Can you copyright yoga sequences?

Bikram Choudhury has developed a style of yoga that involves a sequence of classical positions performed in a heated studio. He has published a book and now wants to copyright not only the book but the yoga sequence itself. A group of yoga teachers are challenging the copyright claims. Here is a report from the Chicago Tribune

Choudhury's yoga is made up of a sequence of 26 postures (each of which is performed twice during a single class) and two breathing exercises. These postures are culled from 84 classical postures and more than 10,000 combinations. …

Hollander [Choudhury's lawyer] contends that yoga is no different from music or any other form of expression.

'There's nothing special about yoga which should make it special or in some way removed from copyright law,' she said. 'In my view it is just a form of expression that has public domain elements to it.'

That view is a stretch to some yoga enthusiasts. 'To say that, basically, a tradition of working with the body can be somebody's intellectual property — no matter how they put them together — seems pretty bizarre,' said Deborah Willoughby, founding editor of Yoga International, a magazine that focuses on the spiritual aspects of yoga. 'It's a violation of the spirit of yoga.'

Copyright law does not extend to an idea or process; it only addresses the way an idea is actually expressed. That means a book, video or photograph can be copyrighted, but teaching a recipe written in a cookbook, for example, could not. [I think that this is a key point. rja]

Athletic movements, such as a basketball star's signature slam-dunk, cannot be copyrighted because sports games are unscripted and have unanticipated occurrences.

'I'm not aware of anyone who has successfully done what Bikram is trying to do,' said Netanel, who has discussed the case in his law classes. 'Which is, through the guise of copyrighting photographs or descriptions of an exercise method, to control the practice of yoga.'

Global warming is now apparently inevitable.

Scientific American reports on a new study that concludes that

even if greenhouse gas levels had stabilized five years ago, global temperatures would still increase by about half a degree by the end of the century and sea level would rise some 11 centimeters.

Typical Bush Tactics

The Washington Post repports that

Three Denver residents yesterday charged that they were forcibly removed from one of President Bush's town meetings on Social Security because they displayed a bumper sticker on their car condemning the administration's Middle East policies.

The three, all self-described progressives who oppose Bush's Social Security plan, said an unidentified official at an event in Denver last week forced them to leave before the president started to speak, even though they had done nothing disruptive, said their attorney, Dan Recht. …

Scott McClellan, Bush's press secretary, said it was a volunteer who asked them to leave "out of concern they might try to disrupt the event."

This is not the first time people have complained about heavy-handed monitoring of who can attend … Bush's events promoting his Social Security plan. A newspaper in Fargo, N.D., reported that when Bush came to the city on Feb. 3, more than 40 residents were barred from attending the event. …

In this case, Alex Young, 25; Karen Bauer, 38; and Leslie Weise, 39, said they were forced out even though they said nothing and did not sport T-shirts or signs criticizing the president or his policies. …

The three were invited to the event by Rep. Bob Beauprez (R-Colo.). Jordan Stoick, spokesman for Beauprez, said the congressman's office distributed the tickets at the behest of the White House …

"When you are punished by not being allowed to listen to your president speak because of speech you have on your bumper sticker, that is a classic First Amendment issue." [said Recht.]

Should Yoga Be Free (Like Speech)?

Bikram Choudhury, an LA (really Beverly Hills) based yoga teacher has developed a sequence of traditional yoga positions that his students follow in heated yoga studios. He wrote a book about it, and he now claims copyright protection. A group of yoga teachers, who call themselves Open Source Yoga Unity (OSYU), are challenging his copyright claims. Here's a story from CIO Insight, where I first saw the issue.

The key question raised by OSYU's lawsuit is whether Choudhury 'can control another person's practice of yoga or teaching of yoga just because he wrote a book about it,' Harrison said. Choudhury can't claim any of his positions are unique because they have been used for thousands of years, he said.

Choudhury's attempt to copyright yoga positions would be like the New York Yankees inventing a new pitching style and trying to copyright it to prevent all other pitchers or baseball teams from using it. Such ideas 'start spinning into the absurd,' and no court would uphold such claims, Harrison said.
The closest legal parallel to what Choudhury is attempting would be a someone who copyrighted a dance choreography, Harrison suggested.

Dance choreography could be copyrighted, But dance 'is expressive art. [Yoga] is exercise not expression. It is not saying anything,' Harrison said. Therefore it can't be copyrighted under the law, he said.

What it boils down to, Harrison said, is that Choudhury has attempted to copyright a process. 'You can't copyright a process and yoga is exercise -- a process of conditioning the human body,' Harrison. People can apply to get a patent for a process, but 'Choudhury hasn't tried to patent anything.'
The situation has also been likened to an author publishing and copyrighting a cookbook, Harrison said. 'You can copyright a cookbook, but you can't keep someone from teaching cooking,' Harrison said.
OSYU members just want to do what they have always done, to freely practice and teach yoga as it has been taught since ancient times, Harrison said.

Here's more from The Chicago Tribune

Hollander [Choudhury's lawyer]contends that yoga is no different from music or any other form of expression.

'There's nothing special about yoga which should make it special or in some way removed from copyright law,' she said. 'In my view it is just a form of expression that has public domain elements to it.'

That view is a stretch to some yoga enthusiasts. 'To say that, basically, a tradition of working with the body can be somebody's intellectual property — no matter how they put them together — seems pretty bizarre,' said Deborah Willoughby, founding editor of Yoga International, a magazine that focuses on the spiritual aspects of yoga. 'It's a violation of the spirit of yoga.'

Copyright law does not extend to an idea or process; it only addresses the way an idea is actually expressed. That means a book, video or photograph can be copyrighted, but teaching a recipe written in a cookbook, for example, could not. [This seems to me to be a key distinction. rja]

Athletic movements, such as a basketball star's signature slam-dunk, cannot be copyrighted because sports games are unscripted and have unanticipated occurrences.

'I'm not aware of anyone who has successfully done what Bikram is trying to do,' said Netanel, who has discussed the case in his law classes. 'Which is, through the guise of copyrighting photographs or descriptions of an exercise method, to control the practice of yoga.'

Should Yoga Be Free (Like Speech)?

Bikram Choudhury, an LA (realkly Beverly Hills) based yoga teacher has developed a sequence of traditional yoga positions that his students follow in heated yoga studios. He wrote a book about it, and he now claims copyright protection. A group of yoga teachers, who call themselves Open Source Yoga Unity (OSYU), are challenging his copyright claims. Here's a story from CIO Insight, where I first saw the issue.

The key question raised by OSYU's lawsuit is whether Choudhury 'can control another person's practice of yoga or teaching of yoga just because he wrote a book about it,' Harrison said. Choudhury can't claim any of his positions are unique because they have been used for thousands of years, he said.

Choudhury's attempt to copyright yoga positions would be like the New York Yankees inventing a new pitching style and trying to copyright it to prevent all other pitchers or baseball teams from using it. Such ideas 'start spinning into the absurd,' and no court would uphold such claims, Harrison said.
The closest legal parallel to what Choudhury is attempting would be a someone who copyrighted a dance choreography, Harrison suggested.

