Defining moment for fledgling neocon?

Thirty years ago, this became one of the more dramatic moments in the history of Madison’s quadrennial revolving door for presidential primary hopefuls. The Capital Times ran the file photo (PDF "virtual newsprint edition") last night as “A Moment in History: March 30, 1976.”

During a Wisconsin presidential primary campaign stop in Madison, candidate Sen. Henry 'Scoop' Jackson was spat on in the face by protester Ben Masel. Later, Jackson said, "It didn't faze me one iota. It didn't bother me at all...That happens once in awhile in Madison, you know."

Looking back now, it’s not so much "the Senator from Boeing" who’s of interest, but the ambitious young Cold War liberals he gathered around him at the time, people like Perle, Wolfowitz and Feith. The photo was taken at what might have been the high point of the Jackson campaign. The next day, perhaps benefiting from a sympathy vote, he defeated Carter in Massachusetts, of all places, but the campaign soon self-destructed. Vietnam was behind us, and Democratic voters had tired of belligerent Cold War rhetoric. In a few weeks Jackson was out of the race. It was too late for him, but not his acolytes. Four years later the neocons found a more congenial home with Reagan, and eventually, an even more congenial one with Bush.

The rest is history. As Roger Morris wrote about Jackson and the neocons in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

"America's attack on Iraq started 65 years ago in the wooded curving inlets and gentle fog of Snohomish County."

Maybe it's just my imagination, but isn't that Paul Wolfowitz recoiling in shock and disdain to Jackson's right? I'm sure he campaigned with him. Hard to tell for sure in profile, but the guy seems about the right age, is wearing the same black campaign raincoat as Jackson. The hands, the dark, bushy eyebrows, and the unruly hair memorialized by Michael Moore — if it's not Wolfowitz, it's someone who looks a lot like him. It would have been a defining moment for him — about the closest the armchair warrior ever came to an actual act of violence, one that would have confirmed for him all his worst suspicions about those new left punks who undermined our noble effort in Vietnam.

It’s because the neocons took the new left so personally that the photo is eerily evocative all these years later. The neocons always seemed to be nursing some private humiliation (or, in this case, not so private). Theirs was the aggrieved resentment of people who felt they were the only sane adults in a world of children gone mad. This emotional baggage seemed to underlie their compulsive need to avenge vast imagined wrongs and restore America's honor through the forceful projection of military power. And this was years before 9/11.

Even writers get tired of words

"We talk far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches," said Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the famous German playwright, poet, scientist and all-round polymath. He didn't exactly take his own advice, but you can see how he'd feel that way sometimes. It's important, as you get older, to tune in to your inner kitten.

" How Stupid are the US Media?!?!"

That's what she was asking when I first ran into her. Strangely, it was Blogger that introduced us — what are the odds? I was clicking the NavBar's "Next Blog" button in a moment of boredom, restlessly moving on to the next new thing even before the last new thing finished loading. But her blog stopped me in my tracks. Great writing has a way of doing that. Her post was subtitled, "Open letter to CNN and other mainstream US media outlets," with special reference to Lou Dobbs. Here's just a brief sample:

1. The vast majority of Hispanics/Latinos in the U.S. (75 percent of us) were born and raised here, including many of us who have roots here that predate the arrival of the pilgrims.

8. The US has TWO international borders, not ONE. To date, not a single terrorist has gotten to the US through Mexico; to date, at least two suspected terrorists have arrived here through Canada. In fact, I would not be surprised if, while the media and xenophobes are focused on the Mexican border, terrorists figure out that it might be a good idea to walk over from Vancouver to Seattle for a latte. Oh, and all international anti-American terrorists who have come to the U.S. so far have been *smart* enough to come with passports and other documents supplied to them by the deep pockets of their organizations. Do you really think a terrorist from Saudi Arabia is going to think it's a good idea to swim over the border to Texas or Arizona with a bunch of Mexicans? How stupid is that?!?

