Bulletin. Fleck appears to have recovered from whatever the grunge is that knocked us out, and is looking pretty chipper. I'm not quite there. At my age having to go for over a week without any sustained physical activity is so unpleasant. I look and feel like a wheel of Camembert that's been sat by the heat register. Ah, well, surely today I will turn the corner. And doubtless David will have something scintillating to post before long.

If you're in the same state I recommend the medicinal cheer of Chase Me Ladies. Does bring on painful hacking fits if you've got the infested lungs aspect of the grunge, but what the hell.

"...the crudeness of the reasoning is more than matched by the ineptitude of the artefact." In a follow-up to a previous post, Oliver Kamm pays a visit to the transgressive knitters.

Off-key echoes of the past. As a student of web archaeology, I should note that today I ran across what is reputed to be the first image file ever put on a web site - a "promotional photo" for Les Horribles Cernettes, CERN's high energy girl band. Apparently, image compression technology back in the dark ages of 1992 wasn't all it could be, and this .jpg weighs in at a hefty and slow-loading 215+ KB. (The fact that the site is currently being Slashdotted doesn't help.)

I've been a bit lax keeping up with my particle physics, but I assume that the page's reference to the "CERN Hardronic Festival" is a typo.

LHC are still in action; you can get samples of their oeuvre from their main page. I have to confess that musically they don't quite measure up to The Chromatics^[1], at least in the clips I've listened to.

--
(^[1]Via Angie Schultz, who needs a search function on her blog, dammit.)

Cooties galore! Damn! I'm late to the party for Estrogen Week. This half of Progressive Reaction must join the fainting flower pundits. (Out of deference to my co-blogger I will not put up the lilac-pink banner. It would send him running for his tinfoil jockstrap.)

Though we probably have enough cooties going 'round chez Fleck y Breen as it is - we've both been sick and I still have a nasty cold. The kind where your lungs hurt when you laugh. At the same time all conspires to force me to laugh. David was being more than usually comical this morning; everything I'm reading in the sphere this morning makes me laugh out loud. Pain. Screw it, I'm going back to bed.

Evolution for thee, but not for me. The morning's woolgathering threw up a couple of completely unrelated questions:

1) Which of the following would be simpler to understand/more intuitively
plausible to a normally intelligent but biologically-uninformed layman?

A) The evolution of complex proteins, or
B) A possible biological basis for observed cognitive/behvioral
differences between the sexes.

2) Who's more irrational and narrow-minded?

A) A biologically-uninformed layman who finds the "irreducible complexity"
arguments of Intelligent Design slicksters plausible, or
B) A scientifically trained individual who thinks it reasonable and righteous
to demand the resignation of persons in prestigious positions for
publicly speculating upon 1)B), above.

Jus' wonderin'.

Larry Summers in Scandinavia. Bjørn Stærk has a fascinating report on the arrival of sociobiology in Norway.

So entranced by my new monitor I forgot to blog. 17" flat-panel. It. Is. Beautiful. After all these years of a cathode ray tube behemoth hulking over my desk, periodically going blank and making loud popping sounds... and my words on the screen, they are so crisp and clean...

Mommy maddest. Oh, preach it, sister.

You know what I'm talking about. The above is a splendid response to this grotesquerie. If you read about this first through Lileks, be warned that he delicately refrained from excerpting the really obscene parts. My fave:

We now have a situation where well-off women can choose how to live their lives—either outsourcing child care at a sufficiently high level of quality to permit them to work with relative peace of mind or staying at home.

Wow. Money expands one's choices; lack of money restricts them. A savage inequality never before seen in human society. But the next line is just unbelievable:

But no one else, really, has anything.

Got that, all you middle-class class women, born between 1958 and the early '70s, living in America in this year of grace 2005? You got nuthin', you hear me? Nuthin'! '58? That's me, that's me! I make the cut! All my dreams have not come true and all my material desires are not satisfied! Commence whining! People who are richer than I am need to fork it over to the IRS because I deserve to live exactly like they do!

