Dowbrigade

A new mass-mailing virus masquerading as
a security patch from Microsoft is on the loose and
anti-virus experts say it has the ability to steal account information
and e-mail server details from infected systems.

The new virus, which originated in Europe, has started
infected e-mail inboxes in the U.S., arriving with a .EXE attachment
with the subject line "Microsoft Internet Update Pack", "Microsoft
Critical Patch" or "Newest Security Update".

from
Internetnews.com

NEW YORK, Sept. 16 /PRNewswire/ — Sure Fit
Inc. announced the winner of its ninth annual Ugly Couch Contest today,
which was chosen by a live studio audience this morning on "Live
with Regis and Kelly." Camille Hempel of Brooklyn, New York, proudly
accepted the $5,000 prize for her three-legged shabby pink velvet loveseat
complete with mud-colored foam seat cushions and cinder block replacement
leg.

from
PRNewswire

NEW
YORK  – US consumers are less informed than they were two years
ago about genetically modified (GM)  foods and their opinions
about safety remain divided, according to a survey.
       
A
survey by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a GM research group in Washington DC, found that 34
percent of survey respondents said they had heard “a great deal” or
“some” about GM foods, compared with 44 percent in 2001.

While the research group estimates that 70-75 percent of processed
foods in grocery stores contain GM products, 58 percent of people
polled said they did not think they had eaten GM foods.

from AFP

Tractors destroy a genetically modified Colza (rapeseed) field.

We
Mac users rarely get to feel jealous of our Wintel colleagues, but are
big enough to admit it when we do. Up until about ten minutes ago my
giddy exuberance over
blogging was naggingly tempered by the inability of my browser of
choice (Safari) to utilze or even display the extremely
cool  formatting pallette
which appears above the text entry window in the
“Create  News Item” page of Manila. Manila, of course, is the blogging software of choice at the Berkman  Center, our host, and the tool with which Dowbrigade is created.

Up
until now, in order to create tables or links, insert graphics,
arrange  the elements of a posting and change text attributes like
size and color,   I needed to create my posts in Dreamweaver
MX and then copy and past  the html into the more limited version
of the page displayed by Safari,  IE or Navigator on the Mac.

Then last night Dave Winer,
the ultimate Manila resource person, informed me that the tags that
allow the pallette to appear ARE supported by Mozilla, so I fired up a
recent implementation  of the open-source browser called Firebird,   and Voila! Instant formatting!

 It will take me a while to get used to the new interface
and see how far I can take it. I can still use Safari, which I love for
its speed, stability and tabbed browsing. Not often one can have one’s
cake and  eat it too. Now, for being smug, it won’t
work.

endnote: As predicted, my premature
self-congratulations proved, well, 
premature.  I will keep experimenting to find the optimal blend of
tools and styles.

Scientists
have found fossils of what they say is the largest rodent that ever lived,
a nine-foot-long, buffalo-sized creature with a long tail and powerful
teeth that foraged along the riverbanks of Venezuela about 8 million years
ago.

Scientists said Phoberomys pattersoni probably weighed up to 1,545 pounds,
about 10 times the size of today’s largest rodent, the South American capybara,
and nearly 2,500 times bigger than a 10-ounce rat.

For millions of years, anatomist John Fleagle of New York’s Stony Brook
University said, South America was an "island
continent" where "all sorts of strange creatures developed in
isolation."

And unlike other continents, where rodents competed for food and habitat
with other small, aggressive mammals, South America offered few rivals,
so rodents "went berserk," he said.

from the Washington Post

Naked bodies are the canvases in new exhibition

An art exhibition featuring pictures painted on naked
bodies instead of canvases has opened in Chile.

The Party of the Body exhibition features thousands of
pictures of painted naked bodies.

Most of the pictures have been blown
up into 10ft high images and some are projected onto giant screens.

The exhibition, entirely by Latin American artists, is being shown
in a circus tent in Santiago, reports Las Ultimas Noticias.
One of the artists, Antonio Becerro, said: "This exhibition shows
bodies that are not defined by meat. Here they portrait metaphoric ideas."

from Ananova

As I sat
the other night blogging, writing brief posts in between paying bills
and correcting student essays, with a baseball game on the potable TV
with the sound turned down and the legendary lost King Crimson album
on the speakers, Norma Yvone wanted to have a conversation.  Fine.  As
a progressive male, I fully accept the desirability of regular and open
communication between partners in a relationship. The problem was she
expected me to stop doing the other things in order to devote my undivided
attention to our conversation.

“You can’t pay attention to more than one thing at a time. When you
try to do so many things at once you end up doing all of them badly.  That’s
why you do such a bad job vacuuming while you watch sports on TV.”

Be that as it may, I am utterly certain that my brain works BETTER when
it is working on several, or even many, things at once.  Concentrating
on just one thing may work fine for the Dalai Lama, but in the real world
it is not behavior geared to survival.

Since reading John Lilly’s seminal
1967 paper “Programming
and Meta programming in the Human Biocomputer” in college I have been
interested in analogies between computers and the human brain. Whatever
version of system software I am currently using, it was designed for multi-processing.
On the surface, I am fully aware of my surroundings and capable of seemingly
intelligent interaction with other people.  But this occupies only
a small percentage of my available processing power.

Part of my mind, for example, is at all times thinking about my next
meal.  It may be planning it, or imagining it, or actively lobbying
for pursuing it.  Another part is thinking about why no food is
colored blue, and if it is true that an experiment proved that if you
give people perfectly healthy food in unusual or unexpected colors they will get sick.

While driving, I get my best ideas for blogging.  I have narrowly
avoided many accidents as I try to just notes on the backs of envelopes
or the margins of periodicals with one hand and half an eye on the road.  But
part of my mind, perhaps due to my felonious past, is always scanning
the horizon for cops (and not just when driving, this is a sixth
sense one never loses).  Another part is continually composing and
erasing justifications and explanations to be used in case of an accident
that (hopefully) never happens.  On the theory that if it DOES happen
you better have your story ready because in all the excitement you’ll
never be able to improvise.

In that vein, a substantial part of my brain, which in fact I would
seriously like to reduce, is constantly thinking of snappy comebacks
and rapier-like repartee to be used in conversations that have already
taken
place. Things I SHOULD have said.  Conversely, I would like to increase
that portion of my brain working on making and accumulating money. Some
people’s brains seem to do this almost exclusively.

Not to mention Sex.  If I am not playing some stupid mental game
like “The ten hottest babes in the Supermarket…” then at least some part
of my brain is thinking about sex with women I know, sex with women I
don’t know, sex with fictional women from literature, etc.

And
this entire phantasmagoric mental cacography has a soundtrack, composed
mostly of classic rock and industrial house imperfectly remembered and
mushed together as if by a demented DJ high on some psychedelic downer.

So don’t tell me to do one thing at a time, Norma Yvone.  Now
please go over one more time everything you just said, I’m not sure I
really understand.  Of course, I was LISTENING. I just need to hear
it again to decide what I really think…