| Tuesday, August
20, 2002
What with the Tablet PC and Cisco wireless I have about
enough material for the column. It is time for me to vanish and get
Burning Tower DONE. I probably won't be around for a few days, even to
answer email. It's time to blitz that book.
But I'm still here. Things needed to be done. Tomorrow for
sure, and for a couple of days.
There's some good mail, including
electric field armor...
And from an educator friend:
Here's a little something to mull over the weekend:
"A three-year-old child in an affluent family
has a larger working vocabulary than the mother of a three-year-old in a
welfare family."
Reid Lyon ASCD Update, August, 2002 (accessible at www.ascd.org,
even for non-members)
And this guy is Bush's reading guru?
I cannot believe that is anything
like true, or why anyone would say it. Illiterate people don't necessarily
have small speaking vocabularies. Assuming that the welfare mother is
illiterate: I don't know the probability there. And
then there are the joys of immigration:
The Electronic Telegraph
Muslims 'must defend Saddam' By Anton La
Guardia, Diplomatic Editor (Filed: 16/08/2002)
Radical Islamic leaders in London yesterday
told Muslims around the world that they had an obligation to rise up
against Britain and America if there was an attack on Iraq.
The declaration was issued by hardline
Islamists after a chaotic day in which they tried to charge journalists a
£30 "admission fee" to hear their pronouncement.
The declaration said that Muslims must ally
with Muslims. "They are obliged to support them, stand with them and
fight alongside them against their common enemies." It added that an
"attack against Iraq is an attack against all Muslims".
Muslims also had the right to possess
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons "to defend their lives,
wealth and property".
The statement was issued by an alliance
including Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, a militant north London preacher;
Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, who leads the Finsbury Park mosque in London;
Muhammad al-Masari, an exiled Saudi dissident; and Yasser al-Siri, the
Egyptian dissident released from custody in London last month when
extradition proceedings to America were dropped.
<snip>
I have recently been in a discussion on the value of all
that money spent on AIDS research: far more than on almost anything else,
although AIDS affects a rather limited population and now that we have
cleaned up the blood supply it's fairly easy not to get AIDS. The
question is, have we learned enough about other things, like DNA
structure, to justify the money spent? (Learning about retro-viruses
probably doesn't count because there are only about 3 human diseases
caused by retro-viruses in the first place.) We have
spent the money; we continue to spend it; are we getting our money's
worth, and if not, what other medical/biological fields are being starved
so that AIDS can get the money? Here is one interchange
between discussants in a conference I'm part of:
[M]y guess would be that most of the benefits that
flow from HIV research into medical research that matters to the average
American who never does anything of which our John D. would disapprove, do
so indirectly. For example, during the "War On AIDS",
biomedicine seems to have developed much better ways of mapping the
structure of viruses and identifying possibilities for messing with their
workings. Biomedicine is very different from software if no value spilled
over from one research project to the next.
> HIV funding has certainly kept molecular
biologists employed,
> and they've sure made a huge contribution to general
> human health. Huge. Yep.
Patience. There will be a payoff from knowing how
these little critters actually work someday. (Though I think that
ultimately we will be forced to attack parasites with
"non-biological" means--Nanomachines with enough intelligence to
identify pathogens and then enough punch to "mechanically"
disrupt their operation (contrast poisoning a person with shooting him in
the heart with a .357 magnum). We all tend to overestimate what can be
done in a year and underestimate what can be done in a decade. The
pathogens will not give up on attacking us, so we should never slacken in
exploring how we might attack them
FAIR WARNING: this is a reprint book consolidating all
the Falkenberg and Prince Lysander stories into one volume. There is an
additional new scene but it's short.
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