When USB accidents happen

The Risks Digest offers up a scary tale of what your cell phone may be doing to your laptop when you're not looking. Caveat emptor!

Do you buy meat thinking it's been carbon monoxided?

Regardless, you may want to read ABC News: Hill Debates 'Carbon Monoxide Meat' where you can learn that CO makes meat and fish look fresh indefinitely.

The FDA's David Acheson, who along with other FDA and USDA officials sat at a table covered with various samples of year-old meat that still appears fresh, and said that 'this particular issue is not a safety concern even remotely high on our radar screen.' He added that he believes that most people are aware that meat is packaged with carbon monoxide...

It just makes me wonder what exactly would make this a bad idea to officials; I can only guess their thinking...since it don't kill it's okay for corporations to add whatever they deem necessary to the food web.

20071117 info UPDATE: Even after reading about the scientific merits of the minute levels of CO exposure, I still think it's a slippery slope ... because of unanticipated consequences and strange coincidences. I still want greater assurances ... with regard to actual habits of those increasing numbers at the margins -- on the street, or unsupervised -- along with the unknown animals being fed whatever from who knows where ... ! I understand the need to save the many over the imagined or projected unknowns but recollections of efforts to track down mad cow disease makes me pause and ask do we really ever know what monsters we're creating.

"If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you get amateur security"

Fav infosec guru Bruce Schneier clarifies what's important -- and ignored in by most current government attempts to makes "US" safe in Schneier on Security: The War on the Unexpected, which originally appeard in Wired.com.

"the Chemistry Set is toast"

The 12 Angry Men Blog's recalls my own youth with two chemistry sets in its take on the "Endangered Species - The Chemistry Set.."

Is saying you got kiddie porn the same as actually having it?

What a slippery slope the porn plane becomes if the Supreme Court agrees with Slate Magazine's characterization of the legal merits when the Solicitor General Paul

...Clement says that to be liable under the PROTECT Act, you need not be selling or advertising the porn. It's enough to say you have it.

A sad day indeed. Oral arguments were yesterday.

DNA Pioneer, Suspended Over Racial Comments

The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog brings us old news from the UK where the October 14, 2007 The Sunday Times Magazine displayed more than we wish to know about how Doc Watson thinks.

But, a few days later he goes on to assure us, he didn't really mean what his words said:

To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly,” he said. That is not what I meant. More importantly, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.

Early onset... Or, perhaps, he needs a better keeper.

Street Mathematics vs School Mathematics

I love what I know of the mathematician Keith Devlin -- aka The Math Guy on NPR's Weekend Edition -- who is a researcher at as well as the executive director of Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information. Here are two good reasons for my adoration:

1. His October 2007 "Devlin's Angle" at MAA Online wherein he adds fuel to my qualms about school math in

   Kinds of Math

2. Mathematics, the Science of Patterns The Search for Order in Life, Mind, and the Universe. New York: Henry Holt, 2003.

By the way, yesterday I finally saw Danica McKellar's Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail which I only wish also came out with a boy-cover....maybe I'll design one to print up so I can try using it w/J. Check out a review at MAA Online.

Richard Scarry's The Best Word Book Ever: 1963 vs. 1991

Who wins? Us or our children?

Perhaps this is a good place to reference Sidney Hook's 10 rules for discourse from "Ethics of Controversy" given that #1 is Nothing and no one is immune from criticism. And, #4, reminds us that while words may be "legally permissible" does not mean they are also "morally permissible". Here, I'm reminded of my unease when J., in first grade, brought home an alphabet worksheet referencing "Eskimos".

someone on the "social graph"

Or, as he says, let me declare the problem statement, as I see it, and the underlying assumptions I've been making.

The someone is Brad Fitzpatrick whose company developed LiveJournal and its backend software all of which were purchased by Six Apart.

Conspiracy Theory + Schoolhouse Rock

"Media-opoly" from Saturday Night Live's TV Funhouse skit was created by Robert Smigel and broadcast on "Saturday Night Live" during the March 14, 1998 airing on NBC, a subsidiary of GE; it was shown only once and edited out of subsequent reruns.

According to Lorne Michaels, he "didn't think it worked comedically."

