"It's kind of like the old moonshine days with neighbors making a living at it," said Sgt. Ronnie Ray, a marijuana suppression officer with the Kentucky State Police here at Bluegrass Station. "And we're kind of like the new revenuers."

Growing marijuana in Appalachia (NYT).

Coleman identifies some key tendencies among boomer Buddhists, including efforts to make Buddhism more egalitarian, more feminist and more socially conscious. The most audacious of these trends is a drift toward a secularized Buddhism that author Stephen Batchelor calls "Buddhism Without Beliefs" and Coleman dubs "bare-bones Buddhism."

This supposedly revolutionary concept is actually rather old, even hackneyed. The idea is this: Strip Buddhism of what Coleman describes as its "traditional religious trappings -- robed priests, elaborate rituals, sacred images of supermundane figures, devotional practices." What remains is a demythologized practice that is both new and (supposedly) improved: no chanting, no incense, no monks and certainly no bowing. This stealth approach leaves Buddhists with little to do except meditate and read books like "The New Buddhism." (Salon via A&L Daily)

Law Kar, a historian at the Hong Kong Film Archive, noted that the first fight in "Crouching Tiger" does not break out for nearly 15 minutes. And when it does, it is a balletic nighttime chase played out over the roofs of old Beijing. There is not an automatic weapon in sight.

"In Chinese martial arts films you don't let the action slow down; you just feed them more fights," Mr. Law said. "Ang Lee knows how to weave inner drama with outer drama. That may be the Hollywood way."

The story points out the irony that the director, Ang Lee, could have made more money in this part of the world had he made the film in English, as his producers suggested; but he also resisted suggestions to tailor the film more to Chinese audiences by making the fight scenes bloodier.

"Dancing was a means of social communication in prestate societies," he said. "It was part of the ritual for coordinating a community's activities. `Hey, it's time to plant the wheat or harvest it.' So everyone would gather and dance, and the next day they would go to work."

The egg may be exercising a form of so-called cryptic female choice: selecting the best sperm from the batch with which to fuse. If so, then sperm cells would be under perpetual pressure either to improve themselves or to figure out a trick to subvert the capacity of the zona pellucida to reject them. And the eggs in turn would keep battling back for the right to decide their partner.

Were I a chick, I would name my blog "zona pellucida."

What the scientists at Bochum’s Ruhr-Universität found is that “spatial intelligence” is seriously affected by the female hormone oestrogen. The women were asked to perform a well-known spatial awareness test in which they had to recognise a three-dimensional object from different angles. The results, reported in Behavioural Neuroscience, showed that, during menstruation — when oestrogen levels fall and levels of the male hormone testosterone rise — the scores of all but one of the volunteers zoomed. (via SciTech Daily)

It must be clear that we are not nearly as sophisticated in our moral and social development as we are scientifically and that that gap widens with the incredible ferment of discovery. (via SciTech Daily)

The refrain of personal responsibility for one's own health runs through Satel's impassioned and intelligent book.

There is a certain irony in this thesis of personal responsibility, which may be a reflection of the polarization, or perhaps the confusion, of our society. At a time when the culture of medical self-help is growing rapidly--and prosperous, well-educated members of the middle class are busily learning about the physiology of their bodies, the relative virtues of aerobic and anaerobic exercise, and the nutritional principles underlying dietary choices, and eagerly seeking medical information on the Internet--the less privileged in American society, especially certain minorities, are being hectored and propagandized by agenda-driven gadflies who claim that most or all health problems are the result of societal inequalities over which the victims have no control. And yet it is evident that there is a great deal of dovetailing in these two seemingly contradictory attempts to reinvent medical practice. They both originate in a spirit of activism, with the intention of overthrowing or at least revising a care system that is seen as autocratic, patriarchal, and distanced from the individuals whom it is meant to serve.

The reviewer, Sherwin P. Nuland, is quite sympathetic to Satel's thesis but does make, at the end of the review, an effort to distance himself from some of her more gratuitously ideological positions.

