham died in 1965 at the age of 88. By the way, both Graham and Greenberg graduated from the University of North Carolina. For a really splendid story, see Mike Downey’s piece in the Chicago Tribune here. [Registration required].

[Greenberg picture from the Chicago Tribune]

If I pretend I'm running, will the evil eye be fooled?

I don't really want to get off the couch so could you just pass me a piece of pizza--An obituary in the Baltimore Sun struck me this morning. I hope I am not invoking what my grandmother called the Evil Eye by writing this but.... A veterinarian named E. Andrew Whittington died in Florida. A Baltimore native, he was a marathon runner, swimmer, and bike rider, described as a nationally ranked amateur athlete. He ran in at least 20 marathons. He spent hours ever day exercising and the picture in the paper showed him to be handsome and really well-well built. I'd love to look like that. What with my personality, I'd be rich and famous. He was so into excersise he was in the process of quitting his vet job to become a full-time personal trainer and if I was into having a personal trainer (I actually had one once), I'd hire him in a flash. I can't. He dropped dead at the age of 58. Heart attack.

Ever since James Fixx [picture above] died while running, I've been keeping an informal list of really healthy seeming people who dropped dead exercising. There was Grace Kelly's brother John Jr., in Philadelphia, who every morning sculled up the Schuylkill River and then went running. He dropped dead in front of my office building one day. Or the former governor of Florida, Lawton Chiles, who fell off his exercise machine. Then there was the law professor at Stanford, John Kaplan, a renowned expert on Constitutional law and a really nice man, who ran vigorously every morning. Meanwhile, a tumor was growing in his brain. I wonder if all that pumping blood made it worse.

I am sure exercise is good for you. I am surer that mortality depends on too many other things, mostly genetics. There is no reason to go out every morning and hurt yourself.

I can't prove it but I think it is likely that had every one of these guys shed their running shoes, found a good lounge chair, a cold beer and watched more baseball on television, they'd still be alive.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! The sky fell--Most scientists agree that the dinosaurs became extinct because a huge meteor crashed into the Earth about 65 million years ago, striking what is now the Yucatan peninsula. But how did the dinosaurs rise? Same thing. Meteor. This one hit what is now the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, although it wasn’t an ice sheet then. Researchers from Ohio State said they found a 300-mile-wide crater more than a mile under the ice that could date back 250 million years, to the Permian-Triasic extinction when most of terrestial life was killed off. That created the world that the dinosaurs would dominate until the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. The earlier blast could have been responsbile for shoving Australia northward and breaking up Gondwanaland. The researchers used orbiting satellites to measure gravity fluctuations to locate a 200-mile wide mascon, the eruption you get in impacts like that.

Look, if it’s on a blog it must be true--That statement, which you have found on a blog and is not true, has had tragic consequences for an Indiana family. It seems their daughter, Laura Van Ryn, a student at Taylor University, was in an automobile accident. Her sister, Lisa, set up a blog to keep the family abreast of what was happening, sitting beside a patient she was sure was her sister. As the woman regained consciousness after five weeks in a coma, Lisa discovered she had made a terrible mistake. It wasn’t her sister. She wrote on the blog:

What may come to us as a shock, does not shock the One who made us. We have some hard news to share with you today. Our hearts are aching as we have learned that the young woman we have been taking care of over the past five weeks has not been our dear Laura, but instead a fellow Taylor student of hers, Whitney Cerak. There was a misidentification made at the time of the accident and it is uncanny the resemblence that these two women share. Their body types are similar, their hair color and texture, their facial features, etc. During the past couple of days, as Whitney had been becoming more aware of her surroundings, she'd been saying and doing some things that made us question whether or not she was Laura."

Laura, it turned out, had been dead and buried a month but her family thought she was recovering in the hospital. The two women do, by the way, look alike. Click on the headline and see pictures of both. Then there is the family that thought they buried their daughter and found she is still alive. Oh aaargh! I don't know why I thought this was appropriate for this blog, but I guess it is just a warning to be careful in life.

Just plug it in and scream.

