MetaFilter

An interview with Jenna Bush's coke dealer is available. Seems he still has her drivers license which she forgot one night. OTOH, his interpol claims are not entirely with it.
comment posted at 12:55 PM on Dec-14-05
comment posted at 1:14 PM on Dec-14-05

A Conversation with Stanley Tookie Williams - Amy Goodman had a conversation with Stanley Williams days before he was executed using lethal injection at San Quentin's death chamber. It was good to listen to the audio and following along with the transcript. In listening I kept in mind Williams' violent past, his long incarceration, and his "redemption". I learned something from this. And it was redemption which Ahnold said [PDF] was the reason for no slack. In the end it was Conan the Barbarian who singularly determined Tookie's fate.
comment posted at 11:05 AM on Dec-14-05
comment posted at 1:26 PM on Dec-14-05
comment posted at 1:40 PM on Dec-14-05
comment posted at 7:54 PM on Dec-14-05

President Bush today accepted responsibility for decision to go to war against Iraq based on faulty intelligence. Discuss. [newsfilter]
comment posted at 8:36 AM on Dec-14-05
comment posted at 11:01 AM on Dec-14-05
comment posted at 12:39 PM on Dec-14-05
comment posted at 1:33 PM on Dec-14-05

Judge: Stealing a password does not constitute hacking. David Egilman is a highly-regarded expert in occupational medicine; he was the plaintiff's witness in a recent $253-million verdict in Texas against Vioxx. After two opposing law firms stole a password to his private website containing confidential information for his clients and students, he sued them under the DMCA. He lost.
comment posted at 8:02 AM on Dec-14-05
comment posted at 8:27 AM on Dec-14-05
comment posted at 11:08 AM on Dec-14-05
comment posted at 12:12 PM on Dec-14-05

Bush in the Bubble. Newsweek's analysis of the man who is possibly "the most isolated president in modern history."
comment posted at 8:54 PM on Dec-13-05
comment posted at 10:02 PM on Dec-13-05
comment posted at 10:04 PM on Dec-13-05

Is the Pentagon spying on non-violent American protesters?
comment posted at 7:53 PM on Dec-13-05

Diebold boss resigns pending fraud investigation
comment posted at 9:13 PM on Dec-13-05

It's official, humans are dumber than chimps. These guys show (at the NY Times level) that human kids will over-imitate every ritualized nuance modeled for them, whereas chimp kids just wanna get the damn cookie out of the box. Their website also describes more of their studies.
comment posted at 10:16 AM on Dec-13-05
comment posted at 10:45 AM on Dec-13-05

Please be careful to observe proper etiquette when dining on sushi. [31 MB .mov, coralized link]
comment posted at 9:53 AM on Dec-13-05

Stanley "Tookie" Williams was executed in San Quentin tonight. The founder of the "Crips" street gang, in 1979 Williams was convicted of several murders involving armed robbery. From prison he has campaigned against gang violence, work that earned him several Nobel Peace Prize nominations. He was denied clemency by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger earlier in the day.
comment posted at 2:21 AM on Dec-13-05

Holy Chimera - Fred Gage has spliced human brain cells into mice.
comment posted at 10:01 PM on Dec-12-05

"...so what we got now is Brokeback Mountain." The New Yorker republishes Anne Proulx's orginal short story. Here's a recent Bookslut interview with the author, and a discussion on turning the short story into a screenplay.
comment posted at 9:19 PM on Dec-12-05
comment posted at 10:40 PM on Dec-12-05
comment posted at 11:15 PM on Dec-12-05
comment posted at 11:55 PM on Dec-12-05

100 Cartoons to celebrate Black Ink Monday "Over the last 20 years, the number of cartoonists on the staff of daily newspapers nationwide has been cut in half." Today, the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists protests "newspapers everywhere who have lost sight of the value of having a staff editorial cartoonist."
comment posted at 10:14 AM on Dec-12-05
comment posted at 10:26 AM on Dec-12-05
comment posted at 10:29 AM on Dec-12-05
comment posted at 10:43 AM on Dec-12-05