Dance choreography could be copyrighted, But dance 'is expressive art. [Yoga] is exercise not expression. It is not saying anything,' Harrison said. Therefore it can't be copyrighted under the law, he said.

What it boils down to, Harrison said, is that Choudhury has attempted to copyright a process. 'You can't copyright a process and yoga is exercise -- a process of conditioning the human body,' Harrison. People can apply to get a patent for a process, but 'Choudhury hasn't tried to patent anything.'
The situation has also been likened to an author publishing and copyrighting a cookbook, Harrison said. 'You can copyright a cookbook, but you can't keep someone from teaching cooking,' Harrison said.
OSYU members just want to do what they have always done, to freely practice and teach yoga as it has been taught since ancient times, Harrison said.

Here's more from The Chicago Tribune

Hollander [Choudhury's lawyer]contends that yoga is no different from music or any other form of expression.

'There's nothing special about yoga which should make it special or in some way removed from copyright law,' she said. 'In my view it is just a form of expression that has public domain elements to it.'

That view is a stretch to some yoga enthusiasts. 'To say that, basically, a tradition of working with the body can be somebody's intellectual property — no matter how they put them together — seems pretty bizarre,' said Deborah Willoughby, founding editor of Yoga International, a magazine that focuses on the spiritual aspects of yoga. 'It's a violation of the spirit of yoga.'

Copyright law does not extend to an idea or process; it only addresses the way an idea is actually expressed. That means a book, video or photograph can be copyrighted, but teaching a recipe written in a cookbook, for example, could not. [This seems to me to be a key distinction. rja]

Athletic movements, such as a basketball star's signature slam-dunk, cannot be copyrighted because sports games are unscripted and have unanticipated occurrences.

'I'm not aware of anyone who has successfully done what Bikram is trying to do,' said Netanel, who has discussed the case in his law classes. 'Which is, through the guise of copyrighting photographs or descriptions of an exercise method, to control the practice of yoga.'

Where Faith Thrives

Nicholas Kristof has an amazing column about trends in Christianity.

So with Easter approaching, here I am in the heart of Christendom.

That's right - Africa. …

On Easter, more Anglicans will attend church in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda - each - than Anglicans and Episcopalians together will attend services in Britain, Canada and the U.S. combined.

More Roman Catholics will celebrate Easter Mass in the Philippines than in any European country. The largest church in the world is in South Korea. And more Christians will probably attend Easter services in China than in all of Europe together.

In short, for the first time since it began two millenniums ago, Christianity is no longer "Western" in any very meaningful sense. …

This shift could be just beginning. David Lyle Jeffrey of Baylor University sees some parallels between China today and the early Roman empire. He wonders aloud whether a Chinese Constantine will come along and convert to Christianity.

Chairman Mao largely destroyed traditional Chinese religions, yet Communism has died as a replacement faith and left a vacuum. "Among those disappointed true-believer Marxists, it may well be that Marxism has served as a kind of John the Baptist to the rapid emergence of Christianity among Chinese intellectuals," Professor Jeffrey said. Indeed, it seems possible to me that in a few decades, China could be a largely Christian nation. …

People in this New Christendom are so zealous about their faith that I worry about the risk of new religious wars. In Africa, Christianity and Islam are competing furiously for converts, and in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and especially Sudan, the competition has sometimes led to violent clashes.

"Islam is a threat that is coming," the Rev. William Dennis McDonald, a Pentecostal minister in Zambia, warned me. He is organizing "operation checkmate" to boost Christianity and contain Islam in eastern Zambia.

The denominations gaining ground tend to be evangelical and especially Pentecostal; it's the churches with the strictest demands, like giving up drinking, that are flourishing.

All this is changing the character of global Christianity, making it more socially conservative. For example, African churches are often more hostile to gays than mainline American churches. The rise of the Christian right in the U.S. is finding some echoes in other parts of the world. …

To borrow a phrase from the community of faith, Heaven help us.

Information Dominance Center

I just came across a web page describing the Army's Information Dominance Center. It was too good not to copy.

The Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) Information Dominance Center (IDC), a Headquarters Department of the Army operations support activity assigned to the Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), provides multi-disciplinary Information Operations (IO) support to the U.S. Army's component and major commands. LIWA/IDC has broad authority to coordinate IO topics and establish contact with Army organizations, USN, USAF, and JCS IO Centers, and with DoD and National Agency IO elements.

Acting as an operations center, an intelligence analysis center, and a communications hub, the LIWA Information Dominance Center is the focal point of all LIWA activities in support of the Army and of JTF-CND. LIWA teams deployed worldwide are continuously linked to the IDC via a number of communications means: common user circuits, strategic communications links, and dedicated satellite terminals. The IOC performs as a typical command operations center, maintaining the status of IO events worldwide, and orchestrating the activities of LIWA's deployed teams and internal supporting activities.

As an analysis center, the IDC provides dedicated support to LIWA's deployed teams and the commands they serve. Tailored analytical products are generated, frequently on a quick-response basis, to meet a deployed team's immediate needs. The IDC also monitors potential trouble spots worldwide, preparing to support contingency operations with IO-related products should the need arise. The IDC uses high-capacity communications links to access selected information from a number of databases maintained by a number of other commands, agencies, and organizations. In addition to providing IO support to the operations process, the IDC provides an advanced environment to leverage new technologies and explore emerging concepts. The IDC is also prepared to provide support to exercises.

The IDC's communications capability serves both operational and analytical functions by using a variety of links to supported commands and deployed LIWA teams. The IDC also has access to DOD and non-DOD Government organizations participating in IO at the National level, and exchanges information with intelligence organizations possessing IO information and subject matter expertise. Collectively, the ability to communicate worldwide permits the small number of analysts resident in the IDC to provide tailored assessments rapidly and efficiently. Finally, in support of the Army Computer Emergency Response Team (ACERT), the IDC uses communications to flash computer intrusion alerts and countermeasures across the Army.

Faith

The previous posting led me to think about faith. What does it mean, and what are its implications? According to Merriam-Webster Online, faith is defined as follows.

1 a : allegiance to duty or a person : LOYALTY b (1) : fidelity to one's promises (2) : sincerity of intentions

2 a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust

3 : something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs

In addition, in the synonyms section under belief, faith is distinguished in that it

almost always implies certitude even where there is no evidence or proof .

The lack of evidence (and perhaps even the impossibility of ever finding evidence) seems to me to be a central element of what people mean by faith, especially in a religious context. (This excludes the use of the term in a context such as "I have faith that my friend will pick me up at the airport.")

If science-based beliefs are based on evidence, faith-based beliefs must necessarily be about a domain about which evidence cannot be gathered. That would suggest that faith-based beliefs are necessarily irrelevant to the world. If there were any relevance, any way in which faith-based beliefs could be tested, then by definition, they would no longer be faith-based.

When I started this posting, I expected to go on longer. But this immediate and simple conclusion seems to say everything. How would the faith-based community respond?

One might point to evidence, for example, that people with religious beliefs tend to live longer and have happier lives. But that isn't about faith, it is about psychology. It is about how one's beliefs affects one's life, not about the truth or falsity of the beliefs themselves. There are lots of ways in which what one thinks affects how one feels. People under hypnosis, for example, seem capable of doing things that they would not ordinarily be able to do.

