How many have you seen?

1 Salo (1975) Pier Paolo Pasolini
2 Natural Born Killers (1994) Oliver Stone
3 Crash (1996) David Cronenberg
4 The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) Martin Scorsese
5 The Devils (1971) Ken Russell
6 Pretty Baby (1977) Louis Malle
7 Birth of a Nation (1915) DW Griffith
8 Straw Dogs (1971) Sam Peckinpah
9 Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) Terry Jones
10 Bandit Queen (1994) Shekhar Kapur

Guardian Unlimited Film | News | the 10 most controversial films of all time

This one is for all the authors out there.

Having earlier piqued one browser's interest in "Hitler Laughing" by playing up its rarefied quality ("Everyone thinks 'Weimar: funny,' but not everyone thinks 'Third Reich: funny' "), I now tried the same trick with the Duras book. "It's sort of like 'Where's Waldo?' for plots," I told him. Tom handed me five dimes.

How to Sell Books by Really Trying

Raytheon directors punished the chief executive, William H. Swanson, by taking away almost $1 million from his 2006 compensation yesterday because he failed to give credit for material that was in a management book he wrote.

This is a follow-up on a story from two weeks ago about "Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management."

You might also want to check out this comparison of the books and Swanson's responses, including that "He sincerely regrets the entire incident." As in, I wish no one had brought this issue to national attention.

Last week, an NYT columnist quipped:

The whole situation is enough to make you wonder whether we now have lower expectations for chief executives than we do for teenagers.

He was referring to Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism in her debut novel.

This first surfaced on the weblog of Carl Durrenberger.

Chief's Pay Is Docked by Raytheon

"I think the most general claim here is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it."

These conclusions, if accurate, would seem to have broad applications. Students should be taught to follow their interests earlier in their schooling, the better to build up their skills and acquire meaningful feedback. Senior citizens should be encouraged to acquire new skills, especially those thought to require "talents" they previously believed they didn't possess.

Follow up with Charles Handy:

L2L: Clearly, education is key to equipping people for the world. What do you see as the future of our school systems?

CH: I think that one trend that's coming is that every child should understand at an early age his or her intelligence profile. This follows psychologist Howard Gardner's idea that there are several different kinds of intelligences -- analytical, interpersonal, practical, physical, musical, and so on. People simply have different aptitudes. Once we have identified those, we can design an individual curriculum which, for at least half of the school time, concentrates on developing those particular intelligences, irrespective of the core base of the teaching.

It's already beginning to happen. Middle-class parents now say, "We want more emphasis on music, want more emphasis on sporting abilities -- and we will pay for that outside of school." The school day should be split in two. The first half is what you might call a required, common curriculum, taught by schools. The second half is an individual curriculum in which many outside organizations take part -- work organizations, community organizations. These activities may be organized by the school, but they may or may not take place in school. The school becomes a kind of broker for learning.

When it works properly, every young person will leave school with a personal portfolio of competence, including many more items than the classroom captures.

A Star Is Made | NYT Freakonomics

The Moussaoui case is emblematic of the administration's approach to fighting terrorism. It has repeatedly overreached and sought symbolic victories, adopting tactics that have undermined its ability to achieve real security while disregarding less flashy but more effective means of protecting us.

Tough talk in news conferences, overheated charges that evaporate under scrutiny and executions for symbolic purposes will not make us safer. The administration needs to turn away from symbolism and toward substance if it is to have any hope of protecting us from the next attack.

How Not to Fight Terrorism

A vast array of virtual tunnels that winds around the sun, planets and moons could slash the amount of fuel that spacecraft need to explore our solar system, according to NASA.

The so-called interplanetary superhighway (or interplanetary transport network) would take advantage of the gravitational pull between celestial bodies. In many cases, the competing forces cancel each other out, leaving corridors where ships could travel using little or no fuel.

I highly recommend the American Scientist article linked from this page. Seek out the magazine at your local newsstand.

The Interplanetary Superhighway

Jeremy Bernstein loves Jeffrey Richelson's "fascinating new book." He also nicely pulls together some ongoing threads about intelligence and foreign policy.

The themes of this review have been twofold. In order to have really reliable intelligence about the atomic program of a foreign country a necessary, but not sufficient, condition is to have agents on the ground. In the examples I have given the necessity is clear.

The second theme is that in almost all cases the predictions have erred on the side of conservatism. Countries have acquired nuclear weapons well before they were supposed to. The example of the Russians is the most graphic. As the people at Los Alamos discovered, making an implosion bomb was a very difficult technological feat that required the enormous assembled talents of almost the entire laboratory. Do the Iranians have the people to do this, even if they have the plans? We simply do not know.

