Recently in Events Category
An unexplained and very harsh form of pneumonia is spreading in Hong Kong and has been detected elsewhere. I found an AP story on the topic this morning, and since then there have been more stories. They're calling it "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome," which roughly translates to "Something unexplained that happens to the respiratory system on a nonpermanent basis," because they don't know what causes it.
AP's Emma Ross, via Yahoo. "Mystery Outbreak May Be New Strain of Flu":
"If it really is the flu, it could be we have a new organism that could cause a pandemic," said Dr. R. Bradley Sack, director of Johns Hopkins' international travel clinic. "People immediately start thinking of 1917," the year a worldwide flu epidemic killed at least 20 million people.Experts discounted the possibility that terrorism is the source and believe it almost certainly is a contagious infection that spreads most easily from victims to their doctors, nurses and families through coughing, sneezing and other contact with nasal fluids.
Cory Doctorow (BoingBoing) blogged this e-mail that ran on Dave Farber's Interesting People" list.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have put up a webpage that collects CDC resources on the outbreak.
We are, of course, still talking about a relatively small outbreak in terms of people presently directly affected. On the other hand, it seems to be a very virulent and harsh illness. I hope that the medical community's relatively early detection of the outbreak will at least somewhat soften the blow that this illness threatens.
I've don't think I've got anything to say here that others haven't already said elsewhere. I'd say to start at Instapundit and work from there, but of course you've probably done that already.
Halley is cool and we are so not. She's at the Berkman Center's party tonight.
Apparently the wine is excellent, too.
Well, I'm going to do something exciting too -- like adjust Movable Type to use weekly archives instead of individual ones! Woo! Uh... well... yeah.
First, the Creative Commons is up and running. The organization will hopefully give the creative community more flexibility in thinking about how to copyright and license their works than the established practices we're familiar with today. I hope that in time we'll find a greater proportion of creative works available for a greater variety of legal uses.
Second, as everyone knows by now, the ElcomSoft verdict is in -- not guilty. I think the judge gave sensible jury instructions, but the prosecution may be able to assail the instruction that in order to convict, the jury would need to find "that company representatives knew their actions were illegal and intended to violate the law." (Quoting the CNet news article, not the jury instructions themselves, which I haven't read.) That instruction requires a specific intent to break the law, which I thought is usually a higher standard than "wilfulness," but my experience with criminal law is a little thin. The instruction may have set the bar for conviction a bit high, but I haven't read enough jury instructions to think of alternatives that wouldn't have set the bar too low. Black's Law Dictionary (7th ed.), which is not legal authority but is instructive, defines "wilful" as "Voluntary and intentional, but not necessarily malicious," (p. 1593) but refers to Perkins & Boyce on Criminal Law (1982), who point out the dispute between those who say that wilfulness means only that the act be purposeful and those who say that the purpose be a specifically bad purpose or coupled with "evil intent." I think that setting the bar higher makes sense with a law that can be so easily violated, and I hope that the decision is consistent with other relevant federal jury instructions.
What Jeff Cooper wrote in this entry is a good expression of how I've been feeling and what I've been thinking about the way the U.S. government has been handling its policy about Iraq lately.
I was at a free concert given at the Boulder Public Library tonight. One thing I like about this area is that you can go to something like that and find very skilled professional classical music performers.
There were also readings. The Mayor of Boulder read an email forward that had been attributed to George Carlin. Now anyone who's heard or seen Carlin or a recording of him even once would have known that this was not George Carlin. The Mayor did not know. But he would have known, if he had checked. At least one telltale was that there wasn't a single swear word in it. (Link is to a PDF of F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978).)
Email forwards are still more often false or misattributed than they are correct.
There was something else I was going to write about, something that I think even deserved to be written about, but I forgot about it during the concert.
Okay, so I haven't kept the TV entirely off. Not today. I watched parts of each of the three memorials this morning.
Le Monde is currently reporting an article by Mathieu Guével titled "Buffy, Vampires, and War." The article describes a report by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies that compares the problems challenging strategic decisionmaking in a world of diverse potential threats to the challenges that face Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the soon-to-be-seven-year television series of that name.
The basic idea is that one central characteristic of Buffy is that the enemy emerges with unpredictable forms, characteristics, tactics, motives, strengths, and weaknesses, just as happens with terrorist groups in real life. The protagonists of the show often find that research and past experience only get them part of the way in understanding what they're up against, and sometimes it doesn't get them anywhere.
Okay, I can see the comparison. I'm still amused that the author worked it into a thinktank report.
(Side comment: The PDF of the CSIS report disappointed me. It did not appear to have been carefully proofread at all. I should note that I only read part of it.)
The big event this week is that it's the week of the anniversary of September 11, 2001. Notice that I said "the week of the anniversary." All the media have already begun their "coverage" of the anniversary, which seems to me to be more of a media event than a moment for us to think of what happened last year, who we are now, and where we're going. My theory is that the networks are hoping people will stay glued to their televisions because they want to recoup the advertising income that they lost last year.
Now, some people have done some very good writing and photographic work about the events of the past year, but for my part, I don't want more than a taste of it. If there's something that is a new way of looking at what has happened and where we are going now, that would be worthwhile. I am skeptical -- from what I have seen so far -- that we can hope for much of that, and I don't want to subject myself to the general coverage in hope of finding something unique and insightful. I don't need help remembering last September. I could recount the moments from when I woke up on September 11th jolted awake by what struck me as a bizarre news report on NPR through the events of the next several days. I do want to pause for a moment or two to think about those who died. I do not want to pause for a week to have the same few moments played over again. Marvin Kitman's Newsday column on the media coverage fit pretty well with what I've been thinking.
I am not criticizing those who want to spend time with what the media have prepared, who find that that is a fitting way to deal with their memories and thoughts about the last year. I am saying only that that way does not fit me.
