Mexican wrath over Wal-Mart store

Mexican writers and artists have joined a campaign to stop the US retailer, Wal-Mart, from opening a store near the famous ruins of Teotihuacan.
In an open letter to President Vicente Fox, the group says the store should be built further away from the ruins.

Lego The Type Designer's Friend

Renowned typographer Mark Simonson, in a quiet post to his lovely website, displays genius in a solution to a problem created by a need to capture thirty-five year-old fonts stored on spools of negative film so they can be revived in digitized form. [from MetaFilter]

The Best Crop Circles of The Year

Amazing what pranksters can do with a rope and a board. --ed.

What Derrida Really Meant

Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, who died last week in Paris at the age of 74, will be remembered as one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century. No thinker in the last 100 years had a greater impact than he did on people in more fields and different disciplines. Philosophers, theologians, literary and art critics, psychologists, historians, writers, artists, legal scholars and even architects have found in his writings resources for insights that have led to an extraordinary revival of the arts and humanities during the past four decades. And no thinker has been more deeply misunderstood. [NY Times]

RNC funds voter supression efforts

Found the following links which all seem to point to the same company that is suspected of tearing up Democratic voter registration forms in Las Vegas. It has set up registration drives in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Florida and Nevada and is accused of the same things in most if not all of these states. Sproul & Associates is a Republican consulting firm run by Nathan Sproul, former head of the Arizona Republican party and Arizona Christian Coalition.
Nevada:Voters Outreach of America AKA America Votes tears up Democratic voter registration forms in Nevada.
Oregon:Company claiming affiliation with non-partisan 'America Votes' to register voters in Oregon is actually GOP consulting firm Sproul & Associates, Inc.
West Virginia and Pennsylvania:Sproul & Associates AKA America Votes workers in WV and PA refuse to register Kerry voters.
OregonDemocrats in Oregon have complained that canvassers for Arizona based Sproul & Associates have been pressuring residents to register as Republicans so that they can get paid.
ArizonaArizona Nader campaign was assisted in its petition drive by an unlikely figure: the ultra-conservative former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party, Nathan Sproul.
About Sproul:Good background story on Sproul and his political track record, cached on Google.
The link:Here is the direct link between Sproul and Voters Outreach of America.
According to several sources, two of the contractors Sproul hired to oversee petition gathering for No Taxpayer Money For Politicians -- Aaron "A.J." James, who directs Voters' Outreach of America, and Diane Burns -- were also paid by Sproul to get as many signatures as possible for Nader.
...KLAS-TV, Las Vegas:"The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee."
CareerBuild.com listing:Help wanted ad for Voters Outreach of America says "Paid for by the Republican National Committee". [from DailyKos.com]

Paralysed man sends e-mail by thought

A pill-sized brain chip has allowed a quadriplegic man to check e-mail and play computer games using his thoughts. The device can tap into a hundred neurons at a time, and is the most sophisticated such implant tested in humans so far.Many paralysed people control computers with their eyes or tongue. But muscle function limits these techniques, and they require a lot of training. For over a decade researchers have been trying to find a way to tap directly into thoughts. [from Nature]

Game Theory: New Strategy Wins for Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma

Before Southampton came along, a strategy called Tit for Tat had a consistent record of winning the game. Under that strategy, a player's first move is always to cooperate with other players. Afterward, the player echoes whatever the other players do. The strategy is similar to the one nuclear powers adopted during the Cold War, each promising not to use its weaponry so long as the other side refrained from doing so as well.
...The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is a version of the game in which the choice is repeated over and over again and in which the players can remember their previous moves, allowing them to evolve a cooperative strategy. The 2004 competition had 223 entries, with each player playing all the other players in a round robin setup. Because Axelrod's original competition was run twice, Kendall will run a second competition in April 2005, for which he hopes to attract even more entries.
[The winning entry used a strategy similar to the biological concept of Reciprocal Altruism --ed.]

American Bar against outsourcing torture

The American Bar Association objects strongly to the inclusion of provisions authorizing "extraordinary rendition" in the House leadership's bill that purports to implement the 9/11 Commission recommendations. These provisions would permit secretly transferring terrorist suspects to foreign countries known to use torture in interrogating prisoners. Extraordinary rendition not only violates all basic humanitarian and human rights standards, but violates U.S. treaty obligations which make clear that the U.S. government cannot avoid its obligations under international law by having other nations conduct unlawful interrogations in its stead. This practice not only violates our own cherished principles as a nation but also works to undermine our moral leadership in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Pirates and Emperors

The surest ways to get me to watch a musical animation is either to address US foreign policy or to do it in the style of "Schoolhouse Rock." This does both. -- Ed.

Sy Hersh on the Bush Administration

While Hersh blamed the White House and the Pentagon for the Iraq quagmire and America's besmirched world image, he was stymied by how it all happened. "How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?" he asked. "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, How fragile is this democracy?"
..."It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me," Hersh answered. "What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community. They know in ways that none of us know, the incredible gap between what is and what [Bush] thinks."