About the book, Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, saying:

Richelson has written an authoritative and definitive account of US nuclear espionage from the earliest days of atomic research in WWII to the present. ... Richelson concludes chillingly, "Trouble Is Waiting to Happen." More than a comprehensive and often compelling history of nuclear espionage, this is an important contribution to the debate regarding American intelligence that began on 9/11.

The Secrets of the Bomb

Those interested in the GE Puffer may also find this device of interest.

Cellular Analysis and Notification of Antigen Risks and Yields (CANARY) – Information taken from Todd H. Rider, et al., "A B Cell-Based Sensor for Rapid Identification of Pathogens," Science 2003, 301: 213-215.

Researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory began work in 1997 on the CANARY (Cellular Analysis and Notification of Antigen Risks and Yields) project. It involves the use of B-lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell that our bodies use against bacterial and viral invaders. These cells are already designed by nature to search for any bacteria and viruses very rapidly. In the laboratory, they are given the ability to glow in the presence of certain contaminants by adding a luminescence gene from jellyfish. The actual detectors are pathogen specific antibodies within the B cells that trigger a burst of calcium when an agent is detected. Within seconds, the calcium activates a bioluminescent protein that causes the whole cell to glow. A device termed a luminometer is used to analyze the light-emitting cell. Within the luminometer the cells are kept alive in test tubes and their response is displayed on a computer readout. The system has already been tested successfully against a list of biological agents, including anthrax, smallpox, plague, tularemia and encephalitis.

The CANARY bio-agent forensic analysis of body fluids would be useful for monitoring air, water, and contaminated surfaces as well as body fluids. It is expected to detect more rapidly and with greater sensitivity than conventional sensors that are based on chemical reactions. These chemical reactions can take several hours to complete and the sensors can require several thousands of particles for detection. By comparison, CANARY has been able detect as few as 50 colony-forming units of the plague bacterium in less than three minutes. Furthermore, unlike many existing sensors, CANARY would not require advanced training for operation. Consequently, MIT researchers foresee a variety of applications for the system. ...

In the event of an emergency, suspicious substances on the street, subways, or airports could be tested quickly.

Here's a press release and a demonstration video. The article from Science may also be of interest for the technically inclined.

We report the use of genetically engineered cells in a pathogen identification sensor. This sensor uses B lymphocytes that have been engineered to emit light within seconds of exposure to specific bacteria and viruses. We demonstrated rapid screening of relevant samples and identification of a variety of pathogens at very low levels. Because of its speed, sensitivity, and specificity, this pathogen identification technology could prove useful for medical diagnostics, biowarfare defense, food- and water-quality monitoring, and other applications.

Looking For Trouble - Finding the Bugs

Did you read the George Packer piece in New Yorker? That esssay earns a Silver Star, at least. But don't expect it to make you feel good about the situation. His reporting is impressive. Here's a sample:

A reporter for the military newspaper Stars & Stripes had heard a bewildered sergeant near Tikrit ask his captain, “What’s our mission here?” The captain replied sardonically, “We’re here to guard the ice-cream trucks going north so that someone else can guard them there.”

Much of the activity at an enduring FOB simply involves self-supply. These vast military oases raise the spectre of American permanence in Iraq, but, to me, they more acutely suggested American irrelevance. Soldiers have even coined a derogatory term for those who never get off the base: "fobbits." I spent two days at Speicher without seeing an Iraqi.

And another:

A field-grade officer in the 101st Airborne said, “The algorithm of success is to get a good-enough solution.” There were, he said, three categories of assessment for every aspect of the mission: optimal, acceptable, and unacceptable. He made it clear that optimal wasn’t in the running. “We’re handing a shit sandwich over to someone else,” the officer said.

Anyway, on to the news article:

Iraqis seem to be gritting their teeth and clinging grimly to the battered hope for democracy, even in what many see as a strange and uncomfortable incarnation.

Riyadh al-Adhadh, a Baghdad doctor, likened Iraq to a drowning man, and the prime minister-designate a floating plank to which people cling.

Said one Baghdad doctor: Iraq is a drowning man, and the prime minister-designate a floating plank.

"We have to hold on to the wood, even if it has nails," said the doctor, a rheumatologist named Riyadh al-Adhadh. "We need this wood, whatever its shape. It is all that prevents us from going under the sea."

Beyond the obvious obstacle of a severe lack of professionals and experts, many of whom have fled Iraq, Mr. Maliki will be under tremendous pressure from his own and other Shiite parties to fill his cabinet from within their ranks.

A woman in a housecoat stood in her doorway just down the street. "There's a lack of everything," she said. "We want someone who will come to save the people."

Warily, Iraqis Investing Hope in New Leaders

Every few days, I get an RSS feed that lists the new books added to the University of Pennsylvania Library's catalog of online books, and I go foraging. To me this is a long-distance version of the kind of trolling I have done most of my life, wandering through the library stacks, making accidental discoveries in the shelves along the way.

I do that kind of thing, too.