For those of you who have been living under a rock, a quick explanation. A gateway drug is a drug which is known to lead to the use of “harder”, more damaging and addictive drugs. Gateway drugs are often seen as innocuous in and of themselves and it’s government flacks we need to tell us that they’re actually dangerous gateways to worse substances. When it’s convenient, of course, for those governments. They don’t get antsy about all gateway drugs, of course. Some are openly tolerated. Like coffee, for instance. No kidding. The stats are kind of surprising, really: Girls and …

So it seems that since the release of the film The Day After Tomorrow, everything in the literati media (such as what you find on Arts & Letters Daily) is saying the film is alarmist… and yet, other environment-related pieces are also showing up in somewhat higher proportions. I’m not sure what I think about “alarmism” as a political strategy. As with everything, there are pros and cons that are difficult to weigh. I guess the thing we need to do is think about what’s at stake, and what are the probable (and possible) consequences of our strategies.

Here’s a piece on the obesity epidemic in America: its causes, and possible solutions.

There’s a weird but interesting expedition being documented over at a page calledTravel Afghanistan. A small proportion of Afghan children have a distinctively European appearance, sometimes blonde or red-haired, quite different from the dark Asian looks of most Afghans. Western explorers have always wondered whether they might be descended from the Greek soldiers in Alexander’s army whom we know settled in Asia. The Afghans themselves are proud of this tradition: Marco Polo records that in the thirteenth century the Kings of Badakshan (the remote eastern part of Afghanistan that abuts China) claimed descent from the Greek conqueror. These people may …

A review of Brian Green’s latest physics popularization by Freeman J. Dyson. I have a book in my bookshelf waiting for me to read, by this Green guy. Hm. I wish I had more books by Dyson, actually. He’s fascinating. Especially The Sun, The Genome, and the Internet, which I think is the title of one of his monographs. Ah, yes, it is. My old online acquaintance Stefan sent me a tape of the title lecture of this book and I loved it dearly. Wow, Stefan’s written a lot of reviews over at Amazon.