More commentary @ http://snipurl.com/contheoryrock

Soul Sides: my fav audioblog

Trying to explain to C the source for a song that she was grooving on...I was listening to Soul Symphony, the downloadable mix of some Asian guy's first soul/jazz/funk mix CD...I realized how little I really knew about DJ O-Dub. So I went and read his bio only to discover that I probably have heard (maybe, even read) him without knowing given the breadth of his portfolio. Also, he maintains Poplicks.com. And, his day job -- like that of many of my St. A's siblings I envy -- is professor. But, I should probably check out the parenting blog in which he's involved Rice Daddies.

Finally, a news-y item to get the child to wash better, more often

aka Cheerleaders' Lemonade Stand Makes Folk Ill

A cultural transliteration: Harry Potter to the 'hood?

Is that even practical? Readable? A possible answer resides in one Troy CLE.

Now, I offer a long intro en route to the point...

As a black kid who grew up in that lap of all that is black and soul-identified -- Memphis, TN, I left as a Jethro Tull loving folkie it is only fitting that I'd remain at the margins with a list of Eurocentric literary favs that include classics such as Stendahl's The Red and the Black, Thackery's Vanity Fair and anything penned by a Bronte sister. Epic and dramatic, and I'm enthralled; see Mario Puzo's The Godfather: Parts I (1972) and II (1974) but NOT III (1990) which was pretty much ruined by the director replacing Winona Ryder with his daughter Sofia Coppola. (And, who knew she'd blossom into a decent director.)

I also loved the Arthurian tales as captured by TH White's The Once and Future King and Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Yep, just another little brown girl with a classical education; I didn't resist what I was fed even as I now flirt with the margins. So while I love mythology having a child makes me more fond of fractured tales and re-tellings such as Eve Merriam's Inner City Mother Goose.

I think I may have attempted The Hobbit when younger I never cozied up to LOTR although Peter Jackson's films have a similar place in my heart as the books I've mention.

To further elaborate the odd outsider theme... I am a child of the sixties who today is a reformed pessimist with a soft spot for dystopias and disquieting utopian visions -- the ususual suspects: Brave New World, Farenheit 451, Solyent Green, and Gattaca; also add Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. (And, I still wonder how I got here from back there...a midnight train from my reality (?).) But, I digress.

Somewhere along the path, I discovered Samuel Delany, still in his SF days; I still love the sound of the first one I read Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. And much later found Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy which led me to her Patternists series.

But I was a reluctant late arrival to the Harry Potter band wagon; I enjoyed the series despite their unevenness always reading the book before seeing the film. I think it was book #6 that I mused about what would it take for a fiction book to have that level of appeal to urban youths with whom I work and see where I live.

Of course, JK Rowling's books already appeal to those kids who do read big long books yet I wondered about what might populate a story with a broad appeal AND have the vibrancy of actual flavors that feel their eyes and ears daily. Few names came to mind; ok, one -- Nalo Hopkinson who I still haven't managed to read but know I should. If I push my brain, I think of a few others I might imagine taking that plunge: Neil Gaiman, China Mielville, Pat Cadigan, Harryette Mullen, Colson Whitehead (ne Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead), Don Byron, directors Julie Dash or Kasi Lemmons.

And finally, we arrive at the point...
The simple truth is the epic tales I love on screen or in print never have faces with complexions close to mine or the kids with whom I've worked. So I was delighted to learn about Troy CLE who has laid out plans for The Marvelous World series which has its own website and has been described as the "black Harry Potter". And, if we're to believe the hype The Marvelous Effect combines elements of fantasy, science fiction, hip-hop, video gaming, NASCAR and anime.

NOTE: Episode #327 of PBS's NOW is where I saw the author in early July when I began the original draft for this post.

this just in from Threat Level @ Wired Blogs

Security Researcher Wants Lube Maker Fined For Privacy Slip.

There are just so many delights in the headline even as I pity those affected by this April 2007 FUBAR. Among the 200,000 suffering are the San Franciscans so dramatically showcased here in the researcher's own Yahoo maps mash-up of the addresses that were sent a nice wet package of Astroglide.

All these tidbits, and more, available from Christopher Soghoian, an Indiana University School of Informatics grad student by day, and possibly a true masked superhero by night.

Play has begun to do real work

Speaking of class, the quote below, on virtual transactions, reminds me that there are no new stories, just repeated failures to learn.

Real-money trading harms the game, they argue, because the overheated productivity of gold farms and other profit-seeking operations makes it harder for beginning players to get ahead. Either way, the sense of a certain economic injustice at work breeds resentment. [emphasis mine]

And, doesn't that sound like a why for affirmative action? Inequality overtime breeds contempt and bad karma!

