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Does This Make My Nose Look Big?

Considered an indicator of self-awareness, mirror self-recognition (MSR) has long seemed limited to humans and apes. In both phylogeny and human ontogeny, MSR is thought to correlate with higher forms of empathy and altruistic behavior … We report a successful MSR elephant study and report striking parallels in the progression of responses to mirrors among apes, dolphins, and elephants. These parallels suggest convergent cognitive evolution most likely related to complex sociality and cooperation.

Some scientists took a more skeptical view, reflecting the controversy that has long engulfed the field of animal intelligence generally and the meaning of the mirror recognition test in particular. “Far too much has been made of a very trivial task in all these mirror experiments, and it has lately reached some dizzyingly bizarre heights,” said Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool in England.

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War On Biodiversity

Julie MacDonald … has been deputy assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife and parks since 2004 [making] decisions on protecting endangered species [and] has repeatedly refused to go along with staff reports … President Bush’s appointees have added far fewer species to the protected list than did the administrations of either Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush [at] rate of about 10 a year. Under Clinton … 64 a year, and under George H.W. Bush … 59 a year … MacDonald [is] a civil engineer by training … In a few instances, federal judges have overturned decisions that MacDonald had influenced. After she declared that the endangered Santa Barbara and Sonoma salamanders were no longer “distinct populations” entitled to protection [a judge] ruled that MacDonald had arbitrarily instructed Fish and Wildlife scientists to downgrade the two species even though an agency scientist concluded that “genetics state otherwise”.

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A City Of Ghosts

The commotion in the streets — goods spilling across sidewalks, traffic snarled under a searing sun — once prompted the uninitiated to conclude that Baghdad was reviving. Of course, they were seeing the city through a windshield, the often angry voices on the streets inaudible. Today, with traffic dwindling, stores shuttered and streets empty by nightfall, that conceit no longer holds … “If they brought the Israelis, the Jews, and they ruled Iraq, it would be better,” said Karima, her face framed by a black veil. Sunlight bathed the room; electricity, as usual, was cut off. “It would be a million times better than a Sunni, a million times better than a Shiite.”

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Web 2.0 Out Of Beta

Both MySpace and Facebook lost visitors in September, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a Web-tracking service. The number of unique U.S. visitors at MySpace fell 4% to 47.2 million from 49.2 million in August, and the number of visitors to Facebook fell 12% to 7.8 million from 8.9 million.

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Seeing Without Hearing

Someone who sees without hearing is much more uneasy than someone who hears without seeing. In this there is something characteristic of the sociology of the big city. Interpersonal relationships in big cities are distinguished by a marked preponderance of the activity of the eye over the activity of the ear. The main reason for this is the public means of transportation. Before the development of buses, railroads and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one another.

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Skid Row Cooties

Image Detective Tricia Hauck finished a burglary investigation at Pete’s Café and returned to the Central Division station near Skid Row. Her left foot started to feel uncomfortably warm. She wondered if it had anything to do with an ankle fracture she suffered on vacation in Mexico a few months earlier. Within a half hour, the warm feeling turned into pain so excruciating that her leg went numb. Unable to walk, the 39-year-old burglary-investigations supervisor was carried to a patrol car and rushed by her partner to an emergency room. An MRI detected fluid around her bone. Later that day, a surgeon cut into her foot and removed an abscess. The diagnosis: Skid Row staph [MRSA]. Cops are so accustomed to seeing people with oozing boils that they call them Skid Row cooties … Skid Row [has] become a giant petri dish … Nearly 1,500 homeless people living and sleeping on the streets, with little or no access to proper hygiene, soap or warm water, make it an ideal breeding ground for the bacteria.

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Hot Zone

If you are an American admitted to a hospital in Amsterdam, Toronto, or Copenhagen these days, you’ll be considered a biohazard. Doctors and nurses will likely put you into quarantine while they determine whether you’re carrying methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a deadly organism that is increasingly common stateside, especially in [US] hospitals. And if you test positive for methicillin-resistant staph, or MRSA, these European and Canadian hospital workers will don protective gloves, masks, and gowns each time they approach you, and then strip off the gear and scrub down vigorously when they leave your room … In the United States, MRSA kills an estimated 13,000 people every year, which means that a hospital patient is 10 times as likely to die of MRSA as an inmate is to be murdered in prison.

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Frying Tonight

The Israeli army dropped phosphorous bombs on Hezbollah guerrilla targets during their war in Lebanon this summer, an Israeli Cabinet minister said Sunday, confirming Lebanese allegations … Hezbollah, meanwhile, has been criticized for failing to distinguish between Israeli civilian and military targets. Human Rights Watch also said the militant group fired cluster bombs into civilian areas of northern Israel during the fighting.

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No Plan B

Two years ago, when there were 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and effectively zero Iraqi forces, the expectation was that once the Iraqis were trained up, security would improve. Now there are 140,000 Americans and 130,000 Iraqi troops, and parts of the country—Baghdad among them—are worse off than ever. No one knows what to do about it. “There is no plan B,” says one senior Pentagon official, not wanting his name on such a gloomy assessment.

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Bush Cutting and Running From Iraq

So the emerging Bush “plan” for Iraq seems to involve cutting the country into several pieces with a partition into Syrian (western), Kurdish (northern), and Iranian (southern) spheres of influence. And then running away, presumably to avoid paying for the broken pieces. It’s sadly ironic that it seems like the U.S. is coming to realise that the only players with real power to salvage the situation are those members of the Axis of Awful, Iran and Syria. Of course, conspicuously absent from these leaks so far is any talk of Turkey’s role, or its willingness to see a de facto Kurdish state emerge on its borders.

Agitation is growing in Congress for alternatives to the administration’s strategy of keeping Iraq in one piece … interest appears to be growing in several broad ideas. One would be some kind of effort to divide the country along regional lines … Many senior Republicans with close ties to the administration also believe that essential to a successful strategy in Iraq are an aggressive new diplomatic initiative to secure a Middle East peace settlement and a new effort to engage Iraq’s neighbors, such as Syria and Iran, in helping stabilize the country.

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