Tomorrow Stan "Tookie" Williams founder of the Crips gang is scheduled to die. Many feel that Tookie has turned has life around, he's written books about his life, and has had his story made into a movie and even been nominated for the Nobel Prize Some say he deserves clemency others do not this morning Tookie was denied an appeal to the California Supreme Court and is waiting on a federal appeal. Which begs the question Should Tookie Die?
comment posted at 11:01 PM on Dec-12-05
comment posted at 12:42 AM on Dec-13-05
comment posted at 12:54 AM on Dec-13-05
comment posted at 1:06 AM on Dec-13-05
comment posted at 1:10 AM on Dec-13-05
comment posted at 1:16 AM on Dec-13-05
comment posted at 8:51 AM on Dec-13-05
comment posted at 10:12 AM on Dec-13-05
comment posted at 10:25 AM on Dec-13-05

'A cadaveric kidney comes from a dead person and in the majority of cases in China, the dead people are prisoners, which allows for us to know at least two weeks ahead when the kidney will be ready' Transplantsinternational.com is offering organs from executed Chinese prisoners for sale on it's website (offline at the moment) for £23,000 per kidney. They say the deceased's family receive a donation for the organs.

This is not a new phenomenon as it was brought to the attention of US Congress in 2001, however, now people seeking transplants know in advance that there is an organ ready for them. "Blood samples are taken from prisoners to ensure they will be the perfect match for their Western beneficiaries."

It raises all sort of ethical issues. Should someone accept an organ from an executed prisoner? What right does someone have to say it is immoral to take an organ acquired in this way? Then again China's human rights record is appalling, should desperate Westerners be taking of advantage of those in prison? Should it be made illegal in the West to become a transplant tourist in order to curb this trade?
comment posted at 9:13 AM on Dec-12-05

Family Guy 's website advertised that tonight's episode would be new. It turns out it was not new, and a few people told me the same thing happened last week. Should we start a boycott?
comment posted at 11:35 PM on Dec-11-05

Experts can suck at predicting the future. Their intuitive sense of probability is no more developed than lay-people's. A classic experiment is to present two indistinguishable choices are presented, but with unequal probability of reward. Humans look for complex patterns, which don't exist, and preform quite poorly. Rats quickly recognize the choice with higher probability, and preform optimally.
comment posted at 9:09 AM on Dec-11-05

In a land where the facility to divorce exists, and where widows may remarry [with no ability to conceive], and where humans may change sex, and the promulgation of same sex unions is rife, the inevitable has occurred: Bernardette [née Bernard] divorced and married the same woman on the same day.
comment posted at 12:23 PM on Dec-9-05

The servers are alive with the sound of music. Wolfram Tones takes patterns found out in the computer universe and converts them to completely original musical scores (which still may sound familiar, weirdly enough). Visitors to the site can then tweak styles, instrumentation and pitch (Phyrigian hexatonic, anyone?). Compositions can be saved, e-mailed or downloaded to your cellphone. Via.
comment posted at 10:26 AM on Dec-9-05
comment posted at 11:07 AM on Dec-9-05
comment posted at 11:48 AM on Dec-9-05

Future handgun ban? Despite reassurances made during passage of C-68 that registration would not lead to confiscation, Paul Martin is promising to enable provinces to ban handguns if elected this January.
comment posted at 8:04 AM on Dec-9-05

The US has admitted for the first time that it has not given the Red Cross access to all detainees in its custody. Meanwhile, the German citizen picked up by the CIA and tortured in one of the secret prisons, based solely on having the same name as a suspected terrorist, would really, really like an apology from someone. If you think things are getting out of hand, why not join the Amnesty International Write-a-thon? You can get the message across to the people in charge and let them know that you don't support prisoner abuse or rendition to secret prisons.
comment posted at 7:44 AM on Dec-9-05