Subterranean Homepage News

By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros

Fair and balanced, too!

This is the strangest collection of items in my 17 months of blogging. Maybe Mars is to blame, but my money's on Pluto. Have a great Labor Day weekend. Back here Tuesday.

Accused Web Attacker Under House Arrest: AP reports,

An 18-year old from a Minneapolis suburb accused of spreading a damaging Internet infection weeks ago was arrested Friday and later released under restrictions set by a federal judge.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Richard Nelson told Jeffrey Lee Parson not to access the Internet or any other network connection and placed him on electronic monitoring.

Parson, known online as "teekid," told the judge he understood the charges against him. He didn't enter a plea during his initial court appearance. His next hearing is scheduled for Sept. 17 in Seattle, where the case was being investigated.

... Parson, a 6-foot-4, 320-pound high school senior from Hopkins, spoke only in response to questions from the judge.

He wore a T-shirt that read "Big Daddy" on the front and "Big and Bad" with a grizzly bear on the back. He sported metal stud under his lip and his hair was dyed blond on top and shaved close around the sides and back.

He looked straight ahead, never turning toward his parents seated in the back row of the courtroom. His mother sighed heavily and wiped tears away from her face before the hearing. Neither she nor Parson's father would comment afterward.

That's Parson, 18, at right, in his high school yearbook photo. All AP moved this afternoon was a dark photo of a car window in which a man's shirtfront could be seen; Parson was holding a piece of paper between his head and photographers.

Google's cache of Parson's site, t33kid.com, shows the message,

p2p.teekid.c
my little p2p worm spreads via kazaa and imesh, downloads a file from web. No biggie.

(Although there's a download link, I figured I'd spare myself a visit from the law by not clicking on it.)

An earlier AP story begins, "Neighbors of 18-year-old Jeffrey Lee Parson say the high school student in federal custody for launching a worldwide computer virus was a loner who drove too fast and didn't appear to have many friends and idolized Bill Gates."

Yet another AP story (Friends say Parson knew he was in trouble) about the man with few friends begins,

Jeffrey Parson blabbed to his friends about a month ago that he was working on modifying a computer virus, a friend said Friday....

It also seems odd that Parson would idolize Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, considering the virus contained the message, "billy gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!"

(Mama said there'd be days like this.)
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Your tax dollars at work?The Washington Post reports (Halliburton's Deals Greater Than Thought)

Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, has won contracts worth more than $1.7 billion under Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to make hundreds of millions more dollars under a no-bid contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to newly available documents. ...

Possibly related: Doc Searls quotes at length from The Promise and the Threat, a post on Baghdad Burning (billed as a "Girl Blog from Iraq" -- and just added to the blogroll at right). Here's a snippet:

Listen to this little anecdote. One of my cousins works in a prominent engineering company in Baghdad- we’ll call the company H. This company is well-known for designing and building bridges all over Iraq. My cousin, a structural engineer, is a bridge freak. He spends hours talking about pillars and trusses and steel structures to anyone who’ll listen.

As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the South East end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn’t too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward- $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labor, contractors, travel expenses, etc.

Let’s pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let’s pretend he hasn’t been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let’s pretend he didn’t work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf War. Let’s pretend he’s wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated -- let’s pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let’s just use our imagination.

A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to an American company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around -- brace yourselves -- $50,000,000 !!

I hope the investigative journalists in Baghdad check this out.

And Doc also points to the original Baghdad blogger Salam Pax's post relating that his family's home was searched by American troops:

...They have been “informed” that there are daily meetings the last five days, Sudanese people come into our house at 9am and stay till 3pm, we are a probable Ansar cell. My father is totally baffled, my brother gets it. These are not Sudanese men they are from Basra the “informer” is stupid enough to forget that there is a sizeable population in Basra who are of African origin. And it is not meetings these 2 (yes only two) guys have here, they are carpenters and they were repairing my mom’s kitchen. Way. To. Go.

