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By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
August 16, 2002
Language
came from an altered gene and changed everything (NYT reg.req.):
Dr. Paabo has estimated the age of the human version of FOXP2 as being
less than 120,000 years.
Dr. Paabo says this date fits with the theory advanced by Dr. Klein
to account for the sudden appearance of novel behaviors 50,000 years
ago, including art, ornamentation and long distance trade. Human remains
from this period are physically indistinguishable from those of 100,000
years ago, leading Dr. Klein to propose that some genetically based
cognitive change must have prompted the new behaviors. The only change
of sufficient magnitude, in his view, is acquisition of language.
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Alcatel
owns US employee's thoughts
Evan Brown has been working on an idea to convert old computer code
so that it can be run on modern machine since 1975.
When Brown mentioned the idea to his employers while he worked for
DSC Communications of Plano, Texas (subsequently bought by Alcatel)
DSC decided it owned the rights to Brown's insight and demanded that
he revealed his idea. Brown refused and he was fired. DSC then launched
legal action against him to gain possession of his thoughts.
Almost six years later and Brown has finally been told by a judge that
DSC is entitled to his idea. He's also been told to stump up $332,000
in legal costs.
Brown's website: Who
Owns Evan Brown's Brain?
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Painted
and Silkscreened Poems by Kenneth Patchen via wood
s lot
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Hormone
replacement: Public meeting in Md. (NYT, reg. req.):
The National Institutes of Health said this week that it would hold
a public meeting on Oct. 23 and 24 in Bethesda, Md., to discuss questions
about the therapy. The Food and Drug Administration is reviewing the
labeling of hormones...
The meeting was announced discreetly on Tuesday on the Web site of
the Food and Drug Administration (www.fda.gov/cder/drug/safety/WHI_statement.htm),
tucked into the end of a statement on the need to reassess the risks
and benefits of hormone therapy. Yesterday, after The Washington Post
published an article about the meeting, the health institutes put a
notice on its Web site (www4.od.nih.gov/orwh)
saying the meeting would take place but providing no details.
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Have
you ever tried to sell a diamond? (Atlantic Online)
The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond
prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into
universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve
this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women
and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious
stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life. To
stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment
that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them. The illusion
had to be created that diamonds were forever -- "forever"
in the sense that they should never be resold.
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Slashdot
reacts to Blogcritics'
interview with RIAA chief Cary Sherman. Scroll down to read the posts.
Blogcritics.org
is turning out to be one monster metablog. Props to Eric
Olsen and friends.
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Afterfest:
• Today, there's an editorial in the Middletown (N.Y.) Herald Record,
the closest daily to the rural Catskill town (pop. 4,300) of Bethel:
About
time we got to Woodstock
Americans can use a lovefest in this summer of angst
If there were ever a summer that cried out for a little peace, love
and rock 'n' roll, this is it....
The author goes on to list our current woes and concludes,
So welcome, Woodstockers. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Your annual visit
to the field and the farm in Bethel where more than 400,000 of you gathered
in 1969 to share your lives for three muddy, love-filled days has never
been more timely.
It may not be as splashy as other Woodstock anniversaries, but that's
good, too. We need to quiet our heads a little. We need to reflect and
relax, listen to some good music, have a veggie burger and catch up
on each others' lives. We need to remember and re-energize the spirit
of unity, pride and caring that brought us together as a nation following
Sept. 11, 2001. Seeing some of the Woodstock nation return for a few
days should help.
So enjoy the visit, hippies. Be cool. And, neighbors, cut 'em a little
slack.
They sound so gosh darn cute, don't they?
• Eric Hanson,
who bills his blog Tyro as "A poli-tech-journo-geek-rock
sort of thing," and I have e-mailed a bit, and I was interested to
learn his
reaction to yesterday's resurrection of the Woodstock stories.
Tactfully noting that he hadn't yet made it through them
all, Eric writes,
"Woodstock ... continues to exist as a cultural
memory, even to those of us whose parents were old enough to attend.
... The idealism and good feelings talked about at Woodstock in many
ways seem very foreign to my world. I'm starting to think I can only
really relate to the '60s as a myth."
"If you want your children to be brilliant, teach them myths."
Einstein said that.
I understand what Eric is saying. Idealism and good feelings aren't
rampant these days, and few voices speak for the high road.
But the flame doesn't die. Idealism is simply a triumph of imagination
over fear. We each choose, constantly.
"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part
limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and
feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion
of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting
us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest
to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening
our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole
of nature in its beauty... We shall require a substantially new manner
of thinking if mankind is to survive."