"Major screw-up": Boot-camp virus runs rampant

The respiratory virus now infects up to 2,500 service members monthly — a staggering 1 in 10 recruits — in the nation's eight basic-training centers, an analysis of military health-care records shows.
Since the oral vaccinations stopped, the flulike germ, adenovirus, has been associated with the deaths of at least six recruits, four within the past year, according to military records and internal reports obtained by The Seattle Times.

U.S.Businesses File Four Times More Lawsuits Than Private Citizens And Are Sanctioned Much More Often for Frivolous Suits

The survey of case filings in two states (Arkansas and Mississippi) and two local jurisdictions (Cook County, Ill., and Philadelphia, Pa.) in 2001 found that businesses were 3.3 to 5.8 times more likely to file lawsuits than were individuals. This comes as businesses and politicians are campaigning to limit citizens’ rights to sue over everything from medical malpractice damages to defective products. By way of comparison, the number of American consumers (281 million) outnumbers the number of businesses in America (7 million) by 40 times.

Shells from Syria fired at troops in Iraq

"Who exactly is firing these mortars, we do not know. But what we do know is that the point of origin of these rounds is on the Syrian side of the border," said [Col.] Woodbridge, 39, of Brooklyn.
There has been no evidence linking the Syrian military to the attacks, he said. However, the Syrian military has the capability to determine who is launching the mortars and act against them, Woodbridge said.

Amphibian species imperiled worldwide Global survey shows one-third threatened

Disease, climate change and habitat loss are threatening one-third of the world's fragile species of frogs, toads, newts and salamanders, according to the first global assessment of amphibians.
The results of the survey, published today in the journal Science, show that 1,856 of the known 5,743 species are "globally threatened'' in their forest, stream or underground homes.
The delicate creatures, which have thin, porous skins and need fresh water to stay moist, are faring much worse around the world than either birds or mammals, the scientists say. Around a tenth of bird species and a quarter of mammal species are threatened.

Fox TV Faces $2.1M FCC Fines

Federal regulators proposed a record indecency fine of nearly US$1.2 million (S$2.1 million) on Tuesday against Fox Broadcasting for an episode of its reality series Married By America that included graphic scenes from bachelor and bachelorette parties.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said the material, which featured male and female Las Vegas strippers in a variety of sexual situations, was indecent and patently offensive, intended to 'pander to and titillate the audience'.

President or Prophet?

The religious outlook of George W. Bush has been the focus of recent stories by several major news media. In these pieces White House officials and allies consistently have made the case that Bush’s faith and language are no different from past presidents. In the words of the Rev. Richard Neuhaus in The Washington Post, “This is so conventionally Christian piety and Christian faith” that Bush’s faith is “as American as apple pie.” That simply is not so. Bush’s fusion of faith and politics is anything but conventional for the presidency. The key difference is this: Presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have spoken as petitioners of God, seeking blessing and guidance; this president positions himself as a prophet, issuing declarations of divine desires for the nation and world. Most fundamentally, Bush’s language suggests that he speaks not only of God and to God, but also for God. Among modern presidents, only Ronald Reagan has spoken in a similar manner -- and he did so far less frequently than has Bush.

Ex-DAFB commander says troops used as guinea pigs

A former Dover Air Force Base commander says military officials used his troops as guinea pigs in illegal medical experiments under the government's controversial anthrax vaccination program.
After some of his troops in their 20s and 30s began developing arthritis, neurological problems, memory loss and incapacitating migraine headaches, Col. Felix Grieder took a drastic step. In 1999, he halted the vaccination program in Dover, a move he said ended his military career. The decorated Air Force colonel has spent the past five years trying to discover the truth about the vaccine program in Dover, where he commanded 4,000 troops.

The Romance of the NYC Subway

Stories in this Series
High-Tech and Low Powers New York's Subway
October 14, 2004 · Designed more than 100 years ago, New York's subway has been upgraded over the years. But it continues to rely on a complicated blend of old and new technology to move thousands of riders each day. Beth Fertig of member station WNYC reports.
Celebrating New York's Subway in Film and Song
October 13, 2004 · The New York subway transformed the nation's largest city -- and how the world viewed it. Over the decades, pop culture depictions of the subway have reflected the ever-changing image of the Big Apple itself. NPR's Robert Smith reports. [from NPR]

Spitzer Takes on Insurance Industry

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued insurance giant Marsh & McLennan and implicated American International Group and several others Thursday, alleging brokers have been taking payoffs from insurance companies to steer corporate clients their way rather than get the best prices for policies, as they are required. Two AIG executives pleaded guilty to participating in the illegal conduct and are expected to testify in future cases, Spitzer said in announcing the broader investigation into whether brokers and companies violated fraud and antitrust laws and regulations.

FDA Says Docs Can Chip Patients

Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved an implantable computer chip that can pass a patient's medical details to doctors, speeding care.
VeriChips, radio frequency microchips the size of a grain of rice, have already been used to identify wayward pets and livestock. And nearly 200 people working in Mexico's attorney general's office have been implanted with chips to access secure areas containing sensitive documents.