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"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" -- William Blake: Onetime cult figure Robert Anton Wilson, perhaps best known back when for The Illuminatus Trilogy, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World and Cosmic Trigger is running as the unofficial write-in candidate for governor of California as the head of the Guns and Dope party:

Position Paper #1

After refusing many pleas to run for governor,
I have reconsidered and now enter the race
as an unofficial write-in candidate. After
all, why shd I remain the ONLY nut in California
who ain't running?

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Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness: You've tried to assemble something that came with diagrams -- wordless instructions -- or you've puzzled over a garment tag that tried to convey its content or care only in pictures. Now there's a site that honors these maddeningly inscrutable messages.
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Behind the "time traveler" spam: You've gotten it -- messages with the subject "Time Traveler Needs Dimensional Warp Generator." It asks that a DWG unit be left at latitude N 42.49430, longitude W 071.14275 -- Majority Lane, in Woburn, Mass. Here's the sad story behind it, at Wired:

A trail of Internet clues has fingered Robert "Robby" Todino as the source of the time-travel messages. In a telephone interview last week, the 22-year-old Woburn, Massachusetts, resident admitted that he has sent nearly 100 million of the bizarre messages since November 2001.

"It almost feels worthless now because the people who are monitoring my every move always seem to win. But it's the only form of communication I have right now," Todino said.

His father, Robert Todino Sr., worries that malicious users have preyed on Robby's "psychological problems" and bilked him out of money.

"What bothers me is that some people are trying to sell him equipment and take advantage of him," said Todino Sr. "He's invested a lot of money into it and has been hurt by it."

But Robby insists that he is "perfectly mentally stable," and that the time-travel technology he seeks is out there somewhere.

Perhaps related: A Watch Powered by Snake Oil, also at Wired:

Like a deflector shield protecting the Starship Enterprise from its enemies, a new watch promises to shield the body from "electronic pollution" from cell phones and other gadgets.

The Philip Stein Teslar watch contains a chip that works with the battery and coil to create a frequency that neutralizes the electromagnetic fields emanating from devices like cell phones, computers and radios, according to the company.

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Bush's telemarketers are in India? The Inquirer (U.K.) reports, (US Republican Party outsources fund raising to India: Whole world's gone batty - official):

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY is using call centres in Gurgaon and Noida in India to raise funds for itself and for its chieftain, George W. Bush.

Young people at the call centres are helping robots to phone American citizens to enlist their support and money for the political party, with plans to extend the scheme if they whip up enough donations.

...We do hope and trust here at the INQUIRER that the irony of underpaid people in Harayana helping robots to call possibly out of work Americans because of a widespread policy of corporate outsourcing is not lost on our readers.

WorldNetDaily offers more details.
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Ashcroft Taking Fire From GOP Stalwarts: More Wish to Curb Anti-Terrorism Powers

BOISE, Idaho -- Even here, in a bedrock Republican state in the heart of the conservative Mountain West, a lot of people think Attorney General John D. Ashcroft has gone too far.

One of this state's most prominent politicians, Rep. C.L. "Butch" Otter (R), is leading an effort in Congress to curtail the centerpiece of Ashcroft's anti-terrorism strategy, the USA Patriot Act. Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), who used to croon alongside Ashcroft in a senatorial quartet, said this month that Congress may have to consider scaling back parts of the law. And in a state with an all-GOP congressional delegation, several city councils and the legislature are considering resolutions condemning Ashcroft's tactics in the war on terrorism.

"Ashcroft wants more power," said state Rep. Charles Eberle (R-Post Falls), who has drafted a resolution critical of the Patriot Act. "What a lot of us in Idaho are saying is, 'Let's not get rid of the checks and balances.' . . . People out here in the West are used to taking care of themselves. We don't like the government intruding on our constitutional rights."

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August 28, 2003 7:10 p.m.

Bless 'em, some people found ways to make fine pictures. Here are three sites worth visiting to see interesting photos that defied the obstacles.

• Shy Globe of War: I should have realized when Shelley (Burningbird) Powers linked to my Mars tips and mentioned her mom had given her a telescope that her interest was more than academic. Sure enough, she took the challenge -- got a big blurry red Mars:

I have a good camera, a Nikon 995, but not a beauty like a D100 or even, in my dreams, a D1X. I have a good telescope, a Meade ETX70, but not a powerhouse like the 14" Schmidt-Cassegrain. Added to the mix, I don't have an attachment that will allow me to take photos through the special port on the telescope and I have to use the eye piece. This is my way of saying that my photos of Mars are properly orange, helped a bit by the haze and the 800 ISO camera setting, and I guess we'll need to be content with that.