Einstein said that, too.
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Woodstock
Aug. 15, 16 & 17, 1969
NBC photo
 August
15, 2002 -- The Woodstock Music & Art Fair began 33 years
ago today at Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y. I had seen
an advertisement in the July 27, 1969 Sunday New York Times Arts
section, and ordered tickets -- $18 for all three days, Aug. 15,
16 & 17, 1969.
Twenty years later, I was lifestyles editor of The
Providence Journal, and the task of doing the 20th anniversay package
fell to me by default, since I'd been there. I interviewed 50 other
Rhode Islanders who were also there, and published a 3-day series
on the concert.
Part One: Your
neighbors may be natives of Woodstock Nation
Part Two: The
music went for 24 hours
Part Three: We
had pulled it off
Sidebar: Who
actually played at Woodstock
Sidebar: An
interview with Wavy Gravy ("...breakfast in bed for
400,000")
Editorial:
The Providence
Journal, Aug. 19 1969.
1989, Bethel N.Y.: The paper
sent me back to Woodstock for the 20th anniversary, but not much
was going on. Nevertheless, I hitchhiked out Saturday night to file
for Sunday's page one from a pay phone in a bar. It was next to
a blaring jukebox, I was using acoustic couplers ("rubber duckies")
and the low-battery light on the Radio Shack laptop was flashing.
Amazingly, it worked. Over
the course of the next week, I saw
wire stories suggesting the real action in Bethel was still building.
On a hunch, I drove back to Bethel the following weekend, and filed
two more stories.
8.13.89: Back
in the mud at Max Yasgur's farm
8.19.89: Back
to the garden: Crowd gathers at original site to recapture past
8.22.89: Woodstock
II: Better than ever
Aftermath:
8.07.94: 'The
global village is finally wired'
Rather than go sit in the mud again for the 25th anniversary,
I wrote an essay for the Sunday Magazine comparing Woodstock and
the Web.
9.1.99: Where
the real Woodstock lives on
The Journal's Century Project revisited the '60s,
and again I was hauled out to comment. It's mercifully brief.
Were you there? Anything you want to add? Send
it to me and we'll blog it.
-- Sheila Lennon
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August 14, 2002
Talking back to Bruce: Springsteen
inspires responses
Gary Leupp, An
Open Letter to Bruce Springsteen About the War on Terrrorism
"I'm hoping you won't let "Rise Up" mean "America
United Against the World." You were born in the USA, but also born
in the world, and the world does not want to see the Boss wave an imperialist
flag while a government of corporate crooks, psychos and religious fanatics
prepares, for no good reason, to send young American men and women to
invade Iraq."
Wayne Robins, On
"The Rising" by Bruce Springsteen
"... what "The Rising" has done is made me think of the
rest of the summer as nothing more than a place holder, time suspended,
as we wait for the ball to drop at midnight on Sept. 10, 2002. Happy
New Fear."
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Elvis
is toast: New Zealand artist Maurice Bennett stands latest giant
portrait is of Elvis Presley, crafted out of more than 4000 small slices
of toast. But wait, there's more: Bennett's Gallery
of Toast Art and Burnt Objects.
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Resurrected: The late great Trouser
Press (it bills itself as "the bible" of alternative
rock since 1983) is back. Its old
FAQ (Google cache) and new
FAQ explain all.
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Banned
Books Project is a blog related to the American
Library Association's Banned Books Week (Sept. 21–28). Here you'll
find a link to The
100 Most Frequently Challenged Books. Reader contributions are sought.
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When bread cost 12 cents: Enter a date at
dMarie Time Capsule
and it will tell you what music was popular, what the headlines were,
and how much a loaf of bread cost then. via Off
the Record
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Who's that knocking? The American Civil Liberties
Union has launched a
website called TIPS Watch to enable protest of the Bush administration's
citizen informant program, which would enlist civilians nationwide to
report suspicious behavior by their fellow Americans.
Here you may send a free fax to your senators and download a form to
send to your local utility companies asking them to pledge that "No
employee of this company will participate in any way in the government’s
attempt to turn utility, cable or satellite dish employees into government
sponsored“peeping toms” through participation in Operation TIPS."
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ZDnet
loves Danger's not-yet-available Sidekick $199 PDA/phone/thingamajig:
(Who's to know? I signed up as a tester, but never got the call. I think
I flunked the age question.)