First you have to tear open the shrink wrap. Just have scissors and bandages ready)--Here’s a fun one. Think of the 25 worst technological inventions of the electronics age. The people at PC World did and you may agree or find your own. (They, by the way, headline their story “The Worst Tech Products of All Time” as if the gas-powered leaf blowers, electric chairs and crock pots were not technology). Their list includes lots of stuff only geeks would know about (Ashton-Tate's d BASE IV, to name one, a $795 data base program up grade so bad it drove the company out of business in two years) and I don’t even know what Presspay and Musicnet are. But some candidates are obvious and uncontroversial.

Number one on the list has to be--and is--AOL. [You knew that was coming somehow, huh?] Sometimes known as the Internet for Idiots or the Web With Training Wheels. It was a con job from the start (1989), with “awful software, inaccessible dial-up numbers, rapacious marketing, in-your-face advertising, questionable billing practices, inexcusably poor customer service, and enough spam to last a lifetime.” Remember when AOL CDs seemed to fall from trees? I know someone who decorated a huge Christmas tree with them. That’s only the start. Even trying to cancel was so bad they got hit with a law suit in New York State and had to pay $1.25 million, but that only covers New York customers. It walled off its customers from the Web until they rebelled. It still is clunky and unnecessary.

Others on the list include: RealNetworks RealPlayer (1999) which simply didn’t work; Microsoft Windows Millennium (2000), which was even worse than every other Windows; Sony BMG Music CDs that hacked your computer when you weren’t looking (see here); Disney’s Lion King CD (1994), which didn’t work on many computers because of problems with the Microsoft software; Microsoft Internet Explorer (2001), still in use by most users and still dangerous to use and three generations behind everything else out there [do we see a pattern here?], the IBM PCJr, which was useless [God, I forgot about that one], the anniversary PCs from both Gateway and Apple, overpriced and marketing disasters; and the Mac Portable (1989), which was portable only if you pumped iron in our spare time.

Oh, and anything shrink-wrapped.

You are welcome to add your own. Love to hear from you.

And for some really cool moments, may I refer you to this, from wimp.com

j

Monkey poop and dope--hey, it's a holiday weekend

So I send you to medical school and the best you can do is sniff through a pile of monkey poop?--Well, yes. And the result is that we now know that the HIV virus that causes AIDS originated in chimpanzees in Cameroon, Gabon or the Congo. It turned out the monkey shit contained the missing link in the scientific hunt for the virus' origin. The result was not unexpected. At least one subspecies of chimps carries a simian immune deficiency virus related to HIV, but no one was sure of a direct link until an international team tested hundreds of piles of poop. Also unknown is when the virus jumped species (the first cases popped up in the U.S. in 1981). The best guess is that it happened 50-75 years ago, based on genetic data. Likely, someone infected from a chimp (they either killed one or ate one—it's done) travelled to Kinshasa or Brazzaville, infected someone else and someone hopped a plane. There still remain gaps in the record, but the discovery, reported in Science adds an important clue. Larry Altman's story in the Times is here, Reuters is here, and AP here. Forty million people have caught the disease, 25 million have died, mostly in Africa.

You put that toke down this minute, you idiot, and go buy me a pack of Marlboros at the 7-11.—Let's all gather around and watch the logic. Cigarettes undoubtedly cause cancer and heart disease and kill millions of Americans every year. They are legal, if expensive. Alcohol brings tragedy in multiple ways to millions of others, either because they become alcoholics, or have alcoholics in the family, or do bad things under the influence of alcohol, and it is legal, widely advertised, relatively cheap and a foundation of our social structure. Marijuana, on the other hand is absolutely illegal according to the federal government, even when used for medicinal purposes and even when voters in about a dozen states have tried to legalize it. A study at UCLA, the largest ever concluded, has shown no relationship between the dope and lung cancer no matter how much you smoke. Not only did they not find a link, there is a hint that marijuana actually has some protective qualities. The researcher involved, Donald Tashkin, has been cited for years by the feds defending federal policy on marijuana, so the study should be inconvenient, or it would be if actual thought was going into the policy. Tashkin still thinks marijuana can be dangerous (there is no solid evidence yet to support that unless you get stoned and drive off a cliff) but opponents of legalization are going to have to find some new arguments.

