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Space, Here We Come! The Chinese make significant progress in their quest for the stars. A good bit of background from Wired explains that they're leveraging off of Russian tech but China still considered the program their #1 sci-tech advance last year. As an aside, some nice spy pictures are available of the Jiuquan Space Facility although I imagine it's been a developed a bit since then.

So, will getting a man into space signficantly change the world's opinion of China as it slowly evolves in a major world player? For Americans, will it be 1957 all over again except the little beep beep is replaced by a Chinese man waving back at them?
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Prozac 'linked' to brain tumors: Nothing incontrovertible yet. But where does it put us already hyper-sensitive brain candy users who've been given a new lease on life? Now we have to worry about this too?
comment posted at 8:13 AM on Mar-26-02

Sneak peek at the new look for the Wall Street Journal "Print buyers were presented with non-disclosure agreements when shown the pages...No media buyer was shown the front page, redesigned for the first time since the 1944." Pretty esoteric subject, but still remarkable how much influence the "look and feel " of a newspaper can have on its reader. Hard to imagine the WSJ looking different. It must be a very tough endeavor to get right. (IMHO the recently revamped Int Herald Tribune looks way messier and more confusing than before.)
comment posted at 2:16 PM on Mar-25-02

New star for "Best in Show 2" Is it just me or is Jennifer Lopez auditioning for the role of the shih tzu in the sequel to Best in Show?
comment posted at 1:26 PM on Mar-25-02

New study claims cold fusion is possible 'A paper by a team of researchers at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory who say they have discovered evidence of what looks like nuclear fusion taking place in a relatively inexpensive tabletop device.' You have to go back to 1989 for the last claim of this kind. Cheap energy - the answer to America's dreams, or Bush's biggest nightmare? (Via Techdirt)
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Mel Lyman 1938-1978. Mel Lyman was controversial. He was the brilliant folk musician who soothed the Dylan-ruffled crowd at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the Fort Hill guru whose prose in the undergound newspaper Avatar shocked conservative Bostonians of the late 60s... Many years of collecting, and help from numerous people has resulted in the large collection of articles reproduced here. Some say Lyman was God... others that he was a devil... but most of these articles show him as a charismatic individual somewhere between those two extremes. An exhaustively authoritative page about a very interesting harmonica player who became God. And, man, does this bring back the 60s...(Details within)
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Where were you during Vietnam?
Emi's Online Anti-War Anthology
"The only way to uncover the real truth about the antiwar movement is for hundreds (or thousands) of people to come forward and contribute their recollections. That is why history needs your stories. Please submit them. I don't care how insignificant you think your story may be. Everybody's story is important. All relevant stories will be accepted. I will be happy to work with anyone who wants to prepare one."
comment posted at 12:56 PM on Mar-25-02

Reverse discrimination? Kathleen Carter, who is white, says that when she became chairman of the education department at historically black Delaware State University in 1995, she was told that she was usurping blacks' right to govern themselves and that whites in the department were trying to make blacks look bad. via Fark
comment posted at 12:45 PM on Mar-22-02

"I hate your politics. Listening to any of you yammer on about the geopolitical situation is enough to make one want to melt down one's dental fillings with a beeswax candle and then jam an ice pick into the freshly-exposed nerve, just to have something else to think about. "
comment posted at 10:27 AM on Mar-22-02
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Is This The Best Bob Dylan Site Or What? Every single song of his reminds us how deeply in debt we are.
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comment posted at 7:19 AM on Mar-22-02

Velvet Underground tops 'coolest records' list Who decides what cool is? Personally, I'd have any of Pink Floyd's or Led Zeppelin's albums as coolest...
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The clock in the terminal at Grand Central has gone. Why do renovated public buildings always seem to lose so much character? Isn't it possible to meld the old with the new?
comment posted at 8:33 AM on Mar-21-02

America, Heal Thyself. "Racial and ethnic minorities tend to receive lower-quality health care than whites do, even when insurance status, income, age, and severity of conditions are comparable, says a new report from the National Academies' Institute of Medicine. 'Disparities in the health care delivered to racial and ethnic minorities are real and are associated with worse outcomes in many cases, which is unacceptable. The real challenge lies not in debating whether disparities exist, because the evidence is overwhelming, but in developing and implementing strategies to reduce and eliminate them.'"
comment posted at 12:07 PM on Mar-20-02
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Book Magazine's 100 Best Characters in Fiction since 1900 (Book Magazine via NPR). Jay Gatsby is #1. Harry Potter is #85. No Gandalf, Bilbo or Frodo. And yet some claim LotR is the book of the century (First post for me)
comment posted at 11:32 AM on Mar-20-02