One can think of classroom learning as a public good with "congestion effects," he suggested. The behavior of each student affects every other student's learning, and the more crowded the classroom the more spillovers there are. Professor Lazear developed a mathematical model to express the relation among class size, behavior, learning and the cost of teachers. The model predicts what might happen when various factors change.

The key variable is how likely it is that students disrupt one another's learning. (This disruption can occur through classic misbehavior, or it can simply take the form of asking questions everyone else knows the answers to.) Small differences in behavior can have large effects on learning and big implications for class size.

The ILECs actually WANT to delay DSL deployment. They don't want the technology to succeed too quickly because that would mean massive upgrades to field gear and cuts into profits. The only reason why any ILEC built out a DSL product line was because of competitive pressure from CLECs and that darned Telecommunications Act of 1996, which they wanted so much at the time but now hate.

The movie's wildness should not be mistaken for the usual juvenile aggression. Though it seems, by default, to be aiming for the youth market, its ideal audience may be children who have had Freud's "Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis" read to them at bedtime. It's a movie about sublimation, neurosis and bad dreams. The title character is, metaphorically at least, our old childhood friend the id, speaking in the squeaky, hyped-up voice of John Turturro.

In contrast with cryptography, a field long given over to high math and puzzle-making abstraction, steganography was always more or less a materials science, its history florid with the range of substances and gadgetry used at one time or another to conceal communications. Simon Singh's The Code Book relates that in the first century A.D., Pliny the Elder explained how the milk of the thithymallus plant dried to transparency when applied to paper but darkened to brown when subsequently heated, thus recording one of the earliest recipes for invisible ink. The ancient Chinese wrote notes on small pieces of silk that they then wadded into little balls and coated in wax, to be swallowed by a messenger and retrieved, I guess, at the messenger's gastrointestinal convenience. The sixteenth-century Italian scientist Giovanni Porta proposed a steganographic scheme involving hard-boiled eggs: Write on the shell with a vinegar-and-alum solution and your message passes through to the surface of the egg white, where it can't be read until the shell is peeled away.

The larger problem is that the dominant model -- content supported by advertising revenue -- isn't working, in part because so few surfers click on the ever-present ads. In this free-lunch culture, Slate and TheStreet.com had to give up on charging for subscriptions.

Prosecutors have been loath to bring charges in many cases because of the ambiguities of the law and what they say are well-intentioned actions of parents whose religious beliefs are so strong that they prefer to put their children in the hands of God, rather than a doctor.

"We certainly know that infants are not blank slates, and that they enter the world with a structure or hard-wiring that helps them learn," Saffran says. "But what's interesting here is we may not have dedicated hardware just for language. The structure is probably general to many complex forms of learning, including music."

. . . . .

Why would absolute pitch come as standard operating equipment, only to fade from our grasp when we grow up? Saffran says it may have something to do with the way the brain responds to tones and frequencies, with so-called tonotopic maps. The brain's neurons are organized to respond to sounds in a particular frequency band. We map our aural worlds based on pitches of sounds in the same we visually map a room by spatially identifying objects.

Absolute pitch provides a remarkably detailed tool for this cartography of sound, giving infants the ability to track extremely fine-grained information regarding everything they hear. But people eventually lose absolute pitch, Saffran argues, because it is simply too detailed to be functional in everyday life.

A study by researchers at Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care and the University of Toronto compared the cognitive function of rats on a high-fat diet similar to what humans consume if they don't eat nutritionally, with rats on lower fat, laboratory chow. After three months, the rats on high-fat diet showed severe impairment on a wide range of learning and memory tasks relative to those animals that consumed the lower fat diet. The research also showed that glucose treatment significantly improved the memory of rats fed high-fat diets.

In 1985 he was sent back to Japan. The authorities there considering putting him on trial for the Hartevelt murder but the French refused to hand over the dossier and later that year he was freed after convincing a doctor he had regained his sanity.

Sagawa told the programme makers he had been obsessed with cannibalism from the age of three, when his uncle used to play a game pretending to be a flesh-eating giant.

He said killing and eating his friend was the fulfillment of a lifelong desire.

Sagawa says he will never kill again. But neurologist Professor Jonathan Pincus, who has read his psychiatric report, told the programme he doubted whether Sagawa could keep his word.

