Three quarks for Muster Mark 
Make sure you are very alert before reading The Poor Man’s exposition of The Standard Model of Political Reporting (it’s analogous, apparently, to the three-quark model of baryons).
A brief excerpt: “Astute observers will note that each candidate shares exactly one candidaton with every other candidate, and that each shared candidaton is unique to a pair of candidates. For example: John Edwards shares only S with only Wes Clark, shares only nV with only Dean, and shares only nO with only Kerry. This symmetry may seem suprising; but, in fact, it is a requirement of the stable 4-candidate system, one of only two configurations allowed by the laws of political discourse.”
The disappeared
The Médecins Sans Frontières list of the most under-reported humanitarian events of 2003 makes for very sobering reading.
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1. Tens of thousands seek refuge in Chad from wars in Sudan and Central African Republic |
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2. Ongoing oppression of civilians, war and dislocation in Chechnya |
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3. Tenth year of civil war in Burundi lowers life expectancy to 40, causes massive dislocation |
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4. Three million displaced in Columbia, infrastructure destroyed, violence & disease rampant, ‘drug war’ ruins economy |
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5. Daily terror and disease in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo pushes 20-year death toll past three million |
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6. Annual death toll from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa reaches two million because $1 treatment is too expensive |
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7. Twelve years of violence, displacement, flooding and drought make Somalia the world’s most destitute country |
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8. Millions of refugees fleeing starvation and terror in North Korea struggle in fear and deprivation in hostile China |
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9. ‘Free’ trade agreements deprive millions of AIDS victims in Southern Africa and elsewhere of affordable treatment |
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10. War, displacement and lack of medical care produces massive malnutrition in Ivory Coast and Liberia |
How to Save the World comments: “Why aren’t the media covering these stories? None of them is physically close to the West. None of them involves countries with resources of strategic importance to the West. Almost all of them are ongoing, so there is nothing ‘new’ to report each day. None of the people in these countries has resorted to terrorist attacks against the West to bring attention to our indifference to their plight. And all of them are intractible problems, and therefore issues that those of us in the West would rather not know about.”
What’s equally troubling is that there are good stories to tell about the developing world that are never reported, either. Unless you really dig through conventional media, most of the world’s population never appears.
Periodic tables
Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel are preparing a book on the scientific, visual and cultural history of periodic tables. I want to be first in the queue when it comes out.