16. Shut up about this non-issue and get back to BEING JOURNALISTS, covering the REAL issues, like the illegal war in Iraq and the lies that got us there; the record-setting trade deficit; Bush's bankrupting of America; NSA's illegal wiretapping of American citizens; the fact that our public schools are MORE segregated than they were before Brown vs. the Board of Education; the fact that we as a nation have now slipped to having only the 27th freest press in the world; the Plame leak and the consequences of it being that Americans are much less safe than we were before Cheney and his friends played "revenge"; the disappearance of the American middle class and unions; the sorry state of the FAA; the rapid devaluation of the American dollar on the world market thanks to idiot leaders; the dismantling of the endangered species act by our administration; the rapid and unprecedented rise of a white underclass (the fastest rise in poor whites in American history has occurred under Bush); the enormous and growing gap between rich and poor in America.

Turns out the writer is best-selling Latina novelist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, author of "The Dirty Girls Social Club" — and her blog has been highlighted by Vanity Fair as among the top writer's blogs. I can see why. Her letter really nails Dobbs and the other talking heads who have been whipping up the latest round of racist hysteria about America being overrun from the south. Read it all here, and check out the comments as well. And pass it on.

“Movie laundering” in the name of art?

That’s what Randy Quaid alleges in his lawsuit over “Brokeback Mountain.”

In his lawsuit, Mr. Quaid claims he was tricked into accepting a tiny (unspecified) fee for the part of Joe Aguirre, the rancher who hires the shepherds played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, because the director, Ang Lee, told him the movie was being made on a shoestring budget by Focus, the arthouse division of Universal Studios.
…
Far from being a labor of love, it says, the picture was a "movie laundering" scheme that "in reality, had studio backing and would be exploited using traditional studio marketing and distribution techniques."

Evolutionary no man’s land — pandemic flu and the underreported meme

The deadly influenza pandemic of 1918 seems to have first broken out in the trenches of World War I. We now know it was a bird flu that jumped species. What made it so lethal? Will it happen again? What about today’s outbreak of H5N1 bird flu? And how do wild birds fit into the picture?

The NYT stories this week about the bird flu threat, like most stories in the mainstream media, are long on questions and short on answers. One reason is that they overlook evolution. Neither the NYT story about the 1918 flu pandemic nor their story about the current bird flu outbreak mentions evolutionary biology or natural selection. However an expert quoted in the latter article does attempt to read a chicken’s mind.

"If you're a chicken," Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a recent conference on avian flu, "this is a pandemic. We have to be aware that other species are thinking about this differently."

It’s not clear that other species are thinking about this so much as suffering from it, but that’s a quibble. The real issue here is the underreported meme. Wendy Orent, the author of "Plague,” filled in some of the missing pieces in the LA Times last fall.

Somehow, somewhere, the mysterious gene collection that made up the 1918 killer influenza acquired its adaptive and lethal abilities in people. Most influenza viruses are respiratory and require mobile human hosts, who become viral distribution machines. You might be miserable with the flu, but you're still able to walk around, shake hands, sneeze on your keyboard and talk to colleagues with a halo of virus around you.

But the 1918 pandemic strain was different. According to evolutionary biologist Paul W. Ewald of the University of Louisville, its lethality evolved in the trenches, the trucks, the trains and the hospitals of World War I. Infected soldiers were packed shoulder to shoulder with the healthy, and even the deadliest virus can jump from one host to another. The Western Front was a disease factory, and it manufactured the 1918 flu. The packed chicken farms of Asia are a close parallel. H5N1 evolved the same way as the 1918 flu did in the trenches.

We don't know what will happen to H5N1 as it moves through Europe. It is certain, though, that the longer it lives in wild birds, the more likely it will become mild, at least for its wild-bird hosts. This is what happened to the 1918 flu after soldiers abandoned the Western Front. In just over a year, the virus lost its virulence and wandered the planet as an ordinary flu.

The lesson here is that the flu virus, like all of life, is subject to evolution. Lethal diseases don't fall out of the sky. They evolve in the context of a host and that host's conditions of life. There is no sign, so far, that H5N1 is turning into a human disease — effectively spreading from person to person. Even if it does, it needs a Western Front to become more than ordinary.

The entire article is worth reading. It also sparked a debate that John Hawks covered in his science blog. He’s an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and while this is not his area of research, he does work with population genetics and evolutionary models, and his conclusions are interesting.