Ok. Creepy, yes? But what was striking to me was the bit about how this obsession blossomed in the three-year-old boy because of a game his uncle used to play with him. Yikes! Iris is only two and a half--maybe there is still time to save her!

Rather they live glamorously and share their experiences, dispensing beauty, travel, dining and exercise tips along with advice about relationships based on their own activities. Photographs of them out on the town, their extraordinarily buff bodies clad in the barest of glittering gowns, are staples of the society columns in weekly magazines, and they have built a brisk business in exercise videos and soft-focus calendars featuring them purportedly being themselves, which apparently involves a lot of time spent in the nude.

The problem with the embrace of the early puberty hypothesis, skeptics like Dr. Bachrach say, is that the science underlying it is questionable. The single study, they say, does not demonstrate that puberty is starting earlier than in the past.

On the other hand, people who have been in the field for some time seem to agree, just on the basis of what they are accustomed to, that the study hit upon a truth. More studies will be done, I suppose.

"If you think cryptography is the answer to your problem, then you don't know what your problem is," said Dr. Peter G. Neumann, a computer scientist at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif.

. . . .

But in the real world, a burglar confronted by an impenetrable lock on the front door may well go round to the back and just smash a window. "I'm a cryptographer by trade," Mr. Schneier said. "And a provably secure cryptosystem doesn't do me any good. We're putting a stake in the ground and hoping the enemy runs into it and now we're arguing about whether it should be one mile tall or two miles tall. It doesn't matter. The enemy will walk around it," he added.

lobal warming is expected to increase crop yields in temperate northern regions while harming agriculture in the tropics, further widening the gap between rich, industrialized countries and poor developing nations, according to a new analysis by an influential network of scientists.

" I think it's time to find a middle ground where we can acknowledge that the erotic pleasure that propels us to reproduce is part of the same pleasure that propels us to nurture our children, and that's something to be celebrated, not denied. It's a truism of psychology that what we can't acknowledge is what causes problems."

Until the 1980s, researchers could only estimate how much ultraviolet radiation reaches Earth's surface. But in 1978, NASA launched the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer. Three years ago, Jablonski and Chaplin took the spectrometer's global ultraviolet measurements and compared them with published data on skin color in indigenous populations from more than 50 countries. To their delight, there was an unmistakable correlation: The weaker the ultraviolet light, the fairer the skin. Jablonski went on to show that people living above 50 degrees latitude have the highest risk of vitamin D deficiency. "This was one of the last barriers in the history of human settlement," Jablonski says. "Only after humans learned fishing, and therefore had access to food rich in vitamin D, could they settle these regions."

Humans have spent most of their history moving around. To do that, they've had to adapt their tools, clothes, housing, and eating habits to each new climate and landscape. But Jablonski's work indicates that our adaptations go much further. People in the tropics have developed dark skin to block out the sun and protect their body's folate reserves. People far from the equator have developed fair skin to drink in the sun and produce adequate amounts of vitamin D during the long winter months.

The other type of Freud-bashing — much more damaging because it hurts patients — comes from a too-narrow focus on biological psychiatry. I fully accept the importance of biological psychiatry, having devoted some of my own research to problems in that area (neurotransmitters and manic-depressive illness). . . . But now the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme: psychiatry departments have become bastions of molecular biology, at which much more time is devoted to studying and teaching psychopharmacology than to what are called talk therapies.

Belief in the extraordinary seems to have infiltrated every aspect of American culture, from psychic hot lines to television series like "Mysterious Ways" and "Roswell" to bogus claims of miracle cures. A 1996 Gallup poll found nearly half of the Americans surveyed believed in extrasensory perception and the reality of U.F.O.'s.

"You see the proliferation of this stuff and think, `Why is this suddenly happening today?' " said Louis Masur, a cultural historian at City College of New York. But there is "not anything necessarily new about this today," he said. "We go through cycles. There is a cycle between reason and faith, enlightenment and religion. Think back, throughout American history in particular, and you have these moments where science, experimentation and reason dominate, and you have these other moments where a faith-oriented set of beliefs challenge that."

