Saturday Links for the Week – May 19, 2007

What’s Important This Week:

Losing the War on Disease: Inevitably, an NIH/WHO study shows, almost all dangerous infectious diseases are morphing to forms that are resistant to all antimicrobials, leaving their victims, mostly (for now) in struggling nations, condemned to die. Part of the problem is overprescription and misprescription of antibiotics and antivirals. Part of it is ignorance and poor hygiene. But part of the problem, the one we refuse to acknowledge, is that it is unnatural for any creature to live in crowded conditions. Infectious diseases are nature’s way of saying “too many, and too close together”, and solving the problem to rebalance populations for the benefit of all-life-on-Earth. When will we listen, pay attention, change?

The Fragility of Having to Spend More Than You Earn: A NYT story profiles a family that, like the average US family, now spends more each year than it earns, and depends utterly on increases in value of their home and their investments and low interest rates on ever-growing debt. If these things start to drop in value, as they are now, or if inflation or interest rates spike, there is no way out except bankruptcy.

Yet More Poison from China: This week it’s diethylene glycol, a cheap, toxic replacement for glycerin, in toothpaste. Time to shut the door on these criminal corporatist clowns, and jail the negligent importers, before thousands die.

Last Chance to Prove String Theory?: Scientists refuse to believe that nature would play the ultimate trick on us: Making space infinitely large and complex and the microcosm infinitely small and complex, with no start, no end, and no ‘fundamental building blocks’. If she has done that (and my instincts say she has), our much-sought ‘grand unifying theory of everything’ will elude us forever. As Liz Kolbert reports in the New Yorker this week, string theory, the wildly convoluted and complex theory requiring 11 dimensions, is on the line when the hugely expensive new European CERN accelerator tries once again to prove the existence of hypothesized particles. If they fail, theory may end up being just that, forever unprovable, and the end of the line for those seeking Nobels for making further theories unnecessary.

Discover What Toxins Are In Your Cosmetics: EWG’s Skin Deep cosmetic safety database rates the safety of 25,000 brand-name cosmetic products and tells you what dangerous and untested ingredients are in each. (Heh…now we need a Deep Throat food safety database to tell us about the ingredients in fast and processed foods.)

Corporatists Telling You to ‘Cease & Desist’? Here’s Help: More and more oligopolies are suing customers who find workarounds to their price-gouging. Now, the Berkman/EFF Chilling Effects Clearinghouse can translate the threatening letter you received intounderstandable terms and tell you how — and if — to respond to their threats. Thanks to my sister-in-law Morva Bowman for the link.

US Health System the Worst of Affluent Nations’: A lesson in how to let greedy health industry oligopolies give you less for more.

Thoughts of the Week (both, as it happens, appear on the same page of this week’s New Yorker):

From ‘Atheists with Attitude’ by Anthony Gottlieb, reviewing several recent books on the problems of modern religion (yep, including The God Delusion):

Unknown Age, by WS Merwin

For all the features it hoards and displays
age seems to be without substance at any time

whether morning or evening it is a moment of air
held between the hands like a stunned bird

while I stand remembering light in the trees
of another century on a continent long submerged

with no way of telling whether the leaves at that time
felt memory as they were touching the day

and no knowledge of what happened to the reflections
on the pond’s surface that never were seen again

the bird lies still while the light goes on flying