] It is a freakish, doped-up, mutant clone which hasn't had
] sex for thousands of years - and the strain may be about
] to tell on the nation's fruitbowl favourite. Scientists
] based in France have warned that, without radical and
] swift action, in 10 years' time we really could have no
] bananas.

Bananas don't really reproduce and apparently have been maintained by human farmers for 10,000 years. They face destruction from fungus. Other stories in the news today indicate that a sequencing effort is underway.

The Guardian | Yes - in 10 years we may have no bananas

] America's space agency has unveiled an ambitious plan to
] learn more about what happened just seconds after the Big
] Bang

Wired News: NASA Looks Way Back to Big Bang

] An ACLU report released Wednesday warns that the United
] States "has now reached the point where a total
] 'surveillance society' has become a realistic possibility

Comforting....really.

Wired News: ACLU: It's Almost 1984

] Following in California's footsteps, New Jersey
] legislators are poised to approve a bill that would allow
] embryonic stem-cell research.

Wired News: Stem-Cell Research OK in N.J.?

Marie, should we do this:::

As some of you know I coach a youth ice hockey team in Nashville. The
Pedators have agreed to graciously allow my team to play one game at the
Gaylord Entertainment Center. As you can imagine, the kids are really
exited. Imagine playing football at the Titans stadium or baseball at
Yankee Stadium. Well for them this is it ... Each player get's announced
on the ice, they play the national anthem, they announce the goals, etc. -
they get all the bells and whistles as the Preds game.

Yes there is a catch - the team has to sell 150 tickets to the Predators
game on March 1 at 1:00 pm. (Chicago Blackhawks). The tickets are in the
cheap seats and only cost $17.00 each. The kids are selling them as best
they can, but based on last nights inventory, it appears they would be well
short. They looked very dejected when I broke the news, until I told them I
would help out if I could.

That's where each of you step in. If each of you could buy just one ticket,
that would sell 30 tickets and I think we would close. If you bring your
spouse or a date and buy two tickets, that would sell 60 tickets and we
would be in for sure.

Please let me know ASAP if you would be interested. (I need to turn the
money in this weekend). Your help would be greatly appreciated by these fine
young men as well as myself.

Thanks,
Dan Bartholemew
DEBartholomew@bwsc.net

[We should all buy tickets to this game, even if we can't make it. $17.00 isn't asking alot...and its hockey for crying out loud. I am definitly in! - Nanochick]

Help a kid play hockey

awesome looking mustang...

Mustang GT

] Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it's hard to figure
] out how people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there
] is a lot of social upheaval and a serious threat to
] innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot. It's your basic
] end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science
] fiction writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are
] my stock-in-trade.

Is scenaria a word? Anyway, Cory Doctorow's new novel is available today, and for FREE on the Internet. Download here.

BTW: you should all read the interview posted on this site. It sounds exactly like Memestreams (you will know what I am talking about once you read it):)

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom - Free Download

] "Helen Longino has written a timely book that fills a
] critical gap in the existing literature between
] philosophy of science and the social studies of science.
] Her exposition of scientific inquiry as a context-laden
] process provides the conceptual tools we need to
] understand how social expectations shape the development
] of science while at the same time recognizing the
] dependence of scientific inquiry on its interactions with
] natural phenomena. This is an important book precisely
] because there is none other quite like it." --Evelyn Fox
] Keller, author of "Reflections on Gender and Science"
] Conventional wisdom has it that the sciences, properly
] pursued, constitute a pure, value-free method of
] obtaining knowledge about the natural world. In light of
] the social and normative dimensions of many scientific
] debates, Helen Longino finds that general accounts of
] scientific methodology cannot support this common belief.
] Focusing on the notion of evidence, the author argues
] that a methodology powerful enough to account for
] theories of any scope and depth is incapable of ruling
] out the influence of social and cultural values in the
] very structuring of knowledge. The objectivity of
] scientific inquiry can nevertheless be maintained, she
] proposes, by understanding scientific inquiry as a social
] rather than an individual process. Seeking to open a
] dialogue between"

This is the first of many books assigned for my psych/phil class on "Science versus Pseudoscience". I read the first chapter tonight, and found that my interest was so peaked that I paced around my apt. for an hour after finishing it. I figured it may be of interest to some people here, so I decided to meme it

Amazon.com: Books: Science as Social Knowledge

This is the website for Baxter....and you should check it out. Its good stuff, and you can listen to their new CD online. Trust me...you will like it.

:::: BAXTER ::::

] So welcome, and special thanks to those of you who
] arrived early and started colonizing the place before it
] was even completed. That really cheered me up, a couple
] of weeks ago. I don’t have to feel I’m moving into an
] empty (and dishearteningly brand-new) structure. There
] is already some human space here, the start of that
] sense of duration and habitation, and soon there’ll be,
] I hope, more.

] In spite of (or perhaps because of) my reputation as a
] reclusive quasi-Pynchonian luddite shunning the net (or
] word-processors, depending on what you Google) I hope
] to be here on a more or less daily basis.

Its live now!

William Gibson's Blog