But faith as generally understood involves predicates that are expressed as if they were either true or false, i.e., statements about something. And yet the something about which faith-based statements refer must, as we said, be beyond evidence.

It may be that believing a statement that can't be tested may make one happier. But would the faith-based community want think of itself primarily as offering a self-help system? I doubt it. Besides there are many self-help systems (e.g., clinical psychology, Buddhist meditation) that provide similar results in a more direct way and without requiring untestable beliefs.

My own prejudice, as you can probably tell, is quite anti-faith. It's important to me to have some ground (or at least believe that there some ground can be established) for what I believe. It seems strange even to have to say that in the 21^st century. But here we are, and I'm at a loss to understand about how people manage to live with beliefs that they know are beyond reality.

Perhaps the faith-based will argue that the statements they believe will be tested but only after one's death. I'm not sure what to say about that. Suppose someone said that 1,000 years from now, civilization will be so advanced that people will be able to reconstruct every human being whose DNA is available. Not only will they will do that, but through brain scans, they will examine the collective memory of all those people and determine what sorts of lives each of us has lived. Based on those results, we will each be punished or rewarded.

I'm willing to believe that the technology to achieve that may be possible — although since brains depend on more than DNA actually reconstructing brains seems a bit far-fetched. But let's assume it could be done. Then what?

First of all, I would have a hard time believing that 1,000 years from now anyone would care enough to reconstruct all previously living human beings. Why bother? But even more relevant, I doubt that it would change my life. Believing something like that seems so far removed from reality that it might as well be fantasy.

But is that the argument? Are faith-based beliefs held because those who believe them expect them to be relevant at some time in the future? If so, it makes a bit more sense to me. But as Ian McEwan said in his answer to "What do you believe that can't be proven?" I believe that my life will end with my death. Is that also a matter of faith? Somehow it seems less a matter of faith because it isn't something that I worry about — just as I don't worry about the possibility that the other side of the moon, which we can't see, may be a base for alien invaders who are planning to attack us. Believing that life ends with death seems more like a skeptical response to those who claim it doesn't in much the same way as believing that the other side of the moon does not host enemy aliens is a skeptical response to anyone who claims it does.

After all, the paranoid and the schizophrenic believe all sorts of things. Denying the reality of their claims is not on an equal footing with their beliefs.

Faith-based science

In his "What's New" this week, Bob Park talks about the effects of a faith-based view of the world on public entertainment and education.

The 2003 IMAX film 'Volcanoes of the Deep Sea,' sponsored by NSF and Rutgers, would seem to be just the sort of documentary that science centers thrive on. Not exactly. It was turned down by a dozen Science Centers, mostly in the South, because of a few brief references to evolution. There goes the profit margin. The result is that IMAX films just aren't made if the science might offend the religious right. It's worse in schools. Even if there is no prohibition on teaching evolution, teachers leave it out rather than listen to all the complaints. In the 1925 Scopes trial, Clarence Darrow said, 'John Scopes isn't on trial, civilization is on trial.' It still is. And it's losing.

Another answer to: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

This is Ian McEwan's answer.

What I believe but cannot prove is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death. I exclude the fact that I will linger, fadingly, in the thoughts of others, or that aspects of my consciousness will survive in writing, or in the positioning of a planted tree or a dent in my old car. I suspect that many contributors to Edge will take this premise as a given—true but not significant. However, it divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons, by those who are certain that there is a life, a better, more important life, elsewhere. That this span is brief, that consciousness is an accidental gift of blind processes, makes our existence all the more precious and our responsibilities for it all the more profound.

I'm surprised that no one else commented on this—either affirmatively or negatively. When my kids were little and asked about death—and the possibility of life afterwards—I would tell them that death is like the end of a movie: when one's life is over, it's over. Just as the lives of movie characters don't continue after we leave the theater, ours don't continue after we die. They didn't like that answer.

The "sanctity of marriage" is suddenly negotiable

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate says

Of all the ironies at the heart of the Terri Schiavo case … the most astonishing is this: Congressional Republicans who have staked their careers and the last election on the "sanctity of marriage" have turned this case into a mockery of that very institution. …

There was and is one principal issue to be decided in this case and that is, what would Terri Schiavo have wanted for herself had she foreseen an irreversible 15-year vegetative condition in her future? Courts have been deciding these issues for decades now, and they have done so by triangulating back not from the federal Constitution but from the implicit respect we have always had for the compact between people who marry.

The reasons given by the Rick Santorums of the world for limiting marriage to men and women always stress that marriage is different, sacred, special. And that's true; it's unlike any other bond under the law. Most states agree, which is why in these invariably awful substituted-judgment cases, courts generally defer to the spouse—who is presumed to best know what the incapacitated patient would have wanted. …

This case is about a reluctant state court making its best effort to unearth an individual's most private wishes and using the intimate relationship with her spouse in order to do so. Yet Schiavo's family—the Schindlers—her governor, and Congress have totally disregarded these presumptions about the sanctity of marriage. To them, the marriage is immaterial.

Why? Because they don't like her husband? Because they don't like that he has a girlfriend? Or because they don't like the decision he made? "I don't know what transpired between Terri and her husband. All I know is Terri is alive. ... Unless she has specifically written instructions in her hand, with her signature, I don't care what her husband says," snarled House Majority Leader Tom DeLay the other day. …

Without any strong federal constitutional claims on which to rest, the Schindlers come back to the same old argument they have been making for years: They should have guardianship over Terri instead of Michael. But the law disagrees. The law says that when one marries one takes on a whole host of legal rights and duties that trump your parents' wishes. Marriage is a sacred and intimate promise. And the very people who keep preaching about the sanctity of marriage when defending it from gay gatecrashers used to believe this more than anyone.

There is just no evidence that Michael Schiavo is an unfit guardian. Sure, it would make for a better Harlequin Romance if he'd spent decades pining alone at his wife's bedside; if he hadn't found himself a girlfriend and some kids. But he and Terri were—and still are—married, and the law has always treated that bond as sacred: serious, inviolate, till-death-do-us-part serious, until the parties themselves decide otherwise. Tom DeLay may not care what Terri Schiavo's husband says. But I'd bet Terri Schiavo would have.

Do Bush and friends argue that it's not about who should be the guardian but about whether anyone in a persistent vegetative state should be taken off feeding tubes? I haven't heard that argument. The legislation passed in Congress didn't go that far. The Florida senate just refused to pass a law to that effect. So perhaps Dahlia Lithwick is correct: this is about who should be the guardian and make the decision in this case.

On the other hand, Harriet McBryde Johnson makes a good case that this is not about the right to die, that conscious or not, Terry Shiavo is alive and should not be put to death, which is what she sees happening. She writes

• Ms. Schiavo is not terminally ill. She has lived in her current condition for 15 years. This is not about end-of-life decision-making. The question is whether she should be killed by starvation and dehydration.
  