Aren't Ms. Warner and her interviewees the very models of distasteful self-indulgence that we associate with the worst of the Boomers? Life is soooo hard, it just hasn't turned out the way I thought it would when I was twenty, I don't have everything I want, and sometimes I have duties and responsibilities that are boooring, and stressful! I'm often frustrated and unhappy, life is just such a bitch, it must be the unfairness inherent in the system!

Uh, I think one generation of this sort of thing has been enough, no? At least, it ought to skip a couple, and not drone on seamlessly.

The Under Control blogger's post pretty much covers the territory. (With some good lines - ex., re babysitting co-ops: "Frankly I'd rather pay the nanny than have to pretend to enjoy being around other people's kids. I don't really like other people's kids." Who does?)

I'm a bit bummed, though, that Slacker Mom stole my idea. When the kid was a baby, I roughed out the plan for a self-help book, Cruel Mom, Free Mom. (But, you know, motherhood just demanded every second of my devotion so I just couldn't get it together.)

...and in hell, it's called "Pepsi". Moira: Check out a web site devoted to the greatest cultural divide of all.

(Via Colby Cosh.)

!HOT SHE-MALE LIBERTARIANS! ("She-male" is spelled with a hyphen, yes?) Apparently, there was a 'buzzworthy' weblog out there run by someone calling themselves "Libertarian Girl". Also apparently, "Libertarian Girl" was not, in fact, a girl, or female in any way, although his devotion to Libertarianism can probably be judged by his self-description: "an unemployed man without a wife or girlfriend still living with my parents despite being over the age of 30".

The now-exposed impersonator, typing away in his parents' dank basement, compares the heady days in the footlights to his previous blog experience:

When I had a blog as my real self, no one linked to me, no one left any comments, it was as if the blog existed in a vacuum. But things were different for Libertarian Girl... It’s ten times easier for a woman’s blog to become popular.

The major life lesson learned: "Whenever I see an attractive woman with a successful career, I’ll remember the experience of this blog and assume that she didn’t really get there on merit, just her looks." Right. OK, Moira, it's up to you. Get out there, show some leg, make us popular!

(Via Joe Gandelman.)

And the saga continues... The Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and the Yakama Indian Nation are appealing the ruling against their claims in the Kennewick Man case - using the same arguments that were rejected in previous appeals. This time around, they are invoking ARPA and NHPA, rather than NAGPRA, to advance the argument that, although all previous courts have decided that the Kennewick individual has no demonstrable ancestral relation to them, they should be allowed to dictate the terms of study because he is their ancestor.

UPDATE: Meanwhile - next week scientists will submit their study plan for review by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Eeeeewwww! Hey, David - follow this link. But first grab a barf-bag. More at Chicagoboyz. (And good on Sue!)

Rock art. Being the unpolished rube that I am, I have for years been blindly, boorishly throwing around the phrase "rock art" to describe art produced on a rock surface. I was unaware that this is offensive.

I'm also very interested to know from what time period - and among whom exactly - "Anasazi" developed a meaning so offensive that the National Park Service needs to purge any texts using it from its park shops (along with the rock art titles). I'm unfamiliar with this, er, controversy, so I'm going to try to dig around on it a bit more. Preliminary poking about reveals contradictory claims as to the meaning, and explanation for the offensiveness, of the word. The above link states:

The dispute over "Anasazi" is even dicier. According to one interpretation, "Anasazi" is a Navajo pejorative meaning "ancient enemy." Yet many scholars dispute this translation, saying that it simply means "ancient ones."

Elsewhere:

Researches[sic] have long referred to the people living in the Yellow Jacket region as Anasazi. But that is a Navajo word meaning “enemies of our ancestors,” Carr said.

Researchers then picked up the name through the oral history of Navajo still living in the area, though “Anasazi” is not what these people would have called themselves or their ancestors.