I don't have a dog in this hunt, but I notice several points:

1. Almost no mainstream press accounts of the bird flu threat discuss anything about the evolution of influenza. This is probably the most important public impact of evolutionary theory today, but we hear almost nothing of the evolutionary modeling of how the virus may change.

2. Ewald is very well known for studying the evolutionary dynamics of disease. He is making an argument that is sound, as far as the dynamics of selection are concerned. Thus, there are good reasons to think that the worst will not happen, and this is a perspective that has been underplayed.

3. So far, the theory has only been tested by a relatively small number of instances -- there just haven't been so many pandemics that we can infer accurately from past events what the future will be like. It could certainly happen that some new influenza strain could violate the model in some unexpected way, and for this reason governments should play it safe rather than assume that no high-virulence pandemic will emerge.

4. A lot of public health scientists are going to be well-employed for as long as the bird flu remains in the public perception. This doesn't mean that they are wrong to convey alarm, but it does mean that they don't benefit by playing down the threat. It's sort of like NASA and the asteroid impact threat --- partly they are more concerned because they know more about the threat and its terrible effects, partly because it's their job to be concerned.

5. There are a lot of biologists who don't use or understand selection.

What do we talk about when we talk about Wonder Bread?

Nostalgia: "Seeing the cookies and bread on the assembly belts, it was a show," said Adrienne Bailey, who grew up near the factory and is now secretary to the Central Area Neighborhood District Council. "It was a smell blocks before you got there. Oh, I have beautiful childhood memories of Twinkies and pies, and a beautiful big red neon sign, all lit up."

Its genome was sequenced last year, but mysteries remain concerning the bird flu virus of 1918 that killed millions

Jeffrey Taubenberger’s 9-year effort to recover DNA and sequence the genome of the “Spanish Flue” of 1918 originally struck some observers as a quixotic quest. When Taubenberger beat the odds last fall, it was a scientific triumph. It also looked as if it might help solve the mystery of how the virus jumped species and created a human pandemic. It may yet, but so far it hasn’t. Gina Kolata explains in the NYT that we still don’t have a clue.

Another abiding mystery is that neither the 1918 influenza pandemic nor any other human influenza pandemic began with a flu pandemic that killed birds. And, scientists add, if the 1918 pandemic had begun that way, it would have been noticed. Even if the deaths of wild birds went undetected, the deaths of domestic fowl would have been recorded.

Although it would be foolish to become complacent, it does bear repeating — whatever was going on with birds in 1918, they weren’t suffering from their own flu pandemic the way they are now.

Are search engines making students dumber or just making op-ed columnists write dumber columns?

Edward Tenner's NYT Op-Ed — "Searching for Dummies" — was enough to make me want to throw a copy of Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad is Good for You" at him. Johnson may overstate his case a bit, but he's much more on target than Tenner, whose lead itself states, "Talk of decline was old news in academia even in 1898, when traditionalists blasted Harvard for ending its Greek entrance requirement." Indeed. Innovations always threaten the end of the world as we know it. It used to be calculators. Computers. Word processing software. Now it's search engines making students dumber.

A distinguishing feature of writing like this is always the truly lame anecdote that seems to clinch the case, but really does nothing of the sort.

Many students seem to lack the skills to structure their searches so they can find useful information quickly. In 2002, graduate students at Tel Aviv University were asked to find on the Web, with no time limit, a picture of the Mona Lisa; the complete text of either "Robinson Crusoe" or "David Copperfield"; and a recipe for apple pie accompanied by a photograph. Only 15 percent succeeded at all three assignments.

Really? With no time limit only 15% succeeded? This seems to say far more about the researchers and the axe they were grinding than it does about the students. Or an anecdote whose contours have been rounded and polished by too many retellings, like a good fish story.

If Microsoft is talking about combining digital photography with GPS data can consumer implementation be far behind?

Digital photography and GPS data are starting to talk to each other more and more. There’s one pro-level digital camera that already lets you embed GPS data directly into a photo’s EXIF file — the Nikon D2x (and the earlier D1x). Last fall the Microsoft Rich Media Group (RMG) sent nature photographer Ruth Happel out with the camera and a GPS unit for a field test.