  
• Ms. Schiavo is not dependent on life support. Her lungs, kidneys, heart, and digestive systems work fine. Just as she uses a wheelchair for mobility, she uses a tube for eating and drinking. Feeding Ms. Schiavo is not difficult, painful, or in any way heroic. Feeding tubes are a very simple piece of adaptive equipment, and the fact that Ms. Schiavo eats through a tube should have nothing to do with whether she should live or die.
  
  
• This is not a case about a patient's right to refuse treatment. I don't see eating and drinking as "treatment," …
  
  
• [I]f we assume that those who would authorize her death are correct, Ms. Schiavo is completely unaware of her situation and therefore incapable of suffering physically or emotionally. Her death thus can't be justified for relieving her suffering.

This is a very interesting argument. It hinges on whether we see Terri Schiavo as a living human being even though, let's presume, she is not (and never will be) capable of thinking, feeling, or having consciousness. Should a non-sentient but physiologically functioning human body be granted the rights of a human being? Ms. Johnson says that such a body should.

When put in those terms, I lean toward the negative. But the question does require that we spend more time thinking about what we mean by a human being and under what conditions the rights and privileges of a human being should be conferred (and withdrawn).

The American way to run a war

Thomas Friedman has supported the war in Iraq on the grounds that it has the potential to change the Middle East. In his column today, though, he contrasts the Bush approach to prisoners to that of George Washington.

[According to a March 16 report by Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt] at least 26 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 …

Only one of the deaths occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, … "showing how broadly the most violent abuses extended beyond those prison walls and contradicting early impressions that the wrongdoing was confined to a handful of members of the military police on the prison's night shift." …

The fact that Congress has just shrugged this off, and no senior official or officer has been fired, is a travesty. This administration is for "ownership" of everything except responsibility. …

Friedman contrasts this with the treatment our revolutionary army gave its prisoners. He quotes from a book by Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer.

"Americans were outraged when quarter was denied to their soldiers." In one egregious incident, at the battle at Drake's Farm, British troops murdered all seven of Washington's soldiers who had surrendered, crushing their brains with muskets. …

Washington ordered that Hessian captives would be treated as human beings with the same rights of humanity for which Americans were striving. The Hessians ... were amazed to be treated with decency and even kindness. At first they could not understand it." The same policy was extended to British prisoners.

In concluding his book, Mr. Fischer wrote lines that President Bush would do well to ponder: George Washington and the American soldiers and civilians fighting alongside him in the New Jersey campaign not only reversed the momentum of a bitter war, but they did so by choosing "a policy of humanity that aligned the conduct of the war with the values of the Revolution. [emphasis added] They set a high example, and we have much to learn from them."

Terri Schiavo

I asked a friend his opinion about the Terri Schiavo case. Here, in part, is what he said.

Now that I'm back in the U.S., I've gotten a look at the Terri Schiavo media frenzy, as (with lumps in their throats and their skulls) they reverently narrate Bush flying in to sit a pious vigil by the phone so he could sign today an emergency bill overruling the husband's decision to let her die after 15 years of futile misery, as she apparently had said she would wish. …

Isn't anybody talking about the fact the Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly authorized hospitals to remove life support if the patient ran out of money to pay them and showed no prospect of recovery - even if the patient's entire family's wanted to "choose life"? Just this week, a 6-month-old African-American baby (whose mother insists the baby was active and responsive, but we'll never know because the hospital refused her pleas to let the media see the baby) had his tubes removed and died under that law.

It certainly isn't even mentioned in any of the few big-media summaries I've just seen.

These same Republicans are also trying to cut off both the malpractice claims that have paid for keeping Schiavo alive so far, and the Medicaid that keeps many other, less severely damaged patients alive.

I would love it if a few more (as Bush would call them) "radical judges" rule in favor of Terri's husband—as the first Federal judge to hear the case did earlier today. How many has it been so far? I think I heard a radio report saying that 13 judges have ruled for the husband. Perhaps Bush will have to eliminate the entire judicial branch. Too much independence and respect for the law.

What I don't get is why either side is so intensely interested. As yet another friend told me, if the Christian right believes in an immortal soul, then death is not so terrible. Wouldn't being in heaven be better than continuing in a persistent vegetative state? Why not let her go?

On the other hand, why does the husband care so much? If he thinks of Terri as essentially dead, then if it makes her family happy to keep her fed, why not? After all, it isn't as if she is suffering or that she has an unacceptable quality of life. She has no life at all. Does he think she would really object to that?

At the level of the immediate objective issues (in contrast to the political circus it has become) the whole thing has me baffled.

A Talk with Armand Leroi

Edge almost always has interesting stuff. This time it's extracts from a talk with Armand Leroi, "a Reader in Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College, London. He is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, winner of The Guardian First Book Award, 2004.
." Edge 156

Cyclopia is caused by a deficiency in a gene called Sonic hedgehog. Sonic hedgehog is named after a fruit fly gene which when mutated causes bristles to sprout all over the fruit fly larva, hence 'hedgehog'. When the gene was found in mammals, some wit called it Sonic hedgehog after the video game character. If you get rid of this gene, bad things happen. You lose your arms beneath the elbow and legs beneath the knee. The face collapses in on itself, such that you get a single eye in the middle of the forehead and the rest of the face collapses into a long, trunk-like proboscis. The forebrain, which is normally divided such that we have a left and a right brain—the left and right cerebral hemispheres—is fused into a single unitary structure. Indeed the technical name for this syndrome is called Holoprosencephaly. …

[T]hese days anthropologists and geneticists overwhelmingly emphasise the similarities among people from different parts of the world at the expense of the differences. From a political point of view I have no doubt that's a fine thing. But I suggest that it's time that we grew up. I would like to suggest that actually by emphasizing the similarities but ignoring the differences, we are turning away from one of the most beautiful problems that modern biology has left: namely, what is the genetic basis of the normal variety of differences between us? What gives a Han Chinese child the curve of her eye? The curve I read once described by an eminent Sinologist as the purest of all curves. What is the source of that curve? And what gives a Solomon Islander his black-verging-on-purple skin? Or what makes red hair?

Actually, the last is the one thing we do know. It turns out that red hair is due to a mutation in a gene called MC1R, melanocortin receptor 1, which controls the production of p eumelanin, black pigment, versus red pigment, phaeomelanin. Rather marvellously, it also turns out that mutations in MCIR also cause red hair in red setters, Scottish cattle, and red foxes. But we don't know what causes brown eyes versus blue eyes versus green eyes. We know very little about the variation in normal human height. We don't know why some girls have big breasts and some of them have small breasts. These are important questions — or at least jolly interesting ones—and we just don't know their answers.

The reason I love the problem of normal human variety is because, almost uniquely among modern scientific problems, it is a problem that we can apprehend as we walk down the street. We live in an age now where the deepest scientific problems are buried away from our immediate perception. They concern the origin of the universe. They concern the relationships of subatomic particles. They concern the nature and structure of the human genome. Nobody can see these things without large bits of expensive equipment. But when I consider the problem of human variety I feel as Aristotle must have felt when he first walked down to the shore at Lesvos for the first time. The world is new again. What is more, it is a problem that we can now solve, a question we can now answer. And I think we should.