“It was one culture’s somewhat derogatory term for another culture,” Carr explained. “In my opinion, (renaming them ‘ancient Puebloans’) is not so much a matter of political correctness as a matter of historical correctness and good manners.”

And:

"Whether one word or another is used is not the issue," [ Tessy Shirakawa, a spokeswoman with Mesa Verde National Park] said. "It's not a matter of censorship - it's actually respect. Out of respect to tribal members, we honor their requests about what's appropriate and inappropriate to present to the public."

Leigh Ku-wanwisiwma, director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office in Kykots-movi, Ariz., said his people led the protest against use of the term "Ana-sazi" because of its meaning - "enemy of old."

"In Hopi culture, to call another person an enemy is not proper - it is against Hopi ethics to call anyone an enemy … we feel it's a derogatory term," he said.

But:

But Eddie Tso, program director for the Navajo Nation's Office of Language and Culture, said the word - pronounced nah-SAHZ-ah in Navajo - simply means "ancient ones."

Your pre-Clovis morning interlude. Some evidence for possible pre-Clovis human habitation has been found in Kansas. The apparently human-fractured bones of extinct mammoth and camel have been carbon-dated to 12,200 years ago. These were found with a flake that archeologists believe may have been part of a basalt hammer stone. If the discoveries pan out, this would be the oldest known site of human habitation on the Great Plains.

Wherein David seeks out his inner libertarian. Smoking tobacco with a water pipe is common practice in the Middle East, and now an enterprising senior at Iowa State has set up a hookah shop near campus:

"For $10 you pick your flavored tobacco. Mohamed Ali, owner, then picks and packs the pipe and readies the charcoal. Then it's time to smoke."

These furrin-like goin's on have raised the eyebrows of some state legislators, who are convinced something underhanded must be going on here, and are reduced in the extremity of their need to do something to gibbering thusly:

"They use fruit flavored tobacco and do deliver nicotine probably breaking the blood brain barrier faster than traditional modes of nicotine delivery and we discovered that because of how they're made.. In essence they're bongs. They don't fall under the definition of cigarettes in the code," said Iowa Legislator Kevin McCarthy.

The horror! Someone's discovered an unregulated activity!

It means hookah bars like this one are not part of a state wide sales to minors enforcement scheme. Police conduct sting operations at least once a year on businesses that sell cigarettes. Hookah bars could slip under the radar as things stand now. But McCarthy is pushing for change.
"A new permitting system for all tobacco products and that would cover the hookah situation subjecting them to the sales to minor enforcement scheme that everyone else has to," McCarthy said.

The proprietor seems unfazed by all the legislative angst he is inspiring.

Mohamed says he's done everything the state has asked him to do. A tobacco distributor permit and a sign warning minors to steer clear hang on his wall. He even has a no smoking section to stay in compliance with the laws.

A no-smoking section, eh? Well, best of luck, Mohamed. If they're smoking in your shop, they're not smoking where I am, so I wish you success.

Portlandization. As economic refugees from Portland ourselves, Moira and I found that Amy Ridenour's post on the unintended effects of "smart growth" policies brought back a lot of memories — long, congested commutes, housing far more expensive than we could afford, and underused (because largely useless) public transportation. Portland is, without a doubt, the prettiest and nicest city I've ever lived near — just as Boulder, Colorado, is the most stunningly beautiful town I've ever lived in — but in both cases that beauty is both a cause and consequence of the fact that only the well-to-do, the lucky, or the subsidized can afford to live there.

Yearrgghh! I generally don't blog anything directly related to partisan politics in this country, because Reid Stott says what I think - but better! and angrier!

"the tonality that helped bring defeat to the Democrats in 2004 is being harshened … so they can get less votes in 2006 and 2008, I guess… it’s so plainly counterproductive to what I assumed was the real goal … getting some more Democrats elected … that I simply have to conclude Karl Rove is involved somehow."

Preach it, brother! Can I get an amen? Amen!