Real-money trading, or R.M.T., is the practice of "selling virtual [gaming] goods for real money", and there's a whole cottage industry serving those who can afford to pay to play.

The writer is Julian Dibbell who is forever mentally cross-linked to his 1993 "A Rape in Cyberspace" which I still have on its original newsprint, from The Village Voice. In this new tale he brings us "The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer" -- the outsourced minions who do the gamers' dirty work giving them the goods required to elevate their virtual existence.

Related:

• Some who study online games: Edward Castronova, Henry Jenkins, Nick Yee
• Castronova, Edward. "On Virtual Economies." Games Studies: the international journal of computer game research (December 2003).

One social scientist thinks that Facebook | Myspace mirror class divisions in US society

So the question of the new generation isn't Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?. Instead it's why are the well-off on Facebook and the subalterns* on Myspace. See a working draft of the paper:

boyd, danah. 2007. "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace ." Apophenia Blog Essay. June 24. http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

^*"N.B., My use of subaltern is not kosher; see term's coverage in "Glossary of Key Terms in the Work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak". Regardless of the proper usage, the reason for its use here relates to the Indian critic Gayatri Spivak who borrowed "...this term from Antonio Gramsci to describe dominated, subordinated and marginalized groups especially those who are doubly oppressed, such as colonised women." [from www.adamranson.freeserve.co.uk/critical%20concepts.htm]

Related:

• How to Rent a Negro

Theremin cover of Gnarls Barkley’s "Crazy"

There are about 5 people in the world who know this but I've got a major jones* for the Theremin, the only instrument played without being touched. (I also happen to love this song!)

The Theremin was invented in 1920 by a Russian physicist named Lev Sergeiyvich Termin (whose name was later changed to Leon Theremin); he also invented the first electronic listening device, or "bug", for the USSR.
The performer in the video is Randy George, of Aether and Ether Experiment:

This gem courtesy of a Yahoo widget RSS feed from Boing Boing leading me to the re-discovered coolness of Laughing Squid Related:

• Gnarls in National Geographic
• Gnarls on MySpace
• hear Nelly Furtado's sorrowful acoustic cover, for Jo Whiley’s BBC Radio 1 program "Live Lounge"(2006)

^*"The slang term 'jones,' meaning an addiction to drugs, is said to have originated among addicts who lived in [NYC's] Great Jones Alley, off Great Jones Street, between Broadway and Lafayette Street." [from "Jargon, slang, and niche vocabularies"]"

What exactly is Abt?

C. has worked for one company for more than ten years. And, that company is Abt Associates, Inc. Often, the people I expect to have heard of it haven't (e.g., a school principal) and those I'm not expecting to have (random soccer parent). When queried about her job, I usually say something about it being a think tank/consulting firm then make some joke about Halliburton largely because both companies pulled staff out of the Middle East around the same time. (A more apt big comparison -- based on consulting sectors -- would be Booz Allen, McKinsey & Company or Westat; or, a small comparison would be the similarly Cambridge, MA-based Goodman Research Group, Inc.) Well, here's the marketing blurb, I found in recent news about the company changing its ISP:

Abt Associates, a private, employee-owned company, applies scientific research and technical assistance expertise to a wide range of social, economic and technological policy issues; international development; clinical trials and registries; and complex business problems. Founded in 1965, Abt Associates provides services to U.S. federal, state and local governments; foreign governments; international organizations; foundations; and business and industry. Its staff of over 1,000 is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Bethesda, Maryland; Durham, North Carolina, Chicago, Illinois; and in Africa, Asia, Central Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Serendipitous unblinking

Despite the fact that I'm the owner of two books about knots and keeping trying out various cross-platform geometry visualization software, I still am wowed by this book's title:

The Shoelace Book: A Mathematical Guide to the Best (And Worst) Ways to Lace Your Shoes

But, then again who am I to be surprised; it's only been a few weeks since I bought a book about a topological object The Mobius Strip: Dr. August Mobius's Marvelous Band in Mathematics, Games, Literature, Art, Technology, and Cosmology.

While I'm fascinated by math, it's not my forte. And, in case you're wondering, I discovered this title after entering a similarly authored book QED about the beauty of proofs at Goodreads.com.

From whence do the best bloggers originate?

Or, as The Boston Globe put it "Where the bloggers blog".