[Chimp photo from the Jane Goodall Institute, Tashkin from UCLA]

Cheesesteaks in Philly, razzberries in Chicago—UPDATED AND REVISED

The barbarians have left the gates in Philadelphia...--Good news, I think, about a story I care very much about, the fate of the two newspapers in Philadelphia. [It's not science but humor me.] It's hard to find a downside. The papers no longer will be controlled by the incompetents at Knight Ridder, they haven't been sold to Singleton or Gannett, and Wall Street will have no influence. Indeed, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News will become a rarity--major metropolitan dailies returned to local control after 36 years of erratic corporate control.

[For those not paying attention to this blog as much as you should--scoundrels all--I was science writer at the Inquirer for 11 years during the Roberts era, when the Inky was probably the best newspaper in America. I had the best job in American journalism. That was before Tony Ridder turned to slimy mush at the alter of high stock prices. I care a lot. See this.]

The two papers were sold to McClatchy, probably the best newspaper chain remaining in America, but McClatchy wanted no part of them. They were profitable but not as obscenely profitable as Wall Street would have it and not enough for McClatchy, who promptly announced they were for sale. (The fact they were unionized probably had something to do with that decision, which otherwise makes no sense.) About half a dozen corporations put in bids. Philly, America's most under-rated city and my personal favorite, is having some wonderful years at the moment and there is no reason why good newspapers couldn't flourish there.

Yesterday, it was announced that a group of local investors, using mostly borrowed money, will buy the two newspapers. Included in the new owners is Bruce E. Toll, a developer and another hero of mine—he's the man who saved the Metropolitan Opera radio concerts after a foul oil company halted sponsorship. Most of the money came from banks, especially the Royal Bank of Scotland, which owns a local Philly bank. The owners pledge to stay out of the newsroom and not interfere with what is still one of America's best regional newspapers. Since here are no outside investors, Wall Street cannot impose its destructive influence.

The only shadow is the presence of businessman Brian Tierney, an outspoken advocate for causes and friends. He has represented Sunoco and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. He once led a group of Catholics in picketing the newspaper and his attempted interference with one reporter led to that reporter being fired and suing the newspapers—and winning. See the New York Times story here. Max King, the editor who had the unenviable task of replacing Roberts after Roberts quit rather than continue his fight with the bean counters at Knight Ridder, worries that there may be a conflict, but Tierney has pledged to stay out of editorial decisions. What would happen if one of the investors broke his non-interference pledge? "I'll beat the crap out of anyone who tries it," he said. Can't ask for more than that.

"I understand the concern, but we don't want to be involved in that," Tierney said. He said his expertise was in advertising and marketing and he would focus his energies on those. "The best way to kill this as a business," he said, would be to tamper with the integrity of the papers, "so I pledge to you that won't be the case."

Zach Stalberg, former editor of the Daily News, however, says Tierney is an honorable man who knows everyone will be watching him. If Zach's cool about it, so am I.

All in all, it seems to be the best possible outcome for a really bad situation. The new owners have rejected the notion of further cutbacks and lay-offs, and they will continue publishing the tabloid Daily News. There must be huge sighs of relief in the city room.

It is my opinion that publicly held corporations cannot run great newspapers. The pressure from investors, interested in immediate gratification rather than the long-term health of their investment, makes that impossible unless there are provisions to keep them at bay. That is the reason why the three best newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) in America are family controlled and why a fourth newspaper (Los Angeles Times), that used to be family-owned, has declined precipitously once the family sold it. With the Inky and the Daily News in private hands, good things can be happening in Philadelphia. Nice to report good news.

...and are alive and well in Chicago—Not all the news in journalism is good. The Chicago Sun-Times went through the now-customary idiocy of offering buy-outs to its senior writers, a way of cutting costs and the newspapers' throat at the same time. One of those taking the deal was Wynne Delacoma, the classical music critic. The newspaper also announced he will not be replaced. That leaves a major newspaper in the home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera without a professional critic. It speaks volumes about both the state of newspapers in America and that of classical music. Say that, Barenboim fellow? Isn't he the second baseman for the Cubs?