Tortuous thinking. Both Michael Totten and Centerfield have recent posts with extensive comment threads regarding the treatment of prisoners taken as a result of the WOT. Perhaps predictably, the thread commenters seem to naturally sort into two groups, pro-administration and anti-administration — the anti- position being that the administration is sanctioning torture — or, at least, abuse of prisoners — based on reports of, shall we say, unorthodox interrogation techniques; while the pro-admin side says this is all definition creep — administration opponents are defining torture down to have a go at Bush.

What started the thread on Totten's site was actually a reference to a Red State post on extraordinary rendition — the practice, started under Clinton, of quietly sending captives off to some other country where rough handling of prisoners will not be noticed. There seems to be a fair amount of concensus on this subject — people are against it.

But on what we can legitimately do to try to obtain information from prisoners in our custody, there is huge range of response - from "whatever it takes" to - well, I'm not really sure how to characterize the other end of the spectrum, because I don't really know if I understand it. It seems to hold military interrogators to the same standards of conduct as your local cop on the street, which seems to me tantamount to giving up on interrogation altogether. It seems obvious that we permit the military to do all sorts of things for which we would toss local law enforcement officials in jail. By its nature, the military is designed to inflict harm on the nation's designated enemies, and to use means and a degree of force that would be criminal within the borders of the U.S.

So how much violence is legitimate in the pursuit of information? At what point does interrogation become torture? The U.S. ratified the U.N. Convention against Torture in 1990 (interestingly, neither Bush I nor Clinton took steps to implement the treaty until 1998) which defines torture as

"any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or her or a third person information or a confession, punishing him or her for an act he or she or a third person has committed, or intimidating or coercing him or her or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity."

The bolded words are, in effect, the major points of contention in the debate on both Totten and Centerfield — do recent reports of interrogation methods show evidence of "severe [mental] suffering, ... intentionally inflicted ... for such purposes as obtaining ... information or a confession"? Opponents of the policy say that they do. However, that seems like an extremely broad categorization. Interestingly, Beth Persky, an attorney for the Human Rights Project (hardly a bunch of pro-Bush shills) contends that:

"Mental pain or suffering must be prolonged and must be caused by or result from: (i) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (ii) the administration of mind altering substances; (iii) the threat of imminent death; or (iv) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration of mind altering substances or procedures. The act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering."

This would seem to significantly restrict what qualifies as 'severe mental suffering', and rule out some recently reported techniques as being torture. But that still leaves at least two other questions, to which I don't have any answers - are these techniques effective? And to what extent are we using them on people that we are reasonably sure have the information that we want?

UPDATE: Oops - I should have realized that Persky's 'contention' above is actually a quote from U.S. Federal law (US Code Title 18, Sec. 2340).

Putting humorists out of business since 1821. Sometimes, parody writes itself:

"By knitting you are resisting capitalism and consumerism....[Knitting] seemed almost as transgressive as breastfeeding in public 20 years ago...Once a devalued craft, knitting is now taking on capitalism, consumerism and war...a knitted willy with realistic head and veins....Knit your own purse grenade"

Where else but the Guardian?

--
(Via Oliver Kamm).

Those crazy Truman Democrats! Moira: The New Republic has retreated behind subscriber walls, but a post at Centerfield reports on a TNR article on the damage done to liberalism by the left. My candidate for quote-of-the-day would have to be this bit:

"...sometimes, you just want to be on the side of whoever is more likely to take a bunker-buster to Arundhati Roy."

Oot and aboot. Hey David: just goofing off and popping around when I have work to do, but I noticed a post over at Eve Tushnet's that reminded me of an argument we were once having, during which you caviled "Hey, stop dissin' the Enlightenment!" I have no memory of what we were discussing, but Eve has a collection of her own links dissin' the Enlightenment, which you might enjoy.

Haven't read the links myself yet; I don't get by that blog often but enjoy her stuff when I do. In addition to the above, not only does it it remind me that I should have planned for today one last victory for carne in the Battle between Carnival and Lent, but informs me that Jonathan Gewirtz and I are not the only bloggers attuned to...vulture-blogging!