I'm more than impressed that she actually did it.

• Mike Lee (curiousLee): Mars looms large and bright

...Just a few hundred feet into Indiana, we made a right turn into tomato patch so I could set up for a time exposure. The best image out of many attempts is offered here. In this fisheye lens view, I composed the rising Mars over our PT Cruiser, and used an LED flashlight to lightpaint the foreground during a 30 second exposure. ...

The round photo, with a necklaces of Marses hopping through time and the sky, looks astonishingly like a Christmas tree ornament.

• Mars Rising Behind Elephant Rock is NASA'S Astronomy Picture of the Day today. Wally Pacholka is the photographer, and Elephant Rock is in Nevada's in the Valley of Fire State Park.

Did you photograph Mars, or have you seen a site with such photos? Please let me know. I'd like to see as many as are out there.

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Serendipity tosses up a gem: I found Nora Murphy's blog while searching for Mars photos. No Mars photos there, but instead a post headlined Rules for hiring that includes "Eleven Tips on Getting More Efficiency Out of Women Employees" from the July 1943 issue of Transportation Magazine. "1943 Job Standards and Rules for Hiring Women" was written for male supervisors of women in the work force during World War II:

1. Pick young married women. They usually have more of a sense of responsibility than their unmarried sisters, they're less likely to be flirtatious, they need the work or they wouldn't be doing it, they still have the pep and interest to work hard and to deal with the public efficiently.

2. When you have to use older women, try to get ones who have worked outside the home at some time in their lives. Older women who have never contacted the public have a hard time adapting themselves and are inclined to be cantankerous and fussy. It's always well to impress upon older women the importance of friendliness and courtesy.

3. General experience indicates that "husky" girls - those who are just a little on the heavy side - are more even tempered and efficient than their underweight sisters. ...

Go read the rest of 'em. They're a hoot.
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The best Japanese restaurant in Rhode Island? I disagree with Journal restaurant reviewer Meridith Ford's choice today of Haruki (reg.req.) for that distinction.

My favorite is Ran Zan, at 1084 Hope St. in Providence, just before the Pawtucket line -- a mom-and-pop restaurant.

It's small, with about 10 tables, a six-seat sushi bar and a tatami room in the back you have to know is there (there are no signs). The decor is Zen-simple -- white walls, a few black and white prints, the only color a short noren curtain above the sushi bar, indigo panels with batik-look white bamboo, tiny red bows holding the panels together.

And the food is superb, fresh and interesting. The sashimi (sushi without the rice, for purists) is always fresh-tasting. The sesame salad dressing does wonders for lettuce. The gyoza -- steamed dumplings -- are addictive. Sushi lovers will find a wide assortment, and the beautiful dragon roll is a good choice. The lavender-colored Mochi ice cream -- it's made from bean paste, but don't let that stop you -- with a slightly elastic texture is a treat for Western tastebuds. It also comes in a green tea variety.

Tempura, teriyaki, udon noodles and much more are offered, as are saki and beer.

We find ourselves there at least once a week, and have never had a bad meal. Check it out.

(The quiet owners have no I idea who I am or where I work, and will probably never see this.)
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How Everyday Things are Made: Fascinating videos at Stanford University's Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing for anyone who wonders what makes things tick. A high-speed connection is required to watch them.

If you've ever wondered how things are made - products like candy, cars, airplanes, or bottles - or if you've been interested in manufacturing processes, like forging, casting, or injection molding, then you've come to the right place.

AIM has developed an introductory website showing how various items are made. It covers over 40 different products and manufacturing processes, and includes almost 4 hours of manufacturing video. It is targeted towards non-engineers and engineers alike. Think of it as your own private online factory tour, or a virtual factory tour, if you wish.