Feb. 13, 2001 | Dear Mr. Blue,
I'm in a bit of a pickle. I have been dating my boyfriend for the past year and a half, and he's one of the most loving men I have ever known. His dedication to and affection toward me are unparalleled, except perhaps by my own mother. In fact, he reminds me a lot of her.
In this time, though, I've found myself wildly attracted to several other men and have felt carnal feelings that I never had with my boyfriend. I am an honest person, but now find myself at the beginning stages of an affair with someone I know I don't love but whom I want.
My boyfriend is incredibly trustworthy, energetic, creative, fun and hardworking. We've been talking seriously about marriage, but now I wonder if I'll always find myself looking elsewhere for good sex. I love him so much, though, that breaking up feels like cutting off my right arm. What's a girl to do?
Dangerously Close

Dear Dangerously,
Your boyfriend should not remind you of your mother. If, in our early courtship, my wife had said, "You are so much like my mother," I would have felt a certain tremulous alarm. Nothing against my mother-in-law, who is a fine woman, but it's such an odd metaphor. My feelings for my wife were (and are) carnal and passionate and wild. So should your feelings be for your boyfriend. This is a healthy place to start out. Of course it's also good if the boyfriend is someone you want to converse with and who cares about you and is loyal and so forth, but your lack of carnal feeling for him seems fatal to me. I don't pretend to understand the mysteries of relationships, but it seems to me that lust and passion and sex are how many men and women manage to fend off the natural shocks of matrimony and all that proximity and the inevitable bruises and the sagging heart. People can be married for a zillion years and yet somehow, God bless them, they still have the hots for each other. Nobody else can see it, but they can. This happens. I had a great-uncle who, at the age of 82, after almost 60 years of marriage, said that he didn't care to get a firmer mattress because then he couldn't "get purchase" with his knees -- meaning he couldn't make love to Aunt Millie with conviction. He was a devout Christian and had been married to only one woman but he was crazy about her. I think this is crucial.

Seven days in and the conversation among the fashionistas has taken on an absurdist quality. “Melissa! Melissa, your hair is so long,” cried one girl, embracing an apparently indifferent acquaintance, who was weighed down by one of the Sephora goodie bags left on each seat as a gentle bribe for beauty editors.

“ So long,” agreed Melissa rummaging through the free make-up before fishing out a Christian Dior mascara. She fell upon it hungrily and started unscrewing the top to examine the brush. “I’ve been thinking about you, I’ve been thinking about you a lot,” the acquaintance said.

“Well thanks for sharing your love,” replied Melissa, without taking her eyes off the mascara.

The new site is known as Dos Cabezas (two heads) and is the first big settlement discovered from the Moche I period, the earliest in the Moche culture, Donnan said.

In addition to the ornate ceramics and other treasures, Donnan said each of the three tombs contained the three tallest people he believed had been excavated in South America.

``They were up to 6 feet tall. The average Moche male is between 4 feet 9 inches and 5 feet 6 inches tall and so they were way out of the range,'' he said. ``We were astonished at the height of these individuals,'' he added.

Donnan, whose discovery is being made public for the first time in National Geographic Magazine's March edition, said he believed all three men may have suffered from a disease similar to Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes thin, elongated bones.

The dead nobleman was accompanied by a young woman's body, possibly sacrificed to accompany him in the tomb, as well as the body of a llama.

Women chat happily, send sexually explicit signals and encourage the man's attention, even if they have absolutely no interest in him. This gives a woman time to assess a man, says Grammer, essential in human courtship, since pairing off is much riskier for the female. The only time women were negative at all was when a man talked too much.

"We have water, we have trees, it's pretty," said Lawel Djibril, 15, who was standing in front of his mud home. "We have everything here. If there's nothing in the rest of Niger, we have everything here. We have dates, salt, water, caravans."

Kiari Leawel, a 24-year-old unmarried woman, added: "Even if you have nothing, you could come here to Bilma, work hard, find yourself a wife, have children and have a good life here."

Yet another reminder that having "everything" is a relative concept.

Best-actress nominations went to Joan Allen in "The Contender," Ellen Burstyn in "Requiem for a Dream," and Laura Linney in "You Can Count on Me."

