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Friday, June 13, 2003
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It is officially roadtrip season.
Roadsideamerica is the source!
10:27:05 AM 
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Steve points out a note on simple information devices and notes they may have interesting uses in underdeveloped areas.
This is probably a very interesting area for investigation.
When I was young we made yearly trips to Salt Lake City. One of the banks (Walker Bank if memory serves) had a large tower that changed colors to give a short term weather forecast. The Empire State Building has a color changing scheme that everyone noticed, but few know the magic decoder ring.
10:19:39 AM
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Current thinking on the origin of AIDS.
What do you call it when one species eats another that is genetically very close. It seems more dangerous than normal meat eating.
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I haven't read it, but three people I trust have recommended Eating Apes by Dale Peterson as a very important book. It is on my list and since I can't offer my own review I note this from a correspondent.
I have been seeing references to the African trade in wild meat, including primates, for a couple of years now--Jane Goodall mentions it in her talks--but searched unsuccessfully for an intelligent guide to the issue. Now it's here, and it's clear that this subject is urgent, appalling, and very very complex. Dale Peterson's gift is to explain the crisis in accessible terms, dispassionately (though the problem arouses passions across the political spectrum), with a wealth of information, and in a lucid, utterly compelling manner. With Karl Ammann, who took the riveting photgraphs, Peterson has visited the meat markets where ape meat is sold as exotic--not subsistence--food, tracked the loggers whose commercial enterprises have opened up the forests to hunters on a scale heretofore unimagined and completely unsustainable, and walked into hunting camps and interviewed the hunters themselves. The story of one of these men, Joseph Melloh, gives the book a human face and a narrative frame; one of the most powerful effects of this study of cultural and political conflict is that it reads like a novel, with this man at its heart, and we see the issues through African eyes--no First World condescension to Third World problems. The book also shows the full range of the catastrophe--environmental, economic, political, social, and ethical--while at the same time showing how readers can make a difference through a few simple steps, by working to change public opinion and shift economic goals. The great apes are humans' closest relatives, and we are destroying them. This book faces a crisis that most people are hardly aware of, and explains it in a way that makes change thinkable and possible. ...
9:39:41 AM
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It appears that the hunt for WMD in Iraq involved some very good people.
Of course this was all a ruse to encourage the action so Bush et. al. can't be too surprised -- if they were it seems clear that we have major intelligence problems. Of the two possibilities I would rather than broken intelligence (as that can be fixed) rather than a administration that lies.
Of course they may have to get very good at lying to cover for what Tom DeLay might do, so perhaps the approach to domestic and foreign agendas is similar.
9:13:13 AM
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