Brownian Motion

He was murdered.

Blue Cheer Dear Abby Abbie Hoffman Abie's Irish Rose Sweet Rosie O'Grady Molly Bloom

Bourke Hickenlooper Mr. Hooper Party Pooper

The Whitney The Frick The 92nd Street Y

William Carlos Williams Doc Watson Nurse Ratchet

Listen to some music!

Happy birthday, Pat. You've made some nice new friends here at Organissimo over the past year: Hammondcheese, and the ever micro-critical Scotty. Way to go!

The web-based New York Times was the source for this bucolic exotica.

Blake Gopnik is an ass.

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By January 7, 2007 Why Our Hero Leapt Onto the Tracks and We Might Not By CARA BUCKLEY MAYBE some people are more hard-wired for heroism than others. Like, for example, Wesley Autrey, the man behind a stunning rescue last week in a Manhattan subway station. People wondered, because they had asked themselves, “Could I have done what he did?” and very often the answer was no. Mr. Autrey, 50, a construction worker and Navy veteran, leapt in front of a train to rescue a stranger who had suffered a seizure and fallen onto the tracks. He covered the stranger’s body with his own as the train passed overhead. Both men lived. Mr. Autrey, who left two young daughters on the platform when he jumped, later chalked up his actions to a simple compulsion to help another in distress. But is there something in Mr. Autrey that the rest of us lack? Probably not, experts say. Except for sociopaths, humans are built to feel and act out of empathy, said Stephen G. Post, a professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University’s medical school and co-author of “Why Good Things Happen to Good People,” scheduled to be published in May. Social support has always been important to survival, and people with strong social networks thrive more than those who are isolated. New science also suggests that people have “mirror neurons,” which make them feel what someone else is experiencing, be it joy or distress. When Mr. Autrey saw the stranger, Cameron Hollopeter, 20, tumble onto the tracks, his brain reacted just as anyone else’s would. His thalamus, which absorbs sensory information, registered the fall, and sent the information to other parts of the brain for processing, said Gregory L. Fricchione, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Mr. Autrey’s amygdala, the part of the brain that mediates fear responses, was activated and sent sensory information to the motor cortex, which sent it down for emotional processing. His anterior cingulate, a sort of brain within the brain that helps people make choices, kicked in, helping trigger his decision about how to act, Dr. Fricchione said. But what happened next is harder to explain. “Propensities to help others are not necessarily based on rational calculations; in fact, they often cannot be, because rational calculations would have been too slow in this particular case,” David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, wrote in an e-mail message. “Instead, they become impulses that are followed spontaneously, either by virtue of genetic disposition or childhood/cultural training.” Still, Dr. Wilson said Mr. Autrey exhibited an extraordinarily high degree of “other-oriented” behavior. “He’s a rarity,” Dr. Wilson said. That Mr. Autrey served in the Navy most likely played a role, too — he had been trained to act quickly in adverse situations. Acts like jumping in front of trains to rescue strangers are easier for people who are prepared, said Michael McCullough, a psychology professor at the University of Miami. One of the curious aspects about Mr. Autrey’s deed is that he jumped even though his daughters, ages 4 and 6, were at his side. Normally, experts say, the power of the parent-child dynamic would overwhelm any tendency to put yourself in harm’s way to rescue a stranger. Then again, suggested Dr. Fricchione, people who already feel attachment, like the kind toward their children, may be predisposed to act more altruistically to others. Mr. Autrey was also one of three people who helped Mr. Hollopeter when he first collapsed, convulsing, before tripping into the tracks. An empathetic connection was most likely forged then, too. Considering that people tend to act more altruistically toward those who fall within their perceived group, Dr. Post said, it was notable that differences in race — Mr. Autrey is black, Mr. Hollopeter is white — didn’t enter the picture. “Not only is he going beyond the narrow interest that we all seem to have toward our children, but he is reaching out toward a shared common humanity. And he’s doing it across a racial line,” Dr. Post said. “And I think that’s really impressive.” No single factor explains heroism, said Samuel P. Oliner, a sociology professor at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif. Yet in interviewing Holocaust rescuers and 911 responders, he found that people who acted heroically often came from more nurturing families and were imbued with an ethic of caring, empathy and compassion. “The other people, the bystanders, are not bad people,” Dr. Oliner said. “But they have been cut from a slightly different cloth.”