Of course, there will be people who object. There will be people who will say that this is a revival of racial science. Perhaps so. I would argue, however, that even if this is a revival of racial science, we should engage in it for it does not follow that it is a revival of racist science. Indeed, I would argue, that it is just the opposite. How shall I put it? If you want to prove, what most of us believe, that skin colour does not give the measure of a man, that it tells nothing about his abilities or temperament—then surely the best way is to learn about the genetics of skin colour and the genetics of cognitive ability and demonstrate that they have nothing to do with each other?

Additive Might Fight Fast-Food Fat

We've been away on vaction. We just returned last weekend and have been digging out from the pile of mail and email and attending to other tasks ever since.

This seems like an appropriate re-entry posting for a return to the 21^st century in America.

Scientific American reports

Wallace H. Yokoyama of the United States Department of Agriculture and his colleagues fed a group of hamsters a diet with a fat content similar to that of typical American fast food--that is, with about 38 percent of its calories derived from fat--for four weeks. A second group of animals ate a low-fat diet with 11 percent of the total calories coming from fat. At the end of the study period, the high-fat eaters developed insulin resistance--a precursor to diabetes--whereas the control animals did not. The initial results corroborated previous findings in similar studies. But when the scientists repeated the experiment with the addition of a cellulose derivative known as hydroxypropylmethylcellulose (HPMC) to the high-fat food, the animals on that diet did not develop insulin resistance.

HPMC is already used as a food additive to modify the texture of items such as fillings, sauces and glazes. To achieve similar fat-fighting results in humans, much larger amounts (about five grams per serving) would be required, the scientists propose. The mechanism for HPMC's beneficial effects remains unclear, although Yokoyama posits that the compound works to slow down the absorption of fat by the digestive system.

Can you trust your internal moral sense?

I think so. I think that ultimately, that's all we have. Of course, we also have to think about things. But one's first reaction will be emotional. Yet sometimes it doesn't work. Here is a paragraph from William Saletan's article about William Hurlbut's proposal to sidestep the moral issues regarding stem cells by developing not-quite-human "biological artifacts." The paragraph describes how some members of the commission reacted to the proposal. (This is the article I discussed below in "Is it alright to create and destroy something almost human?".)

It's 'an attempt at a human that didn't go right,' Krauthammer ventures. 'I'm not sure we ought to want to reproduce that.' He alludes to an essay by council chairman Leon Kass: 'It could be what Leon calls sort of the wisdom of revulsion.' ('Repugnance,' Kass whispers, correcting him.) George says weirdness and repugnance aren't moral problems, but Krauthammer adds, 'Repugnant, weird, and somewhat human. If it's just repugnant and weird, it's just an aesthetic issue. If it's somewhat human, it's a moral issue.'

And here is an excerpt from Nicholas Kristof's Homegrown Osamas article from today's NY Times.

I interviewed Mr. Hale in 2002 because I had heard that he was becoming a key figure in America's hate community, recruiting followers with a savvy high-tech marketing machine. Over lunch in East Peoria, Ill., he described how as a schoolboy he had become a racist after seeing white girls kissing black boys.

'I felt nauseous,' he told me earnestly..

Another example: medical students famously become nauseous when first cutting into a human body. The lesson: even though disgust is apparently one of our basic built-in emotions (see, for example, Some notes on emotion, `east and west'), we can't always trust our emotional reactions.

"Is it alright to create and destroy something almost human?"

William Saletan discusses last Friday's meeting of the President's Council on Bioethics.

Council member Bill Hurlbut, a Stanford biologist, wants to end-run the moral debate over stem cells. He proposes to follow the recipe for human cloning—put the nucleus of a body cell into a gutted egg cell—but turn off a crucial gene so that the resulting 'biological artifact' produces stem cells without organizing itself into an embryo. According to a draft white paper prepared by council staff, 'Several scientists have indicated that they believe [the plan] can easily be made to work, and a few are apparently ready to try it out in non-human animals.'

The actual paper is here.

Using the techniques of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), but with the intentional alteration of the nucleus before transfer, we could construct a biological entity that, by design and from its very beginning, lacks the attributes and capacities of a human embryo. Studies with mice already provide evidence that such a project of Altered Nuclear Transfer (ANT) could generate functional ES cells from a system that is not an organism, but is biologically (and morally) more akin to the partial organic potential of a tissue or cell culture. …

[T]he proposed genetic alteration is accomplished ab initio, the entity is brought into existence with a genetic structure insufficient to generate a human embryo. From the beginning and at every point along its development it cannot be designated a living being. No human embryo would be created; hence, none would be violated, mutilated or destroyed in the process of stem cell harvesting.

Hurlbut make the following "moral argument."

The moral argument for Altered Nuclear Transfer is grounded in the emerging science of systems biology. According to this radical revision of our prevailing reductionistic views, an organism is a living whole, a dynamic network of interdependent and integrated parts.

There are essential subsystems of growth (cells, tissues and organs), but a living being is more than the sum of its parts, and the parts are dependent on the integrated unity of the whole. Fully constituted, the organism is a self-sustaining and harmonious whole, a unified being with an inherent principle of organization that orders and guides its continuity of growth. In the human embryo, this principle of organismal unity is an engaged and effective potential-in-process, an activated dynamic of development in the direction of the mature human form. Incompletely constituted or severed from the whole, subsystems with partial trajectories of development may temporarily proceed forward with a certain biological momentum. Ultimately, however, they fail to rise to the level of the coordinated coherence of a living organism and become merely disorganized cellular growth.

The activation of the egg by the penetration of the sperm (or the equivalent events in nuclear transfer/cloning) triggers the transition to active organismal existence. But without all of the essential elements (a full complement of chromosomes, proper chromatin configuration, the cytoplasmic factors for gene expression, etc.), there can be no living whole, no organism, and no human embryo. Recent scientific evidence suggests that such a 'failure of fertilization' is, in fact, the fate of most early natural initiations in reproduction. The artificial and intentional construction of a biological entity lacking any of these essential elements, yet bearing a partial developmental potential (similar to that in the aberrant products of fertilization), may make it possible to procure ES cells without producing a human embryo.

This is an essentialist argument that wants to differentiate a whole from its parts. I don't think it works. I am not opposed to embryonic stem cell research, but it seems to me that Hurlbut is attempting to make an argument for the sake of appeasing people who are not philosophically sophisticated enough to be appeased. He is saying that an embryo that is genetically incapable of developing into a human being should not be considered an embryo. Only embryos that have a genetic makeup sufficient for complete development should be considered human. Therefore, harvesting stem cells from his proposed "biological artifacts" violates no moral principles.

But certainly, we will eventually be able to do genetic surgery on artifacts such as these and allow them to develop properly. Then what? More generally, how does Hurlbut propose to draw the line? Which genes must be missing or mutated to disqualify a biological organism from being considered human? I doubt that this will be a line that can be drawn.

The real problem is that the anti-stem cell people believe in a soul, which as science progresses will require them to identify precisely when a mass of stuff gets a soul. That can't be done. Hurlbut is attempting to give them a way out—at least for now. I don't know whether they will take it or not, but it isn't a long term answer.