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August 13, 2002
Bloggers on music: Blogcritics.com
launched today with a live interview with Cary Sherman, President of the
RIAA (here's
the transcript), and record reviews by bloggers. I'll be joining them
soon with a few words about the most recent releases from two very different
Rhode Island bands, Purple
Ivy Shadows' Field:Guide and The
Dino Club's Hey! Drink Up, and hope to follow soon with Bill
Petterson's newest, Parts and Labor.
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XP "protection" can render music backups
useless, writes Cory
Doctorow, summing up a longer post
from the Guardian (U.K.):
By default, Windows Media Player encodes your music collection using
your machine's unique key, so that you can't share, loan or give away
the tracks you rip to your machine. What that means is, if you have
some file-system or OS corruption and reinstall from scratch, then restore
your music collection, it will be unusable. You won't be able to play
the files. There's a backup utility that'll preserve your license keys,
but if you fail to employ it, you're SOL -- MSFT's position is that
you need to start over from scratch at that point, re-ripping all the
CDs in your collection.
Does this mean those of us considering the purchase of a wi-fi-enabled
laptop should toss XP and install Windows 2000 instead?
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 Better
news from Doctorow: "Estonia has amazing national WiFi coverage
and they don't need warchalkers
-- the gubbmint puts up these nifty signs to tell you where you can hop
online."
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Boot camp for corporate boards isn't usually
my kind of story. It was serendipitous that the Kellogg School of Management
at Northwestern University held a long-planned event for women just after
a trio of women had blown whistles on corporate misdeeds. But the story
reports on a fascinating case study: The women broke into teams to work
on a decision involving a hypothetical business that owned a racecar,
and a crunch call over whether to race in dicey circumstances.
"...But then Ms. Medvec pointed out that most of the women had made
the right decision for the wrong reasons. Faced with inconclusive data,
most had simply followed their instincts." I won't spoil it, but
there's a killer hook to
this story (NYT reg. req.), -- the "wrong reasons"
don't at all diminish the value of "the right answer."
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"When
the Truth Had Consequences" by Dan Morgan at the Washington
Post:
On April 13, 1938, Richard Whitney -- president of the New York Stock
Exchange and personification of Wall Street aristocracy -- entered New
York's Sing Sing Prison in handcuffs to begin a five- to 10-year sentence
for embezzling millions of dollars from his clients. ...
Whitney loomed like a shadow over my childhood and youth, for my father
was one of his partners and suffered the consequences. Though my father
did not know Whitney was engaging in embezzlement, he was fully liable
for Whitney's debts under the prevailing partnership and bankruptcy
laws. All my parents' assets, down to many of the dresses and coats
in my mother's closet, were seized and sold at a bankruptcy auction
to raise money for Whitney's creditors (including widows and orphans
of former Stock Exchange employees whose benefit fund Whitney raided
for his own investments).
In those days, being "ruined" meant something. For the rest
of his life, Whitney, once a commanding figure, was shunned by his business
associates, as well as his silk-stocking friends from the New York Yacht
Club, the Essex Hunt in New Jersey and the Porcellian Club at his alma
mater, Harvard. After being freed, he tended a herd of dairy cows in
Massachusetts and later was a clerk in an armaments factory. My father
was ruined too, merely because of his association with the scandal.
He was never able to get another job on Wall Street.
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Dan
Gillmor: We must engage in copyright debate (San Jose Mercury
News)
If you can set the rules, you can win the contest. That's the major
reason the entertainment cartel is winning the debate over copyright
in the Digital Age.
Average people are not part of the conversation, not in any way that
matters. To the cartel and its chattel in the halls of political power,
we are nothing but ``consumers'' -- our sole function is to eat what
the movie, music and publishing industries put in front of us, and then
send money.
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"The
media titans still don't get it:
Corporate America lost billions on the Net. That doesn't mean the medium
has no value -- but the moguls remain clueless about where it lies"
by Salon managing editor Scott Rosenberg.
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Better browser display: Thank you, Krzysztof
Kowalczyk, for this: "Here,
go and grab yourself a nice Mozilla theme." If you're using Mozilla,
this will slightly change the appearance of your buttons and bars and
menus, tightening everything up; less blank space makes for more content.
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Houseboat allegedly from the 1991 movie Cape
Fear is for
sale on eBay.
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Elevator to heaven: Scientists are meeting
in Seattle to discuss funding and technology for the space
elevator:
The elevator is essentially a cable, attached at one end to an ocean-going
platform.
At the other end it is connected to a satellite, in orbit 35,000 kilometres
above the Earth.
Commercial loads, such as sections of space stations, and eventually,
perhaps, human tourists, are then mechanically pulled up the cable and
catapulted into orbit at a fraction of the present cost.
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com
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