Elsewhere, I think Angie Schultz has quite the best take on the Eason Jordan affair. It's all about that fatal temptation to swank. But isn't everything?

...but screw you, gramps! I moved to Iowa of my own volition, dragging worldly goods 2/3^rds of the way across a continent, and yet the state spurns me for pretty young things! (Onerous registration required - summary in extended entry.) No-one in the state legislature is offering to rescind my income tax, apparently just because I'm a shattered wreck of a 42-year-old.

But I suppose things like this can make legislators think crazy thoughts:

"...Iowa had a net loss of nearly 12,000 college-educated adults ages 25 to 39 between 1995 and 2000 -- a rate of departure second only to North Dakota."

Think about that — that means more youngsters fleeing Iowa than, e.g., Oklahoma, or Kansas, or Alabama — but it's not that bad here! Really!Yes, it's pretty flat, and air is sometimes redolent of cow, and Des Moines isn't exactly a metropolis, but the cost of living is low and it's safe and the schools are very good here. Iowa's a good state, a nice state, but all you young whippersnappers treat her like she's dirt beneath your shoes!

––

Cash flow to stem Iowa brain drain?
Rene Sanchez, Star Tribune
February 6, 2005

"Iowa's legislature has begun debating an extraordinary bill to exempt anyone under 30 from paying state income tax. No other state with the same affliction -- an exodus of residents commonly called "brain drain" -- has taken such a step."

Grow old along with me!/ The best is yet to be,/The last of life, for which the first was made... "Oh, and aging sucks," says D. Well, in context D.'s comment is understandable - bodily degeneration and all. I do get annoyed with one knee, which creaks rather embarrassingly loudly going down the stairs in the morning, and a shoulder joint on which the original warranty appears to have expired. But aging doesn't suck as badly as it would suck to be one of the frenetically "non-old" - you know, those unfortunate persons, my contemporaries and those a decade or two older, who are represented by, for example, that "boomer couple"* that "travelled across the country to present a petition to the dictionary publisher requesting that boomers 'no longer want to be defined as old'." Lord, deliver me from such a fate. At one time, I think, "second childhood" was a euphemistic reference to senile dementia, a condition most of us aging humans would prefer to avoid. ("Why," the young people surveying the aging boomers will think, "are we throwing all this money at Alzheimer's research, when our elders seem so actively to seek comparable conditions of confusion and silliness?")

Poking around further on Boomer Death Watch, I came upon another old link** to this article from last summer, wherein the author discusses the need for society to create a "contemporary story" of aging:

But government-sponsored 'awareness campaigns' are blunt instruments with which to combat our fear of ageing. We would do much better if, as a society, we could tell ourselves a contemporary story about the value of growing older: the greater wisdom, finesse, and accumulated experience that ageing can bring. The alternative is to be dragged kicking and screaming into an old age for which we are not cut out.

Well, uh, yes, it would be preferable if the hysterically "non-old" could discover a sense of their own dignity before they disgrace themselves any further, but I'm not interested in the "contemporary story". The old "story", told by my parents and still-living in-laws, will work just fine for me, thank you. Humans have always sighed for the passing of bright youth, resented the weakness of age in themselves and others, and borne the trials of failing bodies, but a belief in the utter pointlessness and joylessness of a life lived out in a body no longer young and sexy is a "story" these Boomer's told themselves. My parents certainly gave me every impression of enjoying the hell out of life, whatever its inevitable sorrows, but they were adults; they lived adult lives, and expressed scorn and pity for their near contemporaries who even then were buying into the euphemisms and "age is bad" dogmas of the rising Boomers. (So you spend all this time denigrating age and all that came before you, and are surprised to enter old age and find its currency debased? You couldn't see that coming, you half-wits?)

