EU rejects full Hamas ban. Europe rejects US calls to outlaw the political as well as the military wing of the Palestinian militants. [BBC News | Europe | World Edition] 
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Gates and Security. An anonymous reader writes "Orwell was wrong about Big Brother! Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates told a homeland-security conference on Wednesday ... ...[Slashdot] 
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IBM creates self-assembling metamaterial [Ars Technica] 
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American Apology Shirt:. "I was preparing for an international trip, and I thought, 'what can I do to tell as many people as possible in other countries that many Americans vehemently disagree with the policies of our own government?' So I made this shirt, and various wonderful people translated it into all of the official UN languages, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Russian. Buy one for your own international travels. A domestic version (US$16), without English, is also available for those who want to make a statement, but not to monolingual locals." [Follow Me Here...] 
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When They Talk Tech, DC Listens. What do politicians know about technology? For the most part, only what their advisers tell them -- which explains the growing influence of science and tech whizzes in Washington. Meet four of the heaviest hitters. From Wired magazine. [Wired News] 
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SpaceshipOne:.

"Slung below its equally innovative mothership dubbed White Knight, SpaceShipOne rides above planet Earth, photographed during a recent flight test. SpaceShipOne was designed and built by cutting-edge aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites to compete for the X Prize. The 10 million dollar X prize is open to private companies and requires the successful launch of a spaceship which carries three people on short sub-orbital flights to an altitude of 100 kilometers -- a scenario similar to the early manned spaceflights of NASA's Mercury Program. Unlike more conventional rocket flights to space, SpaceShipOne will first be carried to an altitude of 50,000 feet by the twin turbojet White Knight and then released before igniting its own hybrid solid fuel rocket engine. After the climb to space, the craft will convert to a stable high drag configuration for re-entry, ultimately landing like a conventional glider at light plane speeds." Astronomy Picture of the Day [Follow Me Here...] 
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Ice Detected Underneath Mars' North Pole. TheSync writes "A Reuters/Yahoo story says University of Arizona and Russian scientists have detected water ice uniformly distributed in the soil of Mars' ... [Slashdot] 
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Controversial Issues in Psychiatric Diagnosis:. Christian Perring, a philosopher, reviews Advancing DSM: Dilemmas in Psychiatric Diagnosis. Edited by Katherine A. Phillips, Michael B. First, and Harold Alan Pincus.:

Those interested in the philosophy of psychiatry will find much food for thought in the chapter by Wakefield and First, "Clarifying the Distinction Between Disorder and Nondisorder." They explain that it is important to distinguish between mental disorders and other conditions including normal intense emotional reactions, social deviance, personal unhappiness, lack of fit between an individual and a specific social role or relationship or environment, and socially disapproved or negatively evaluated behavior in general. This is especially motivated by concerns within the psychiatric profession and the general public that mental disorders are being overdiagnosed, and ordinary human problems are being medicalized. They call this the false-positives problem, and they spell out the wide range of clinical, research and social concerns that it raises...

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Space impact 'saved Christianity':. "Did a meteor over central Italy in AD 312 change the course of Roman and Christian history?

A team of geologists believes it has found the incoming space rock's impact crater, and dating suggests its formation coincided with the celestial vision said to have converted a future Roman emperor to Christianity.

It was just before a decisive battle for control of Rome and the empire that Constantine saw a blazing light cross the sky and attributed his subsequent victory to divine help from a Christian God.

Constantine went on to consolidate his grip on power and ordered that persecution of Christians cease and their religion receive official status." BBC News [Follow Me Here...] 
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Do you love Led Zeppelin?. If so, stop everything you're doing right now and go get How The West Was Won. It's 3 CDs worth of live recordings from 1972 shows in Long Beach and Los Angeles, CA. Don't be turned off by past live horrors like the Song Remains the Same, this is outstanding. I've been listening non-stop and it's so good, filled with crazy improvisations and bluesy rocking. "Whole Lotta Love" goes for more than 20 minutes and at this writing it has 141 reviews at Amazon with an average of five (out of five) stars. We've got it on repeat here at the office and we're rocking out so much listening to it that we're contemplating exchanging the desks for bean bag chairs, covering the large warehouse windows with tapestries, hanging the beads, and packing the bong. From now on, we'll be coding by the light of the lava lamp. [muchas gracias a Jake] [megnut] 
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