What the hell happened to the Best Actress category?

The principal surprise is how few human genes there seem to be compared with the estimate of 100,000 given in many textbooks.

That number seemed perfectly appropriate in light of the first two animal genomes sequenced: the roundworm has 19,000 genes, and another standard laboratory organism, the fruit fly, has 13,000 genes. But Celera and the consortium each say they can find only 30,000 or so human genes, just a third more than the roundworm's genetic patrimony.

"Sex and the City" coined the term "toxic bachelor" to describe the many Mr. Wrongs bedded by the show's chronically single women. He is emotionally unavailable, unwilling to commit, unfaithful. But ask a man why a relationship has gone bad and he will very often cite just one reason. Twirling his index finger around his ear, he will lip-sync, if not actually come out and say, "She was crazy."

The less said, the better.

It is worth examining the mental mechanisms that liberal intellectuals use to disguise the truth from themselves and others, and to ask why they do so.

Dirk Kempthorne, the governor of Idaho, however, has filed a lawsuit against the government because he says the bears pose a serious threat to human life. Mr Kempthorne said: I oppose bringing these massive, flesh-eating carnivores into Idaho.

That sounds like a fine bumper sticker, doesn't it? Personally, I'd rather perish in the maw of a grizzly than be hit by a bus. Of the two deaths, the former has a long, proud tradition among my ancestors and the latter would be unbearably ignominious. But alas, with all the running I do the bus is far more likely. The last impressions on my brain will be the sight of a large grill plastered with bugs and the smell of diesel exhaust--either that or a glimpse of a bumper with a Bush/Cheney sticker and the head of some asshole on a cell phone.

Overspending and undersaving are indeed American characteristics that economists struggle to explain. The mainstream argues that people save as much as they can, voluntarily, and that if taxes are reduced, as the Bush administration proposes, people will save a substantial portion of the windfall. Corporate America could then tap those savings to finance investment in, say, computers, making the economy grow.

Behavioral economists say this reasoning is flawed. They contend that despite their best intentions, most people spend almost all of any income that comes their way. Instead of rationally balancing spending and saving over a lifetime, people are indebted from youth to old age, the behaviorists find.

This, I fear, describes my behavior thus far in life.

Once he has ingested the toxin from the plant, the male is no longer tasty to his common predators, particularly spiders and bats. After gathering the poison, the moth goes in search of a female. When he finds his insect bride, they mate for nine hours. But, just before mating, the moth releases the toxin like a cloud of miniature confetti that sticks to the female. The toxin protects her while she is mating and while she lays her eggs. The female moth then passes the toxin to her eggs. The toxin deters egg-eating insects like ants and ladybugs from devouring her young.

Nine hours. I guess if you are going to mate once and die, it had better damn well be worth it.

Thaler began designing experiments to test his ideas. In one, Thaler told lab subjects to imagine they are stranded on a beach on a sweltering day and that someone offers to go for their favorite brand of beer. How much would they be willing to pay? Invariably, Thaler found, subjects agree to pay more if they are told that the beer is being purchased from an exclusive hotel rather than from a rundown grocery. It strikes them as unfair to pay the same. This violates the bedrock principle that one Budweiser is worth the same as another, and it suggests that people care as much about being treated fairly as they do about the actual value of what they're paying for. Although "fairness" is generally ignored by neoclassicists, it's probably a reason why companies do not lower salaries when they encounter tough times -- perversely, laying off workers is considered more fair.