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A New Battleground In Web Privacy War: Ads That Can Snoop: Software Programs Track Where Users Go On Net, Then Target Them With Pop-Ups

August 27, 2003 6:26 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

...No institution of higher learning had ever proposed anything as revolutionary, or as daunting. MIT would make everything, from video lectures and class notes to tests and course outlines, available to any joker with a browser. The academic world was shocked by MIT's audacity - and skeptical of the experiment. At a time when most enterprises were racing to profit from the Internet and universities were peddling every conceivable variant of distance learning, here was the pinnacle of technology and science education ready to give it away. Not the degrees, which now cost about $41,000 a year, but the content. No registration required.

"It's a profoundly simple idea that was not intuitive," recalls Anne Margulies, the former Harvard assistant provost and executive director of information systems who was hired to be OpenCourseWare's executive director. "At the time, the world was clamping down on information, limiting it to those who could pay for it." Soon foundation money was gushing in to support the initiative. MIT earned the distinction as the only university forward-thinking enough to open-source itself. To test the concept, the university posted 50 courses last year.

In September, as students arrive on the Cambridge campus for the start of school, MIT will officially launch OpenCourseWare with 500 courses...

If you've ever wished you'd studied architecture, programming (they've put the whole introductory textbook online), genetics, here's your chance.

But wait, there's more: The description of Media, Education, and the Marketplace begins, "Lectures, presented in streaming video format, feature a variety of educators and visionaries addressing the course themes."
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Hubble Makes Best Mars Globe Photos Ever:

Related: Mars Trip Not on Political Radar
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Prints the Chaff is a great blog by Tom Mangan, copy editor/page designer on the features desk at the San Jose Mercury News. (Although today he's fantasizing about a job opening in Cambodia.) Great wry voice.

Here's a sample:

Now this is great news:
AP chief vows to transform news service. A couple highlights:

"We are transforming the AP from a wire service, which we've been for 150 years ... to an interactive database and news network that connects us, and not just connects us technically, but more importantly connects our common business and journalistic goals."

Translation: more work for overworked Associated Press staffers, which means more work for the rest of us cleaning up their copy. Now get this:

He said the news service is made up of "the greatest journalists you'll ever meet." But the AP must make those journalists more productive because, in an era of declining newspaper circulation and hard economic times, "it's tough to imagine there will be more slots" opening to expand the AP staff, he said.

Oh, wait, no new bodies to do these new duties. Oh, sure, they're going to work smarter. (Because, you know, they've been so damn stupid all these years).
respond by e-mail | posted by tom mangan at 7:39 AM | perma-link

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More garden blogs: Kathleen Purdy of Cold Climate Gardening emailed,

"Every so often I do get a visit from your site, so I thought I'd reward you with some more garden blogs. They vary in quality and frequency of posting, and some just teeter on the edge of actually being a blog. But anyone who enjoys reading about what's going on in other peoples' gardens will enjoy reading them all."

Thank you! Here they are:

http://www.welchwrite.com/agn/blog/

http://bashasgarden.blogspot.com/

http://clearwaterlandscapes.com/news/index.php

http://familyrobinson.blogspot.com/

http://home.att.net/~larvalbugbio/gardenindex.html (Click on the link "chronological order" for a blog-like
journal)

http://gardendjinn.typepad.com/garden/ One of my favorites

http://www.stingykids.net/garden/

http://www.karinsbeautifulsite.com/garden.html

http://tectorum.com/

http://www.gardengal.net/page42.html This is a page of links to personal garden websites. Most of them
probably don't have blogs or journals, but I haven't checked them all out yet myself.

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More email: Jack Peters writes in response to last week's 'Rho Dyelinnahs' try to mind the r's:

As a former resident of the beautiful city of Central Falls, I read in the Yankee Magazine that the letter "r" is added when the first word ends in a vowel and the second word starts with a vowel. Ex: manila envelope would sound like (maniller envelope), Visa account would be spoken as (Viser account). That's the best explanation I've heard . Sincerely, sjp

And, Steve, blogging at Absit Invidia, responds to Lifting the veil on gender apartheid, a National Post story which notes that the hajib -- the head and face covering worn by Muslim women -- has no religious significance but is rather a recent invention. Steve headlines his item, France to Muslim women: "Get that towel off your head!"
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Man builds his own town:

FRUITLAND - Bub Hyder's town was almost complete, but something was missing.