Sometimes these people are downright scary, and cruel and evil to the innnocent young, who are just trying to go about their proper and necessary business of behaving like young people:

Many younger baby boomers are refusing to pass on the baton of youth culture to their children, believing that since they invented youth culture it remains rightfully theirs. In the course of the past decade, youth culture and popular culture have expanded their boundaries - and now increasingly encompass people in their forties. In return, the content of much popular culture - the slew of nostalgia programming and nostalgia advertising, for example - is beginning to reflect the interests of the middle-aged.

(Shudder) This gives me a nightmare vision of myself and friends desperately clambering onto the roof tiles to avoid the rising and all-obliterating tides of youthless youth culture, while in the water are expressionless zombie Boomers, nipped, tucked, dyed, and vitaminized into Michael Jackson's undead army, flailing at my ankles, croaking "DHEA!", "Botox!", "Collagen!" "But we don't want no steenking BRAINS!"

I generally do, as a matter of fact, find that persons younger than myself act toward me with politeness, respect and deference. But some of those geezers, tsk! - no respect for age.

*Boomer Death Watch appears not to have permalinks. Scroll down to "OLD SPOILED BRATS CONTINUE TO WHINE". 12.15.03.

**"AND DEATH SHALL NOT CLAIM THEM...", 7.25.04

Gettin' hammered with Hitch.

"He hated Hitchens on sight. And when I say “hate,” I mean white-hot, wide-eyed hate with flaring-nostrils."

Michael Totten gets loaded with Christopher Hitchens and the Iraqi moderator and guests of last week's Spirit of America Iraqi election coverage.

Tubing U.S.A. The first time one of my co-workers told me that Iowa had a downhill ski area, I just assumed he was pulling my leg. I brought it up, jokingly, at a dinner party a while later, and was surprised to see that everyone assured me that the thing was true; in fact, not only was there a ski area, there were several, and there was one only about 20 miles away. Still dubious, I googled; and there it was.

Last winter, we had several fine dumps of snow, and after one of them the idea that there was actually someplace to go skiing around here started eating at my brain. Eventually, I convinced our offspring, A., that she simply must learn how to ski, so the two of us ventured forth. Equipmentless (and cursing myself for selling off my skis, boots, and poles some years ago), we rented the standard crappy rear-entry rental boots and under-waxed and -edged rental skis, but the shop employees were very helpful and friendly (this is Iowa, after all), and gave A. a 20-minute free beginner's lesson on the bunny slope ('field' might be more accurate). Then I showed A. how to get on chairlift (chairlift! Iowa!), not fall off the chairlift, and get off the chairlift at the top. There is precisely one (1) green slope at Seven Oaks, and we spent a couple hours riding the lift up, making the 3 or 4 turns possible in 200 vertical feet, and doing it again.

A. was doing pretty well; fortunately for her, she inherited her mother's coordination and motor skills rather than mine. But after a few trips up and down, her attention started wandering to the slopes just beyond the ski runs - where there were 3 troughlike lanes carved out of the snow, extending from the top of the hill to an icy flat at the bottom. People were riding big innertubes down the lanes, spinning and shouting wildly, and sliding way out onto the flat. A. looked more and more longingly over at the tube-riders as time when on.
"Dad, can we do that?"
"Well..." I tried to explain that skiing was clearly superior to riding a tube; skiing was a skill, riding a tube was just, well, riding a tube - where was the control, the mind-body coordination?
"Yeah, but... it looks more fun."
I stared off across the valley while trying to compose a rebuttal to this line of reasoning.
"...Well, it does."
Okay, fine. We turn in all the rental equipment, and get passes to ride the tubes.

The tubes are for truck tires, I guess. The sides and bottom are covered with canvas, and the bottom has an additional layer of hard, smooth plastic. They look kind of like gigantic blood corpuscles. The canvas cover has two straps for handles, and a pull rope that an attendant attaches to a tow rope that drags you uphill. At the top, you pick one of the 3 lanes, wait for the bottom to clear, and push off. By the time you get to the bottom of the slope, you're moving pretty fast - and then you start hitting the bumps, and you try not to go flying off the tube completely. Then trudge back to the tow rope and repeat. It is fun, in that aaaahhhhhh I'm out of control sort of way.