I also think that the people opposed to stem cell research on religious lines are taking a cowardly stance. It will not be easy to decide when abortion should be allowed. It will not be easy how to decide which biological entities deserve to be treated as human. By claiming that stem cell research is a religious (or "moral") issue those opposed are saying we don't have to think about these questions. Our religion or morality gives us a answer; we don't have to work it out for ourselves.

In my view, to take this stance is to fail to accept one's responsibility to look at issues as they arise and to make decisions when required. If one can say, "I don't have to think about it; a superior source tells me what the answer is." one is giving up one's essential humanity for the comfort of easy answers.

There are many difficult questions in life. We should be willing to face them all—and do so without falling back on an appeal to some externally given absolute answer. There aren't any.

Remote physical device fingerprinting

Tadayoshi Kohno (aka Yoshi Kohno) , a graduate student at UCSD, has written a paper that describes how one can identify computers remotely.

We introduce the area of remote physical device fingerprinting, or fingerprinting a physical device, as opposed to an operating system or class of devices, remotely, and without the fingerprinted device's known cooperation. We accomplish this goal by exploiting small, microscopic deviations in device hardware: clock skews.

The idea is that when computers communicate over the net, they tag packets with a time retrieved from their internal clocks. Since each computer has a unique internal time (when considered at very high resolution) one can identify a computer (or at least distinguish between two computers) by comparing tagged times.

Mitch Kapor, on whose blog I found this link, seems worried about this. But I would think it would be easy to defeat simply by having one's computer reset it's clock periodically from a remote time server.

Beware the backbone carriers

Link via Copyfight.

Robert X. Cringley writes:

The trick for phone companies and cable companies alike is to hurt the VoIP upstarts without incurring the wrath of Congress, the FCC, or any other regulator. They have to be sneaky.

Here's how they plan to cripple the Vonages and Skype's, according to friends of mine who have spent 20+ years in engineering positions at telephone companies, cable companies and internet service providers. As the phone and cable companies begin offering their own VoIP services in real volume, they plan to "tag" their own VoIP packets so that at least within their own networks, their VoIP service will have COS (Class of Service) assignments with their routers, switches, etc. They also plan on implementing distinct Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) for the tagged packets.

Tagged packets get both less restrictive rules for passage and a private highway lane to drive on.

The net effect is that any packet that isn't tagged will only get "best effort" service, which means whatever is left.

"Best effort," as defined by IETF RFC 791, makes almost no guarantees. The packet may arrive damaged, it may be out of order (compared to other packets sent between the same hosts), it may be duplicated, or it may be dropped entirely. And that was in the good old days.

Now imagine "best effort" transport on a backbone that is already clogged with tagged traffic that gets preferential treatment. Where previously all packets got "best effort," in this new system some packets get better than best effort, which means the remaining packets will effectively get worse than best effort.

The telco and cable guys know enough about their networks that they can throttle their network capacities up and down so that "best effort" service is going to be pretty awful. But have the magic tags on your packets and you'll have decent service.

The beauty of this approach is that they're NOT explicitly doing anything to the 3rd party service applications. They're just identifying and tagging their own services, which is within their rights. …

This is the beginning of a web services war where the advantage lies almost entirely with the broadband service provider. It starts with VoIP but I am sure will move on to movies and music, too. The incumbent suddenly has a real, unassailable advantage. If Vonage (or CinemaNow or even Bit Torrent) wants to play along, that's fine, but they'll see most of their profits going to Comcast. …

The ID Wars

The New York Times reports about the arms race in fake IDs.

Using Internet resources and sophisticated computer graphics software, college students are forging drivers' licenses of startlingly good quality, complete with shimmering holograms, special inks and data encoding that can fool the police and even occasionally the latest generation of scanners. To hear law enforcement officers tell it, in the fake-ID arms race the kids are winning. …

The nation's fixation with security cards and ID systems has also been a boon for manufacturers of fake ID's. The widespread use of corporate ID's has created a large pool of people who know the inner workings of the security features in the cards. In online chat rooms dedicated exclusively to the manufacture of fake ID's, unscrupulous members of this pool - including some drivers' license bureau workers, the police say - share or sell information about security features and even run a black market in the more sophisticated components of ID's.

"There are guys online who manufacture the bar codes and holograms," said the Columbia student who made fake ID's. "The hologram like on a Texas will glow. I can order that."

For students who prefer to make their own ID's, the Web offers all the raw materials. High-quality graphics templates for most state drivers' licenses - with accurate renderings of intricate background patterns and color schemes - can be found online. High-tech driver's license plastics and laminates that were once available only to drivers' license bureaus are now easily available online as well at legitimate office supply sites and specialty sites.

It's hard to imagine that it will ever be possible to eliminate fake IDs. After all,

1. There must be some mechanisms that checks an ID to determine whether it is genuine.
   
2. There must be some mechanism that generates IDs that satisfy the test.

So how is it possible to prevent people from using the same mechanisms used by a real generator to create a fake version of the same thing that will pass the testing mechanism?

How many levels of forgery must one prevent?

• the ID object, i.e., the piece of paper or whatever it is that one carries around;
• the information on the ID object;
• the connection between that information and the person carrying it.

For currency we use special paper. Why don't they do something similar for IDs? States seem to use holograms these days. But that seems no longer to be hard enough to forge.

To ensure the validity of the information on the ID object, the only thing I can think of is to have an independent (e.g., online or onsite but regularly updated) database of encrypted information that against which the ID must be validated.

But even if one could certify the validity of pieces of paper and ensure that there are no forgeries, one would still be stuck with ensuring that the person presenting the ID object is the person the ID object presumably identifies.

It would seem that the only solution is to use biometric identifiers (iris scans, etc., perhaps even on-the-spot DNA analyzers from a sample of hair) that could be checked with a centralized database of people. If we went that far, we wouldn't need IDs at all. Everyone's biometric markers would be ID enough. Are we willing to go that far? Even if so, the centralized database would still be a point of vulnerability.

What I find fascinating about all this is the seeming impossibility of ever ensuring meta information. I'm working on an analysis of emergence and related phenomena. I believe that one of the features of the world that is central to emergence is just the impossibility of fully segmenting the world into two disjoint worlds, i.e., that there is only one world and no matter how hard one tries, it is impossible to build a second world that is so partitioned from the object world that it can't be gamed.

A second thing that I find fascinating about this is that the forgery business has, in fact, become a business, like all other businesses.

Some ID mills are offshore and sell online. Many sites purporting to sell fake ID's are scams set up to take advantage of gullible under-age drinkers, but Michael Cawthon, the special agent in charge of the Nashville district of the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission, said that others offer forgeries of drivers' licenses. Mr. Cawthon said some offshore counterfeiting outfits solicit students to market for them on campuses and even conduct background checks on their American liaisons to make sure they are not the law.

So there are even fake forgers! And since some forgers hire people to act as their marketing agents, they must investigate those people to ensure they are legitimately dishonest!

This is the sort of column Nicholas Kristof does so well

When Rapists Walk Free

Mukhtaran, a tall, slim young woman who never attended school as a child, lives in a poor and remote village in the Punjab area of Pakistan. As part of a village dispute in 2002, a tribal council decided to punish her family by sentencing her to be gang-raped. She begged and cried, but four of her neighbors immediately stripped her and carried out the sentence. Then her tormenters made her walk home naked while her father tried to shield her from the eyes of 300 villagers.

