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| Spectrometry can be fun. (This is Sodium) |
Barbie girl
Mattel has specifically but somewhat unfirmly denied that the much-discussed breakup of Ken and Barbie has anything to do with the new “Cali girl Barbie” that was recently introduced.
This took a whole different spin in my head when I saw a print ad for the latter in a local paper, and noticed that when printed on low-grade newsprint, a lower-case i looks an awful lot like an l.
Lunatics. All of them.
So Focus on the Family, a political group headquartered out of Colorado Springs, has issued a statement about the recent South Korean research on stem cells, describing it as “nothing short of cannibalism.” (news story)
(1) I am, once again, embarassed to be from the same state as these idiots.
(2) It’s a fscking blastocyst. The South Korean group has found a way to manufacture a large volume of cells from any donor starting from cells from that donor. It uses a denucleated egg cell from another donor as a component. I fail to see the moral difference between this and taking a skin scraping and culturing it in a petri dish.
(3) “Nothing short of cannibalism” sounds like an excellent motto.
Footnote: I suppose this is a good place to quote Dr. Keuntz from Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death:
This is war! The battle between the sexes! Anything short of cannibalism is just beating around the bush!
A person who lacks the means, within himself, to live a good and happy life will find any period of his existence wearisome.
– Cicero, On Old Age.
Film
I just finished watching “Smoke.” It’s a good film, kind of a hard one to explain – just a story about people who hang out in a smokeshop, really, but who they are, what’s happened to them, where they’re going… for a short summary, it’s got Harvey Keitel playing the owner of the shop, and ends with music by Tom Waits. And can pull the latter off without bullshit, which is not as easy as it sounds.
Actually, I signed up for netflix a few weeks ago – after suggestions by quite a few of my friends that I ought to – and since then have been watching quite a few more movies than I normally do. It makes some sense, really; when you come home late from work, it’s too late to call anyone up or to do anything like playing the piano, it can be a good way to spend some time. And it’s been a chance to explore through what’s out there in film, which I’m realizing I haven’t spent nearly enough time doing. There’s a whole literature out there just waiting.
(Some of the highlights from the past few days – Smoke, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, and Roman Holiday. All well worth the time.)
Anyway, I’m starting to scan through good film for things to watch. Anyone have any suggestions? Films you think everyone ought to see at least once?
Incidentally, Cabbala isn’t the biggest thing on my mind tonight. There’s a new paper out on the archive (here) which I suspect is on the tail of something very, very important. I think that Bousso’s approach to holography has something very “right” about it, and this paper may be one of the first hints of exactly which way this needs to go.
Word games (Cabbala)
I’ve been reading through a book by Zetter on the Cabbala, which is overall nothing stunning but has some interesting insights. And some of these got me thinking, so I’m just going to muse here….
Please be warned that at some stage in this I’m going to descend into alphabetic analysis, which should not be taken too seriously. It’s a way to get at ideas more directly, but the ideas are the goal and the alphabet is just a rather odd means to get there.
Also, please note that it’s late, and I’m really not thinking in English at the moment, so the following may be really incomprehensible at times, and is probably not of interest to anyone who doesn’t do these things for fun. So be warned!
Random news for your day…
I don’t know why this isn’t being mentioned a bit more in the American press, but there’s an uprising going on in Haiti. Given that this is only a few hundred miles from Florida, and that refugees and other interesting political problems are quite capable of seeping over that distance, you would think people would be a bit more interested…
President Bush was interviewed for the first time since taking office several years ago. The shifting sands of rationale continue to move, now back to the assertion that we needed to invade because Saddam Hussein was “dangerous.” (Please don’t take this amiss – remember that this reason was cited before WMD were cited. They didn’t come up as a reason until the beginning of the campaign to sell the war to NATO and the UN, around last September.)
One of his statements (cf. this article) did surprise me a bit – “[The weapons of mass destruction] could have been destroyed during the war.” If it were that damned easy to destroy them, they wouldn’t be so high a risk – the only way to bulk get rid of nonconventional weapons is to set them off. More interesting is the suggestion that some stockpile may have been “transported to another country.”
I suspect that there may have been something – not very much, but enough to be worth moving into the Syrian desert. Not enough for the WMD rationale to really be defensible, but enough to make me wonder what’s going to happen to any such weapons that may be lying around….
A potentially serious matter (Domestic politics)
On 4 Feb, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force got a judge to issue a subpoena to Drake University in Iowa for all records associated with an anti-war protest held there on 15 Nov. (story, stora) The subpoena, issued under seal by US District Judge Longstaff, includes specific requests for all records regarding the protest leaders.
According to attornies from the National Lawyer’s Guild and the ACLU, this is the first such subpoena in several decades. (As a side note: These subpoenas were especially common during the 1960s, and were a particular favorite even before then of J. Edgar Hoover. Their primary purpose then was to assemble dossiers against political subversives and enemies of various administrations.)
The seriousness of this matter is, I hope, clear. The issuing of subpoenas of any sort, even for purely “informational purposes,” against demonstrators is designed and intended to have a chilling effect on speech; it is a specific act of the Justice Department to subdue ordinary political dissent. The subpoena has been challenged in court and hopefully will not stand.
In another matter, there was this story about investigations within the DoD. I can’t even begin to explain how furious this makes me. If any of these allegations are substantiated, these are matters for general courts-martial and the penalties which only they can provide; it brings into question the performance of the entire chain of command in any place where it happened, and of who allowed a circumstance to arise in which such a thing could even be conceivable. I only hope that all levels involved in this understand just how serious a matter this is.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 