So this year, A. wanted to go tubing again. We had some good snow a few weeks ago, but nothing since then, so conditions weren't quite as good. Still, we got our tickets, and grabbed some tubes, and began sliding. I discovered that if I put the straps toward the back and laid flat on my stomach, I could both hold on and also keep my form pretty streamlined, so that I moved quite fast when I hit the bottom of the slope. Because of the lack of new snow, the slide across the flat took you from ice to muddy ice to icy mud to puddles, grass, bark chips, and dirt. And bumps - once or twice I felt like I was going to bounce completely off the tube. After about an hour of this, I slowly realize - my back is just not feeling quite right, but do I stop? Of course not! After another hour, I realize d that my lower back is not happy, so I stopped, finally. On the way home, I had to readjust the car seat so that stepping on the clutch didn't send shooting pains up my back.

Now, a week later, I think I'm mostly recovered, but I still have to stand up slowly, hunching over like an old man and s-l-o-w-l-y straightening up. Periodically, I get weird tingly feelings in my legs if I sit down too long.

I think I'm done tubing. Oh, and aging sucks.

In Memoriam. Having been immersed in work the last few days, I was unaware that Ernst Mayr died Thursday. From the viewpoint of someone trained as a vertebrate evolutionary biologist, Mayr was one of the most important figures of 20^th century biology. Along with Theodosius Dobzhansky and George Gaylord Simpson, Mayr was a principal architect of the Modern Synthesis, the basic framework upon which current evolutionary theory is based. (Okay, geneticists would probably add R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright to that list as well.)

He was fantastically productive, publishing books well into his 90's. For me, his 1963 "Animal Species and Evolution" was a book of historical importance, right up there with "On the Origin of Species"; it summarized Neo-Darwinian thought and what was then known about evolutionary processes in vertebrates better than any other source. While it has been in many ways superceded by more recent work, it lays out the foundation with enviable clarity. What is now the generic "textbook view" of evolution, for better or worse, is basically what Mayr laid out in 1963. The standard answer to the deceptively simple question, "What is a species?" is Mayr's.

I had the honor of meeting Mayr, once, in the mid-1980's. He was in his 80's, and still highly involved in the debates of the time. It was shortly after Stephen Gould had begun pounding his drum for the idea of punctuated equilibria; I remember Mayr remarking with a trace of irritation that Gould was, in essence, just writing footnotes to Mayr's own views. (Gould and his colleagues disputed this, obviously.) Despite his age, he could still argue with force and clarity. Mayr was probably the greatest influence on those scientists who were my mentors; had I not exiled myself, he would have been a profound influence on my academic work as well.

Got 'em on the list - and they'll none of them be missed. Is there a special course in journalism school that teaches the art of filling column inches without actually reporting information? Stories that artfully dance around the central point or points, without ever actually getting to those points, are infuriatingly common. Case in point, this story^[1] on the website of the Fargo (N.D.) Forum, under an AP byline. Here is a paragraph-by-paragraph precis:

1. Local woman on a list of people to be barred from Bush speech.
2. The list "was supplied" to ticket distributors.
3. Details of who is on the list.
4. Reactions of people on the list.
5. Denials by officials that they had anything to do with list.
6. 5 more paragraphs of either (3) or (4).
7. 2 paragraphs reiterating (5).
8. 2 paragraphs of officials pointing out that no one was, in fact, barred.

Nowhere in the story do we learn anything about the provenance of 'the list', which by means of the insidious passive voice apparently conjured itself from thin air and simply appeared. Nor do we know what 'the list' actually said — did it straight-out say "Keep these traitorous commies away from Bush?" Based on wordcount, the most important thing about this story is how people felt about being on the list. Color me a heartless bastard, but I don't care how they feel. I want to know where the list came from, and what it actually said. Is that asking so much?