"I had built me a marshal's office and a jail, but I checked with the feds and they said, `Bub, you can't put somebody in jail without trying them in a court of law first,'" Hyder said. "So I built a courthouse. I had kind of put the cart before the horse."

Puncheon Camp Creek Farm, the town Hyder has built on his 700-acre farm in this apple-growing area of Henderson County, boasts a general store, schoolhouse, church, hotel, filling station, livery stable, doctor's office, a post office, a bank, a marshal's office and a jail. And the combination courthouse/town hall/firehouse - modeled on the Hendersonville City Hall, complete with granite steps - should be finished by Sept. 1.

Yes, you're just supposed to know where Fruitland, Henderson County and Hendersonville are, since you're reading The Citizen-Times.

I looked at the bottom of the page and saw the word Asheville. I think we're in North Carolina. Thanks to Liz Donovan for the link.
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Thursday is Towel Amnesty Day at Holiday Inns: "About the towels, we forgive you."

Unlike libraries that offer amnesty if you return their books, they don't seem to want their towels back. They do ask that you tell them the story of how you came to have it.

I think you just packed it. How else would you get one?
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GOP = Goldwater's Old Party? W. James Antle III at Tech Central (Slogan: Where free markets meet technology) succinctly examines a trend that's been obvious here on the Web for quite a while:

The political coalition that has comprised the American right for half a century is showing signs of breaking up as conservatives and libertarians go their separate ways. While conservatives seem to be making peace with government growth, libertarians are increasingly forging a separate identity outside the right that often includes strategic alliances with the left.

The writer and frequent TCS contributor Ronald Bailey has written in an article posted on the libertarian Reason magazine's website about joining the ACLU, an old nemesis of the right. And TCS contributor Radley Balko has stated on his blog (this link is to the item in which the following quote appears) that "the right now poses a greater threat to freedom than the left." In the September/October issue of Liberty magazine, editor R.W. Bradford called for a libertarian-conservative divorce.

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Cell transplant restores vision: BBC reports, "A blind man can see again after being given a stem cell transplant."

This story's ending may not be all that happy for the patient, though. He now knows how dangerous the world is:

...But Mr May was not fully comfortable with his newly gained sight.

Before the operation he had been a keen skier, using verbal directions as a guide.

But after he recovered his sight, he was frightened he would crash into something.

Over two years, he has learnt to use shading patterns on the snow to estimate the shape of the slope.

Mr May is also nervous of crossing the road, where he was confident of doing so while blind.

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Fox drops lawsuit over Franken book (CNN); Salon excerpts some of the book; Franken crows. (The last two Salon links trade a free day pass for a few moments with your eyeballs -- you have to watch an ad.)

Judge Stops Deployment of Navy Sonar (Washington Post)

Siding with the powerless: Ideas from 60 years in journalism by Walter Cronkite, longtime CBS anchor; now retired, he has emerged to write a syndicated column.

August 26, 2003 6:15 p.m.

Looking for How to photograph Mars? It's here now. And here's one more link, to Sky Photography.

If you've only read Rosenbaum's recent New York Observer columns on the Web, you may be surprised by how well reported and vastly entertaining these gems are. I'll return to this, but the very first piece I read was The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal: In Which a Cunning Pseudoscientist Catches the Elite with Its Pants Down, which is actually reproduced here without a byline.

It originally appeared in the New York Times magazine in January 1995. Here's the meat of it.

One fall afternoon in the mid-60's, shortly after I arrived in New Haven to begin my freshman year at Yale, I was summoned to that sooty Gothic shrine to muscular virtue known as Payne Whitney Gym. I reported to a windowless room on an upper floor, where men dressed in crisp white garments instructed me to remove all of my clothes. And then -- and this is the part I still have trouble believing -- they attached metal pins to my spine. There was no actual piercing of skin, only of dignity, as four-inch metal pins were affixed with adhesive to my vertebrae at regular intervals from my neck down. I was positioned against a wall; a floodlight illuminated my pin-spiked profile and a camera captured it.