		North Carolina apparently ranks second in the U.S. in shark attacks (pity poor Thadeus Kubinski, the only U.S. fatality last year--in August, "in St. Petersburg, Florida, he jumped off his dock and landed near a feeding shark"). I take note of this trivia because my brother is mildly obsessed with animals that attack. I have referred him to The International Shark Attack File , which tracks shark attacks all over the world. Fortunately, my brother is now safe in Colorado where such things are very rare. Recently he has become concerned, however, about mountain lions. Here is a rather affable site that tracks mountain lion attacks, which are not nearly as common as folklore would suggest. As its author sagely points out:
For some reason, humans worry much more about rare dangers than about common dangers. For example, in California, from 1986 through 1998, exactly two people died from mountain lion attacks, whereas in one year alone, over 4,000 people died in traffic accidents, including 800 pedestrians. So we should be much more worried about meeting a dangerous car rather than a dangerous lion, but we aren't, because we are much more familiar with being in a car than we are with being around an uncaged mountain lion. Rationally, if one avoids hiking because of fear of mountain lions, one should also avoid driving in a car, or crossing a street as a pedestrian. Another example: an average of several people per year die from recreational activities in the San Gabriel Mountains, yet no one has ever died from a cougar attack in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Ironically, my brother owns the same breed of dog (a 120 lb. English mastiff) culpable in a recent fatal attack in San Francisco. Has he ever worried about this? Of course not. It's a sweet dog, actually--not exactly the same mix as the killer dogs in the story. Nothing to worry about.

The account begins: Gilgamesh, two-thirds god and one-third human, is the greatest king on earth and the strongest super-human that ever existed; however, he is young and oppresses his people harshly. The people call out to the sky-god Anu, the chief god of the city, to help them. In response, Anu creates a wild man, Enkidu, out in the harsh and wild forests surrounding Gilgamesh's lands. This brute, Enkidu, has the strength of dozens of wild animals; he is to serve as the subhuman rival to the superhuman Gilgamesh.

A trapper's son, while checking on traps in the forest, discovers Enkidu running naked with the wild animals; he rushes to his father with the news. The father advises him to go into the city and take one of the temple harlots, Shamhat, with him to the forest; 1 when she sees Enkidu, she is to offer herself sexually to the wild man. If he submits to her, the trapper says, he will lose his strength and his wildness.

Shamhat meets Enkidu at the watering-hole where all the wild animals gather; she offers herself to him and he submits, instantly losing his strength and wildness, but he gains understanding and knowledge. He laments for his lost state, but the harlot offers to take him into the city where all the joys of civilization shine in their resplendence; she offers to show him Gilgamesh, the only man worthy of Enkidu's friendship.

His breakthrough came when he failed to hit the right pain relief spot for a patient.

"I was placing the electrodes and suddenly the woman started exclaiming emphatically.

"I asked her what was up and she said, 'You're going to have to teach my husband to do that,'" he said.

Dr Meloy said the stimulating wires could be connected to a signal generator, smaller than a packet of cigarettes, which could be put under the patient's buttocks.

The patient would then be given a hand control to trigger the orgasms.

The discovery must have been a hilarious scene indeed. One wonders what, exactly, the patient exclaimed emphatically? And how many times did the curious doctor (and the enthusiastic patient) test the reaction before concluding that it was exactly what they thought it was? Did they videotape the surgery? Did the patient leave her husband afterward and hook up with the talented Dr. Melroy?

The other amusing image comes from stories about lab rats who were given brain implants that could deliver orgasms (I wish I could remember where I had seen this); I seem to remember that the rats just pressed the buttons over and over until they collapsed from exhaustion. That's what I would do, anyway.

In 1942 that ability enabled him, at the age of 22 and a civilian, to become head cryptographer with the Special Operations Executive, a secret agency established in 1940 at the behest of Winston Churchill. Its mandate: plant saboteurs equipped with two-way wireless radios into occupied Europe to subvert Germany's war operations. Entrusted with overseeing these agents' activities, Marks brainstormed brilliant codemaking innovations. When he joined SOE, Marks explains in his engrossing 1998 wartime memoir Between Silk and Cyanide, field operatives encoded their messages in poems by Tennyson, Keats, Racine et al.

WHAT TYPES OF FAMILY HISTORY RECORDS DOES THE NAS HOLD?

What types of family history records does the NAS hold? For family historians the main groups of records you will find useful for your research are:

Wills and testaments
Sasines and other property records
Estate records
Valuation rolls
Taxation records
Court records
Church records
Burgh records

The second new study on fighting in the animal kingdom involved fig wasps. The researchers set out to test a theory that males would show less aggression to their close relatives.

They found the theory is wrong, and that in fact, male fig wasps will fight any wasp that may thwart their chances of having sex with a female. It is every male for himself -- if there is an available female in the fig tree.