God Changes Everything Let's say there was a school system or a chain of clinics on whose professional staff were a certain number of men who molested the children in their care and who, whenever this behavior came to the attention of their superiors, were shifted to another school or clinic, with parents and colleagues, not to mention the justice system, kept in the dark whenever possible...
comment posted at 11:43 AM on Mar-20-02

Islamic Republic of Great Britain? The heartland of violent Islamic extremism is now none of the official fronts of the war on terror. Its center is Western Europe -- mainly, but not exclusively, in Britain. "Al-Muhajiroun has one goal," Anjam Choudry, its U.K. chairman, told the Observer newspaper. "We would like to see the implementation of the sharia law in the U.K. Under our rule this country would be known as the Islamic Republic of Great Britain."
comment posted at 9:02 AM on Mar-20-02

A Good Summary, albeit in the form of a NYPost Editorial, as to why Israel should ignore 95% of the criticism it gets regarding it's current policy towards negotiating withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. President Bush: are you listening?
comment posted at 6:36 AM on Mar-18-02

The Left in America has lost its bearings An appraisal of what is pereceived as a decline in Left thinking from a Leftist writing for a fine journal specializing in socialistic critiques of America.
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The Minstrel Show The Minstrel Show presents us with a strange, fascinating and awful phenomenon. Minstrel shows emerged from preindustrial European traditions of masking and carnival. But in the US they began in the 1830s, with working class white men dressing up as plantation slaves. These men imitated black musical and dance forms, combining savage parody of black Americans with genuine fondness for African American cultural forms. By the Civil War the minstrel show had become world famous and respectable. Late in his life Mark Twain fondly remembered the "old time nigger show" with its colorful comic darkies and its rousing songs and dances. By the 1840s, the minstrel show had become one of the central events in the culture of the Democratic party.. The image of white men in blackface, miming black song, dance and speech is considered the last word in racist bigotry for some. And yet, standing at the crossroads of race, class and high and low culture, blackface minstrelsy is one fascinating topic in academic circles. It’s history is intertwined with the rise of abolitionism, the works of Mark Twain and the histories of vaudeville, American vernacular music, radio, television, movies, in fact all of what is called popular culture. Details within.
comment posted at 7:06 AM on Mar-14-02

Are Jesus & Mary buried in Pakistan & Kashmir? Hmm. Suzanne Marie Olsson, a New York-based researcher, claims that the earthly remains of Jesus lie under a Muslim saint's tomb in Kashmir. She is using DNA testing on remains from the Pakistani town of Murree that she believes to be those of Mary. Olsson also believes Moses is buried in Bandipore in north Kashmir and Solomon at Takht-i-Suliaman in Srinagar. "You have more Christian holy sites than even Egypt or Israel," she said in an appeal for help from Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah. (Via alt.muslim)
comment posted at 10:07 AM on Mar-13-02
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Thanks be! Orgnanization finally formed that speaks for all of us terrorized Americans. Except it's not that squeaky clean. Beware of AVOT. They intend to "take to task those groups and individuals who fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the war we are facing."
comment posted at 7:06 AM on Mar-13-02

FLOW is a spiffy flash-animated music video thingamabob, if you're into that kinda thing. Very clickable.
comment posted at 8:05 AM on Mar-11-02

The Time Machine opened in wide release this weekend but according to multiple reviews ( including this one) it looks like great-grandson Simon managed to transform a socialist metaphor for the dangers of industrialization into yet another special effects-loaded romantic movie. This seems to be an overall trend in Hollywood to remove the socio-political content from adaptations following The Count of Monte Cristo and Planet of the Apes. Perhaps we should just stick to the book on tape.
comment posted at 8:52 AM on Mar-9-02

A Grand Narrative "When Hindus kill Muslims it's not a story, because there are a billion Hindus and they aren't part of the Muslim narrative. When Saddam murders his own people it's not a story, because it's in the Arab-Muslim family. But when a small band of Israeli Jews kills Muslims it sparks rage — a rage that must come from Muslims having to confront the gap between their self-perception as Muslims and the reality of the Muslim world." Thomas Friedman looks for an angle and finds a story! What role, if any, does narrative consciousness and social psychology play in the Middle East? (via blogdex :)
comment posted at 9:47 AM on Mar-8-02

Bond, James Jimmy Bond.

Last Saturday ABC television aired "Diamonds Are Forever" and digitally altered the color of character Plenty O’Toole’s panties, as well as adding a black brassiere.

What possesses a network experiencing serious viewership erosion to cause them to spend time and money is such ridiculous censorship? What are the issues regarding copyright and intellectual property?

More importantly, what are they smoking over there at ABC?
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