It didn't occur to me to object: I'd been told that this "posture photo" was a routine feature of freshman orientation week. Those whose pins described a too violent or erratic postural curve were required to attend remedial posture classes.

The procedure did seem strange. But I soon learned that it was a long-established custom at most Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools. George Bush, George Pataki, Brandon Tartikoff and Bob Woodward were required to do it at Yale. At Vassar, Meryl Streep; at Mount Holyoke, Wendy Wasserstein; at Wellesley, Hillary Rodham and Diane Sawyer. All of them -- whole generations of the cultural elite -- were asked to pose. But however much the colleges tried to make this bizarre procedure seem routine, its undeniable strangeness engendered a scurrilous strain of folklore.

Not only Hillary and Diane, but also former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (Wellesley '59), who included a mention of the posture pictures in her June commencement address at Washington University in St. Louis:

I attended a women's college, Wellesley, where we were all expected to become young ladies. When we enrolled, we each had to pose for what they called a posture picture to see whether we had, and I quote "an understanding of good body alignment and the ability to stand well." The thing is, we were not allowed to wear any clothing above the waist. They actually graded the pictures, and if we flunked, they made us do exercises. We always wondered what happened to the pictures, until a few years ago. They were discovered in a vault — at Yale.

Not so, says Wilma Slaight, Wellesley's archivist. I called her today to ask, "Where's my posture picture today?" (I was not a member of "the elite," but I tested well, and slid into Wellesley as a National Merit Scholar.)

"Wellesley did not keep them," Slaight said, "and Wellesley did not allow them to be taken for external purposes." They were a tradition of freshman orientation from 1926 to 1969, she noted, but they really were about posture as it related to health and the ability to perform physical education activities. In later years, she emphasized, they were destroyed within a year of their creation.

The truly bizarre part of this saga is the use to which some of these photos were put -- but apparently not those from Wellesley. Rosenbaum writes,

...George Hersey, a respected art history professor at Yale, wrote a letter to The Times that ran under the headline "A Secret Lies Hidden in Vassar and Yale Nude 'Posture Photos.' " Sounding an ominous note, Hersey declared that the photos "had nothing to do with posture . . . that is only what we were told."

Hersey went on to say that the pictures were actually made for anthropological research: "The reigning school of the time, presided over by E. A. Hooton of Harvard and W. H. Sheldon" -- who directed an institute for physique studies at Columbia University -- "held that a person's body, measured and analyzed, could tell much about intelligence, temperament, moral worth and probable future achievement. The inspiration came from the founder of social Darwinism, Francis Galton, who proposed such a photo archive for the British population."

And then Hersey evoked the specter of the Third Reich:

"The Nazis compiled similar archives analyzing the photos for racial as well as characterological content (as did Hooton). . . . The Nazis often used American high school yearbook photographs for this purpose. . . . The American investigators planned an archive that could correlate each freshman's bodily configura) and physiognomy with later life history. That the photos had no value as pornography is a tribute to their resolutely scientific nature."

A truly breathtaking missive. What Hersey seemed to be saying was that entire generations of America's ruling class had been unwitting guinea pigs in a vast eugenic experiment run by scientists with a master-race hidden agenda.

At the Smithsonian, Rosenbaum found "20,000 photographs of men -- 9,000 from Yale -- and 7,000 of women." Here's an overview of the Sheldon collection at the Smithsonian.

Slaight faxed me an article from the Spring 1995 Wellesley alumnae magazine, written to address the furor Rosenbaum's piece had stirred up. Pointedly, one of the Q & A sections addresses posterity:

Are there any Wellesley posture pictures at the Smithsonian?

Officials at the Smithsonian have assured Wellesley in writing that they can find no evidence of any photos of the College's undergraduates in the collection.

Did Wellesley cooperate with William H. Sheldon or his colleagues?

What the Smithsonian officials did find in the collection was a 1950 letter from a Wellesley faculty member declining the Sheldon request that Wellesley collaborate in the research.