The researchers scored aggressive behaviour on a scale from 0 to 8. (Loss of an antenna was worth half a point, and the loss of a head was worth eight.)

I think conflict over females has probably caused all of us to lose our heads a time or two, hasn't it?

Fratiglioni and colleagues found that living alone was less significant or risky than being alone. In short, those with strong social networks had less risk of developing dementias than those with very limited social networks. Living alone did pose some increased risk for developing dementias over living with partners, married or not. But more significantly, the researchers found that satisfying relationships with social contacts--among them, children, friends and relatives--were more important than frequency of contact. Further, the study found that the risks for cognitive decline are higher among those having unsatisfactory contact with children than among those having no children at all.

Still, Mr. Filo shares the frustrations of all inventors. For every Hit Clips, he has had several ingenious but unsuccessful ideas. Consider Beer Fetch Bob, a robot that Mr. Filo created with a partner in 1982. When given a command by a man watching a football game, the robot would live up to its name. Unfortunately, Bob cost $4,000; at that price, most people would rather get the beer themselves. Bob had few takers.

Now why on earth would an invention like that not have been successful?

Some colleagues invite you to the pub after work. What do you do?

a) Join them for a quick drink before heading home

b) You crawl out of the pile of empty bottles underneath your desk and somehow manage to stumble to the pub. The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur

c) Report them to your boss, calling for them to be disciplined for discussing non-work-related matters in company time

d) Enjoy a few jars with your fellow workers, even though you might regret it tomorrow morning

Mr. Fine, of N.Y.U., said one thing that drew him to the city was a workshop on "vagueness" conducted by philosophers at various institutions in the New York area. He is one of the world's leading philosophers of vagueness, which asks the question, Does vagueness come from using vague language, or is vagueness an aspect of reality itself? "There's a huge amount of interest recently in vagueness," Mr. Fine said.

Stone said people who used arsenic in the cases he investigated over 40 years appear to be ``loving-type people.''

``Most of the time it's a person that's very close to the victim who uses poison,'' he said. ``I've never had a case of poisoning that was outside the family or a real close friendship.''

I explained my proposal to Lisa H. Morrice, 44, a PR agent from California: I will write glowingly about her client's pillows if she will tell me something really humiliating about herself that I will also print.

(A colleague of mine had been skeptical of this gambit: PR folks may be desperate, he reasoned, but they have their dignity.)

Just how glowingly, Lisa wondered.

Very, I said.

"My husband dumped me for a younger woman," she said.

At this moment, I gave my doubting colleague a cheerful thumbs up.

"She was a blonde," Lisa continued. "A secretary. And I'm not ugly! And . . . " Lisa showed no signs of stopping, until I informed her she'd made the cut.

Lisa represents Houles, Europe's largest manufacturer of trimmings, fabrics and decorative accessories. Houles has a new line of richly colored, lavishly textured pillows that, in my professional judgment, provide an exciting, affordable ensemble for any living room or den. They're available locally at Calico Corners in Rockville.

The Guardian offers lots of interesting links, as it turns out. Regarding the coevolution of altruism and egoism:

A roaming egoist can be thought of as a con man, suggests Leda Cosmides, who uses evolutionary biology to study social interactions and the structure of the human mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

A con man arrives in a small town where the residents trust and cooperate with each other. He can get away with fleecing the townspeople for only so long; once everyone gets wise, he has to move on. "Good exploiters keep on the move," says Cosmides, "like keeping ahead of your creditors."

And last but not least, the article passed along by Sanders that led me to the Guardian Unlimited in the first place, which describes a study of the DNA passed along in paternal lines in England. This flies in the face of assertions by some social scientists that infidelity and illegitimacy are commonplace:

Chromosomes are shuffled from one generation to another - except for the Y-chromosome which is passed from father to son like a surname. 'What is remarkable is that both name and Y-chromosome have remained linked for more than 20 generations,' said Bryan Sykes.

'It would only take a single act of infidelity to break this link, after all. Yet after 700 years, surname and Y-chromosome remained connected in more than 50 per cent of the men. That indicates an illegitimacy rate of less than 1 per cent a generation.'