---

Finally, this morning some light breaks. A follow-up story adds the following bits:

• White House & governor's office apparently blame "overzealous volunteer"
• Overzealous volunteer could be from White House advance team.
• Fargo papers can't tell the difference between "compose" and "comprise".
• White House taking steps to prevent recurrence.
• "Sobolik thinks he saw the list Tuesday when he was asked to make photocopies. The list he saw contained names, but Sobolik said he didn't look at who was on it and didn't ask how it would be used." So apparently it didn't say "BAN THESE COMMIE TRAITORS" across the top. So how do we know this was a list of people to be banned from the speech? I'll concede the possibility that it was, but what's the evidence?
• Several paragraphs of local officials Running Away! from any possible involvment or responsibility.
• "CVB staff members, several of whom were asked to help hand out tickets, were told to alert a representative from the governor's office if someone from the list tried to get a ticket."
• Said representative is now on Deep Vacation, uncontactable by any known technology.
• "If anyone from the list tried to get tickets, Burgum was instructed to take the person aside and explain to them that this wasn't a political rally and to make sure they weren't intending to be disruptive, Larson said." So they weren't, apparently, banned. Creepily overzealous? Yes. But apparently not banned.
• More Running Away! and people on Deep Vacation.
• Despite explanation (above) that people weren't banned, article continues to refer to list as a "do-not-admit" list.
• More Feelings, combined with dark mutterings about Bu$Hitler's Amerikkka.

So. based on these two stories, my version of the story would go something like this: some local Republican volunteer, high on the idea that Bush! is coming! to MY TOWN!, decides that there are some... flaky undesirables we'd better keep an eye on, y'know? And puts together the list, just to make sure these people aren't going to do anything rash or weird or Democrat-like. The list gets out there, but knowledge of its existence comes to light, and everybody remotely associated with the event skedaddles away to avoid bad publicity.

It's actually too bad the publicity came out before the event - I'd be far more interested in knowing what would have happened if none of this had been reported, and one of the listed people had gone to the speech. Would they, in fact, have been banned? Given a good talking-to? Measured for cement overshoes? Eyed nervously by jumpy volunteers? Now we'll never know.

--
^[1]Via Byzantium's Shores.

---

UPDATE. Well, that was fast - the first link above has disappeared completely, and the second now requires registration.

The nefarious Professor's hidden mind-control powers extend even further than we thought. In the course of an Instant Messaging conversation on some technical matter with a co-worker yesterday, (a colleague with whom I have never had a non-technical discussion) I made some blindingly obvious comment, and said co-worker responded affirmatively by saying,


 Indeed.


I then made some mildly humorous remark, and the co-worker's response?


 Heh.


Lascaux.org One of the peculiar aspects of the information on the internet (to someone who's all about collecting and sorting data) is how transitory it is. Browse around on the archives of your average blog du jour, and you will already notice that many of the links are broken on web pages only two or three years old. (Links to media sites seem particularly prone to this.) Linkrot is all.

Such a vast compilation of — stuff — that can just disappear with the flick of a switch or the crash of a hard drive, or just the caprice of a site owner or server admin. Oh, sure, there might be backups, caches of sites, and all that, but really, how likely is any given resource on the internet likely to still exist and be accessible in, say, ten years? Twenty years?

(Note that I'm not making any value judgements here. I don't think that something like a web page must be available 100 years from now - it may just be the nature of the thing that internet data is evanescent.) Turn the longevity question around - what's the oldest web page (or other internet resource location; FTP, Gopher, Archie - go wild) you can still make use of?

True, it's often difficult to know how old a web site is, if it's not explicitly dated. So far as I can tell, the first web server, ever, was a machine at CERN named nxoc01.cern.ch, and the first web site was http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. That site is gone now, but some history-minded people at the World Wide Web Consortium preserved it, and it's still available here. This museum display contains what the W3C say is the "least recently modified web page we know of", untouched since the misty depths of time, Tue, 13 Nov 1990 15:17:00 GMT (though there's no way to tell that from the page itself). Marvel at the crude scratchings, so like and yet so unlike us...