“Although my aunt, a dedicated nature photographer and my original photo mentor, always advised me to carefully label my photos, quite a few of my slides have inadequate descriptions. They are now spilling out into photographic entropy, pictures without identity,” Happel explains. She hoped that GPS would help her avoid this problem with her digital photos.

I used the Nikon D2X camera, with a Geko GPS receiver mounted on top, connected with the Red Hen adapter. I would turn the unit on as soon as I went outside, and it would generally take a minute or less to lock up if I was out in the open, longer in a forest. As I observed the screen on the GPS as it locked up, reliability would usually begin at 100 or more feet, but within seconds generally was accurate to within 50 feet. Even when I used the WAAS signals, in my own locations I never achieved greater than 16 foot accuracy, but for my purposes this is sufficient.

In the two weeks I tested it, I took it on nine major hikes in Squak Mountain State Park, each at least one to two hours, near daily smaller hikes and excursions, and a trip to the Woodland Park Zoo. In almost all cases, I found the GPS to be an unobtrusive, but helpful, assistant—reliably recording the location of photographs as I took them. Given the light weight of the unit and its relatively small footprint on the top of the camera, it did not impact my workflow as I took photographs.

Both the GPS and Nikon D2X LCD top control panel display the status of the GPS, and whether it is locked on satellites. I found it would be more useful if the camera viewfinder had an indication of whether the GPS is locked or not when you are shooting a photo, so you could determine it without looking at the top of the camera.

High accuracy GPS signals have only been available since the late 1990’s, and the technology is clearly still evolving. On an all day hike climbing to the top of Squak Mountain, the GPS briefly lost the signal once or twice, but continued working even in dense forest cover. On the remaining eight hikes, there were two days that it took quite a while to lock up, and then lost the signal at least half a dozen times. On the other hikes, it would lose the signal at most once or twice, and there were at least four hikes when it never lost the signal. At the zoo, it was able to pick up the signal outdoors, and also through a roof if it was made of a clear material such as glass or plastic, but not more solid types.

There are several options for enhancing the reliability of GPS. One possibility is using an external antenna. These are available for most units, including the one I used, though I have not tested one of these. There is also a program that allows users to track satellite locations and determine the optimal times for GPS use, and this program could be used to aid in finding optimal shooting times and locations.

The overall impact of these problems on my workflow was minimal. The benefits of using a GPS clearly outweighed the costs for me as primarily a nature photographer. This camera is an ideal solution for me

Happel’s report goes into detail on numerous aspects of GPS photography and its benefits, as well as remaining technical issues (it usually doesn’t work indoors). She urges camera manufacturers to build GPS capability into all cameras, perhaps adding cell phone capability to triangulate position from tower signals where GPS coverage doesn’t reach. She seemed reluctant to give up the equipment after her trial.

The saying goes there is a time and place for everything. With GPS technology, this has two meanings. It is a way to literally know both when and where the picture was taken, two pieces of information that together enable photographers to encode their images with powerful ways of sorting and organizing them. I also feel now is the time and place for GPS to become ubiquitous in a variety of technological devices, and cameras are one great place for them to reside.

After a couple weeks of exploring and experimenting with GPS photography, I am convinced I no longer want to shoot without it. My next camera purchase will be contingent on its GPS capability. Although I would prefer a fully integrated camera that is self contained regarding GPS abilities, I would for the moment accept a compromise just to have the ability to encode GPS. I hope that a demand by photographers for location information will drive camera manufacturers to include it on all future digital cameras.

I’m glad to see Microsoft taking an interest. Who knows? Maybe a future version of Windows will automatically sort your pictures for you by place.

Drop the irony and step away from the kitsch

Meme Watch via Robot Wisdom: Drop the mouse and step away from the PC — Drop the keyboard and step away from the blog — Drop the Twinkie and step away from the vending machine — Drop the trout and step away from the hamster — Drop the pitchfork and step away from the merry-go-round — Drop the snail, and step away from the aquarium — Drop the brush and step away from the bear — Drop the red herrings and step away from the straw man… (Hundreds more here.)