I was barely 17 when I stripped for my posture picture, and I remember the embarrassing episode vividly. I stood as straight as I could, fervently hoping I'd pass so I wouldn't have to take a remedial posture class. I also remember wearing underwear, which the alumnae magazine confirms: "In the 1950s, the methodology was changed to a more 'subjective' assessment and that was the point at which students were permitted to wear underwear for the photographs."

Slaight says there are a few posture pictures in the archives, used in the '30s in articles on the methods of measuring posture for physical education teachers. There are no names attached, but Slaight does not recall if the faces were obscured.

(Photographer Peter Marshall, in Science, Nudes & Faces at about.com, reports, "From around the 1880s, Harvard University had apparently made 'posture photographs' of its students for medical reasons, using the results to screen students who needed treatment for their posture (although this was largely totally unnecessary), and in the 1920s this was developed at Wellesley, who sent a training film about it to other colleges, and the practice became more popular.")

The alumnae magazine reprinted a 1941 article, "On Beautiful Carriage," written by the department chairman for her instructors. It is bizarrely quaint.

Fortunately, phys ed at Wellesley in the late '60s was a succession of sports in six-week chunks. After swimming, fencing and skiing (on campus hills), I settled into my true calling: cox on an eight-woman crew shell. It was low-energy, and depended more on my sense of rhythm than my muscles. Being able to land the expensive shell without crashing it into the dock was highly valued, and my posture was never mentioned again.

I saw the photograph of me with the pins down my spine -- I remember a vertical line drawn on the photograph which my spine sometimes approached; I passed, but barely. I don't know if I saw the photo as part of a conference about my posture or if I got my own copy. Slaight thinks there was only one copy, and that I saw it only briefly. (Rumors abounded, of course, that Harvard men got hold of them all.)

Digitas, an undergraduate online journal at Harvard, addressed the posture pictures in 1995 as well. This practice was not limited to Wellesley. The short report, headlined The Naked and the Nude, begins,

It is hilarious to imagine: the young George Bush, a first-year at Yale, summoned mysteriously to a dingy, windowless room on the fourth floor of Paine-Whitney Gymnasium. After waiting in line outside, Bush enters the room, skinny and awkward; somewhat nervously, he follows orders from two middle-aged men in shirtsleeves. He undresses at their request. One of the men attaches metal spikes to his spine at regular intervals and positions him in profile to a camera on one end of the room.

Thanks, Ron Rosenbaum, for dredging up these memories. It's inconceivable, from a 2003 perspective, that nude photographs would be as routine a part of freshman week as getting books and a beanie.

Also bizarre: One of my new friends, a woman from Chattanooga, was far more worried about the "speech tests" than about stripping for the camera -- she was afraid these Yankees would force her lose her Southern accent.
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Tomorrow, we'll get back to the news on the Web, and some of the email that's arrived. For today, a couple of important links from J.D. Lasica:

• A New York Times editorial today dissects the unpatriotic USA Patriot Act.

• Group wants search engines freed from policing copyrights: San Jose Business Journal via MSNBC:

Advocates for freedom of expression on the Internet issued a call this week to change a federal law that requires search engines to remove search results suspected of infringing on someone's copyright.

The federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the law that lets record companies go after music fans for sharing copyrighted songs online that they haven't paid for, also holds search engine companies liable for other copyright violations. If a Web page violates a copyright, a search engine can be forced to remove that page from its list of search results. ...

• "BBC opening its archives to public: This is pretty interesting, and goes against the trend of subscriptions, walled-off archives and for-pay services: The BBC plans to open its full content archives -- television and radio, not just online -- to the public for free. PaidContent.org has the item here, as well as the full text of the speech Sunday by BBC director general Greg Dyke, who said, "I believe that we are about to move into a second phase of the digital revolution, a phase which will be more about public than private value; about free, not pay services; about inclusivity, not exclusion."

Steve Outing at E-Media tidbits adds, "Speaking of the BBC and free content, here's another statement from a Beeb executive that's sure to be controversial. Ashley Highfield, director of new media and technology, told The Independent that news organizations seeking to charge for news should "give up and move on"; only niche content can work under a pay model, and the BBC does not operate in those areas. "

Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com