Mukhtaran was meant to be so shamed that she would commit suicide. But in a society where women are supposed to be soft and helpless, she proved indescribably tough, and she found the courage to live. She demanded the prosecution of her attackers, and six were sent to death row.

She received $8,300 in compensation and used it to start two schools in the village, one for boys and one for girls, because she feels that education is the best way to change attitudes like those that led to the attack on her. Illiterate herself, she then enrolled in her own elementary school. …

And even though she lives in a remote village without electricity, she has galvanized her supporters to launch a Web site: www.mukhtarmai.com. (Although her legal name is Mukhtaran Bibi, she is known in the Pakistani press by a variant, Mukhtar Mai).

Until two days ago, she was thriving. Then - disaster.

A Pakistani court overturned the death sentences of all six men convicted in the attack on her and ordered five of them freed. They are her neighbors and will be living alongside her. Mukhtaran was in the courthouse and collapsed in tears, fearful of the risk this brings to her family.

"Yes, there is danger," she said by telephone afterward. "We are afraid for our lives, but we will face whatever fate brings for us." …

Mukhtaran's life illuminates what will be the central moral challenge of this century, the brutality that is the lot of so many women and girls in poor countries. For starters, because of inattention to maternal health, a woman dies in childbirth in the developing world every minute.

In Pakistan, if a woman reports a rape, four Muslim men must generally act as witnesses before she can prove her case. Otherwise, she risks being charged with fornication or adultery - and suffering a public whipping and long imprisonment.

Mukhtaran is a hero. She suffered what in her society was the most extreme shame imaginable - and emerged as a symbol of virtue. She has taken a sordid story of perennial poverty, gang rape and judicial brutality and inspired us with her faith in the power of education - and her hope.

Consumption Tax?

The New York Times reports that Greenspan "Gives Consumption Tax Cautious Backing." Basically I like the idea of allowing people to put income into a non-taxed account and not be taxed on it until they spend it. But I also favor progressive taxation. This would make it very hard to tax people with very high incomes unless they spent a great deal of money.

There are other problems as well. If we retain the mortgage interest deduction, then as William Gale of the Brookings Institution pointed out,

'If interest income isn't being taxed and interest payments are deductible, you and I could just lend each other $1 million,' Mr. Gale said. 'Neither of us could be taxed on our income, and both of us could deduct the interest payments.'

A primary argument in favor of a consumption tax (and a savings incentive) is that it would encourage savings, which would promote capital formation. But is that really a problem? Interest rates are so low (and apparently the Fed has no problem keeping interest rates low) that access to capital is quite easy. There is no shortage of capital these days. If there were more savings, interest rates would be even lower. But how low do we want interest rates to be?

I think the fundamental issue is how to encourage productive work, i.e., work that builds value rather than work that builds waste. I know that's a difficult distinction to make, but wouldn't it be better to have more people working on building better computers than building better soft drinks?

One way to encourage value work is to support work that is paid for by businesses. Presumably, businesses only pay for work that increases value. But that includes people who work for the Coca Cola company, so this is not a an easy solution. Also, we probably do want to encourage work that produces cultural artifacts, artistic works, and scientific results. Often these are not done by profit-making organizations. I don't see an easy answer.

Is the Internet really intended to promote MGM's business model

From Eben Moglen amici curiae brief in the forthcoming MGM v. Grokster case on behalf of the Free Software Foundation and New Yorkers for Fair Use.

At the heart of Petitioners’ [MGM's] argument is an arrogant and unreasonable claim—even if made to the legislature empowered to determine such a general issue of social policy—that the Internet must be designed for the convenience of their business model, and to the extent that its design reflects other concerns, the Internet should be illegal. …

Petitioners’ view of what constitutes the foundation of copyright law in the digital age is as notable for its carefully-assumed air of technical naivete as for the audacity with which it identifies their financial interest with the purpose of the entire legal regime. …

Despite petitioners’ apocalyptic rhetoric, this case follows a familiar pattern in the history of copyright: incumbent rights-holders have often objected to new technologies of distribution that force innovation on the understandably reluctant monopolist.

From Intel's brief in the same case.

The clear rule of law this Court announced in Sony has served the nation well for more than 20 years. Intel, which provides the digital building blocks at the heart of the information economy, and other technology innovators have relied on the Sony rule in developing and deploying digital technologies that, though designed for noninfringing uses, could be put to infringing uses. The various tests proposed by Petitioners would require an inventor to predict, at the time it creates a new product, not only how people will use a product that has yet to be designed, let alone introduced in the marketplace, but also which of the various potential uses will ultimately predominate over the other potential uses. Such predications are impossible in the real world, especially since the uses to which products are put routinely change over time.

Digital technologies are by their nature copying technologies; there will always be a risk that any digital technology, however well intentioned its designer, will be put to infringing uses. Faced with impossible predictions about how as yet undeveloped technologies might be used, ambiguous tests that would be unpredictable in their application, and nearly limitless statutory damages for guessing wrong about the unknowable, innovators, such as Intel, would grow timid. It would be irrational to bring new products to market in the face of massive uncertainty; innovators, such as Intel, would have no choice but to withhold from the market socially and economically useful products. The national economy, which has grown through technological innovation over the 20 years since this Court decided Sony, would suffer. ...

The entertainment industries have repeatedly predicted that new technologies would destroy their businesses. Although their concerns are understandable, new technologies that are capable of substantial noninfringing use have, over time, benefited both the entertainment industries and the public. For example, professional baseball initially barred radio broadcasts of games out of fear that radio would reduce attendance; the film studios feared that VCRs would be the end of movie theaters (and before that, refused to license theatrical movies for television distribution); the music industry feared that free, over-the-air radio would put record distribution out of business; and the film studios initially resisted the introduction of DVD technology. Ultimately all of these innovations proved enormously profitable to entertainment companies.

Via Copyfight.

Millions of pairs of eyes

It's probably been said before, but what strikes me over and over is how the web enables us to see the world through so many different sets of eyes. Technorati tracks over 7.5 million blogs. Google index over 3 billion web pages. Does this make us more tolerant? I regret that I haven't noticed any such effect. But I still like to think that the fact that there are so many people whose perceptions are available will make a difference.

In the past, it wasn't all that easy to find other ways of looking at things. Books were one. Corporate and political media were others. And for sure there were plenty of both. But now, each individual has an opportunity to let the rest of the world know how things look from his or her perspective. Perhaps no one cares. But still, the fact that those perspectives are out there, that there are so many people who are converting their experiences into a form that others can share — one would think that it must make some sort of difference.

BBC reporting

The BBC has apologized for how it covered the recent suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. The apology, published as a statement by the head of BBC television news Roger Mosey said

'The programme editors and I agree it was inappropriate to begin the report with footage of the suicide bomber's family in mourning.

'It was also inappropriate to include this footage without coverage of the suffering of the victims' families.

It's difficult to believe that they would have shown pictures of the family of the bomber and not of the victims. What were they thinking? How can they have done that? If they really had some point to make, why did they apologize, and apologize without mentioning their point? This seems totally incompetent.

SourceForge.net

I'm one of the more than 1,000,000 people who have registered at SourceForge.net, which describes itself as

the world's largest Open Source software development website, with the largest repository of Open Source code and applications available on the Internet. SourceForge.net provides free services to Open Source developers.

I haven't spent the time to become as knowledgeable as I probably should, but I never know what to make of these projects. The big guns, such as Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, and Eclipse. are not on SourceForge. Others are quite useful. But many seem fairly amateurish. A fair number are quite minimal. And quite a few seem to be dead. Yet SourceForge as a whole is alive and active, and many of the projects do sound interesting. We used one in a recent project. It worked quite well.

Fight against radically conservative Bush judge nominees

MoveOn PAC is campaigning to stop the appointment of the following judges.

William Myers III has never been a judge and spent most of his career as a lobbyist for the cattle and mining industry.[1] He has written that all habitat conservation laws are unconstitutional because they interfere with potential profit.[2] In 2001, Bush appointed him as the chief lawyer for the Department of the Interior. In that role he continued as a champion of corporate interests, setting his agenda in meetings with former employers he promised not to speak with, and even illegally giving away sacred Native American land to be strip mined.[3]

Terrence Boyle was a legal aide to Jesse Helms. As a judge, his signature decisions have attempted to circumvent federal laws barring employment discrimination by race, gender, and disability.[4] His rulings have been overturned a staggering 120 times by the conservative 4th District Court of Appeals, either due to gross errors in judgment or simple incompetence.[5]

William Pryor Jr. served as Attorney General of Alabama, where he took money from Phillip Morris, fought against the anti-tobacco lawsuit until it was almost over, and cost the people of Alabama billions in settlement money for their healthcare system as a result.[6] He called Roe v. Wade "the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history," and has consistently argued against the federal protections for the civil rights of minorities, lesbian and gay couples, women, and the disabled.[7]

---

[1] "Unfit to Judge," Community Rights Council, 4/2/04.

[2] "Myers Troubling Legal Philosophy," People for the American Way.

[3] "Environmental Group Calls on Senate to Block Myers Nomination: Ethical Problems and Anti-Environmental Activism Make Him Unfit for Judgeship," Friends of the Earth, 2/5/05.

[4] "Federal Judge Terrence Boyle Unfit for Promotion to Appeals Court," People for the American Way, 2/23/05.

[5] "Eastern District of North Carolina Terrence Boyle Nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit," Alliance for Justice.

[6] Eric Fleischauer, "Pryor Called a Tobacco Sellout," Decatur Daily News, 10/30/02.

[7] Ann Woolner, "Bush Judicial Candidate Shows How Things Change," Bloomberg News, 5/16/03.

You can help by signing a petition here.

Worksafe

In a recent BoingBoing Xeni Jardin assured us that a particular link was worksafe, a nice term that means that you won't be accusing of downloading pornography if you link to it at work. Interestingly Google doesn't seem to have any high ranked links with that meaning — and OneLook doesn't recognize it at all..

Fossil gaps

Michael Shermer is a bit of a smart ass, but I like this Scientific American column.

Nineteenth-century English social scientist Herbert Spencer made this prescient observation: 'Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.' Well over a century later nothing has changed. When I debate creationists, they present not one fact in favor of creation and instead demand 'just one transitional fossil' that proves evolution. When I do offer evidence (for example, Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between ancient land mammals and modern whales), they respond that there are now two gaps in the fossil record.

The column goes on to talk about "convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more" that supports evolution and then about "Richard Dawkins's magnum opus, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Houghton Mifflin, 2004)--688 pages of convergent science recounted with literary elegance."

What a misleading headline

news @ nature.com writes:

Engineers devise invisibility shield — Electron effects could stop objects from scattering light.

The article goes on to say that

a particular shield only works for one specific wavelength of light.

An object might be made invisible in red light, say, but not in multiwavelength daylight.

And crucially, the effect only works when the wavelength of the light being scattered is roughly the same size as the object. So shielding from visible light would be possible only for microscopic objects; larger ones could be hidden only to long-wavelength radiation such as microwaves. This means that the technology could not be used to hide people or vehicles from human vision.

Does Eugene Volokh submit the same paper to multiple law journals?

He wrote:

I am happy to have just finished submitting my latest article, Rethinking Searches and Seizures in a Digital World. I'm pretty excited about the article — it asks and answers a number of big questions in the field of criminal procedure that are beginning to come up a lot but no one has written about yet. I think the article 'clicks' pretty nicely.

Having blogged at length about the law review article submission process, I thought some readers might be interested to know what approach I chose. On the paper vs. electronic submissions question, I ended up mailing paper copies to most of the journals on my list. I submitted electronic copies to the journals that encouraged them, however, including the main law reviews of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Penn, and Cornell.

For most academic publishing, one submits articles to only one publisher at a time. Is law different?

John Gilmore refuses to show his "identity papers"

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The regulation that mandates ID at airports is 'Sensitive Security Information.' The law, as it turns out, is unavailable for inspection. …

"Are they just basically saying we just can't travel without identity papers? If that's true, then I'd rather see us go through a real debate that says we want to introduce required identity papers in our society rather than trying to legislate it through the back door through regulations that say there's not any other way to get around," Gilmore said. …

I will show a passport to travel internationally. I'm not willing to show a passport to travel in my own country," Gilmore said. "I used to laugh at countries that had internal passports. And it's happened here and people don't even seem to know about it."

"Putting your money where your mouth is"

Room 116 has this clever 3M ad along with a link to a pdf with more images.

Schwarzenegger copies Bush

The LA Times reports

Using taxpayer money, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration has sent television stations statewide a mock news story extolling a proposal that would benefit political boosters in the business community by ending mandatory lunch breaks for many hourly workers.

The tape looks like a news report and is narrated by a former television reporter who now works for the state.

Well, he campaigned for him, and he gave a speech at Bush's nominating convention. Can we expect integrity from Schwarzenegger? I guess not. But then Schwarzenegger has been consistently dishonest from the beginning. This is just one more bit of evidence of his lack of intellectual integrity.

I wonder if Schwarzenegger know what that even means. As the previous post suggested, at least Rice does.

Honest reporting by the Bush administration?

The New York Times reports:

The State Department on Monday detailed an array of human rights abuses last year by the Iraqi government, including torture, rape and illegal detentions by police officers and functionaries of the interim administration that took power in June. …

The lengthy discussion came in a chapter on Iraq in the department's annual report on human rights, which pointedly criticized not only countries that had been found chronically deficient, like North Korea, Syria and Iran, but also some close American allies, including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

I've been critical enough of the Bush people for lying and covering up in the past. It is refreshing to see a bit of honesty.

Is this Rice's doing? It is a State Department report. Did she clear it with the White House before releasing it?

Perhaps Barbara Boxer's comments about her integrity during her confirmation hearing got to her. I hope so — and I hope that this is the result.

Unlike the rest of the Bush people, who seem willing to sell their integrity for a barrel of oil, Rice does seem to care about her integrity.