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By January 7, 2007 Attack of the Zombie Computers Is a Growing Threat, Experts Say By JOHN MARKOFF In their persistent quest to breach the Internet’s defenses, the bad guys are honing their weapons and increasing their firepower. With growing sophistication, they are taking advantage of programs that secretly install themselves on thousands or even millions of personal computers, band these computers together into an unwitting army of zombies, and use the collective power of the dragooned network to commit Internet crimes. These systems, called botnets, are being blamed for the huge spike in spam that bedeviled the Internet in recent months, as well as fraud and data theft. Security researchers have been concerned about botnets for some time because they automate and amplify the effects of viruses and other malicious programs. What is new is the vastly escalating scale of the problem — and the precision with which some of the programs can scan computers for specific information, like corporate and personal data, to drain money from online bank accounts and stock brokerages. “It’s the perfect crime, both low-risk and high-profit,” said Gadi Evron, a computer security researcher for an Israeli-based firm, Beyond Security, who coordinates an international volunteer effort to fight botnets. “The war to make the Internet safe was lost long ago, and we need to figure out what to do now.” Last spring, a program was discovered at a foreign coast guard agency that systematically searched for documents that had shipping schedules, then forwarded them to an e-mail address in China, according to David Rand, chief technology officer of Trend Micro, a Tokyo-based computer security firm. He declined to identify the agency because it is a customer. Although there is a wide range of estimates of the overall infection rate, the scale and the power of the botnet programs have clearly become immense. David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology researcher who is a co-founder of Damballa, a start-up company focusing on controlling botnets, said the consensus among scientists is that botnet programs are present on about 11 percent of the more than 650 million computers attached to the Internet. Plagues of viruses and other malicious programs have periodically swept through the Internet since 1988, when there were only 60,000 computers online. Each time, computer security managers and users have cleaned up the damage and patched holes in systems. In recent years, however, such attacks have increasingly become endemic, forcing increasingly stringent security responses. And the emergence of botnets has alarmed not just computer security experts, but also specialists who created the early Internet infrastructure. “It represents a threat but it’s one that is hard to explain,” said David J. Farber, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who was an Internet pioneer. “It’s an insidious threat, and what worries me is that the scope of the problem is still not clear to most people.” Referring to Windows computers, he added, “The popular machines are so easy to penetrate, and that’s scary.” So far botnets have predominantly infected Windows-based computers, although there have been scattered reports of botnet-related attacks on computers running the Linux and Macintosh operating systems. The programs are often created by small groups of code writers in Eastern Europe and elsewhere and distributed in a variety of ways, including e-mail attachments and downloads by users who do not know they are getting something malicious. They can even be present in pirated software sold on online auction sites. Once installed on Internet-connected PCs, they can be controlled using a widely available communications system called Internet Relay Chat, or I.R.C. ShadowServer, a voluntary organization of computer security experts that monitors botnet activity, is now tracking more than 400,000 infected machines and about 1,450 separate I.R.C. control systems, which are called Command & Control servers. The financial danger can be seen in a technical report presented last summer by a security researcher who analyzed the information contained in a 200-megabyte file that he had intercepted. The file had been generated by a botnet that was systematically harvesting stolen information and then hiding it in a secret location where the data could be retrieved by the botnet master. The data in the file had been collected during a 30-day period, according to Rick Wesson, chief executive of Support Intelligence, a San Francisco-based company that sells information on computer security threats to corporations and federal agencies. The data came from 793 infected computers and it generated 54,926 log-in credentials and 281 credit-card numbers. The stolen information affected 1,239 companies, he said, including 35 stock brokerages, 86 bank accounts, 174 e-commerce accounts and 245 e-mail accounts. Sensor information collected by his company is now able to identify more than 250,000 new botnet infections daily, Mr. Wesson said. “We are losing this war badly,” he said. “Even the vendors understand that we are losing the war.” According to the annual intelligence report of MessageLabs, a New York-based computer security firm, more than 80 percent of all spam now originates from botnets. Last month, for the first time ever, a single Internet service provider generated more than one billion spam e-mail messages in a 24-hour period, according to a ranking system maintained by Trend Micro, the computer security firm. That indicated that machines of the service providers’ customers had been woven into a giant network, with a single control point using them to pump out spam. The extent of the botnet threat was underscored in recent months by the emergence of a version of the stealthy program that adds computers to the botnet. The recent version of the program, which security researchers are calling “rustock,” infected several hundred thousand Internet-connected computers and then began generating vast quantities of spam e-mail messages as part of a “pump and dump” stock scheme. The author of the program, who is active on Internet technical discussion groups and claims to live in Zimbabwe, has found a way to hide the infecting agent in such a way that it leaves none of the traditional digital fingerprints that have been used to detect such programs. Moreover, although rustock is currently being used for distributing spam, it is a more general tool that can be used with many other forms of illegal Internet activity. “It could be used for other types of malware as well,” said Joe Stewart, a researcher at SecureWorks, an Atlanta-based computer security firm. “It’s just a payload delivery system with extra stealth.” Last month Mr. Stewart tracked trading around a penny stock being touted in a spam campaign. The Diamant Art Corporation was trading for 8 cents on Dec. 15 when a series of small transactions involving 11,532,726 shares raised the price of the stock to 11 cents. After the close of business that day, a Friday, a botnet began spewing out millions of spam messages, he said. On the following Monday, the stock went first to 19 cents per share and then ultimately to 25 cents a share. He estimated that if the spammer then sold the shares purchased at the peak on Monday he would realize a $20,000 profit. (By Dec. 20, it was down to 12 cents.) Computer security experts warn that botnet programs are evolving faster than security firms can respond and have now come to represent a fundamental threat to the viability of the commercial Internet. The problem is being compounded, they say, because many Internet service providers are either ignoring or minimizing the problem. “It’s a huge scientific, policy, and ultimately social crisis, and no one is taking any responsibility for addressing it,” said K. C. Claffy , a veteran Internet researcher at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The $6 billion computer security industry offers a growing array of products and services that are targeted at network operators, corporations and individual computer users. Yet the industry has a poor track record so far in combating the plague, according to computer security researchers. “This is a little bit like airlines advertising how infrequently they crash into mountains,” said Mr. Dagon, the Georgia Tech researcher. The malicious software is continually being refined by “black hat” programmers to defeat software that detects the malicious programs by tracking digital fingerprints. A slight change in the code signature can help programs elude detection. Some botnet-installed programs have been identified that exploit features of the Windows operating system, like the ability to recognize recently viewed documents. Botnet authors assume that any personal document that a computer owner has used recently will also be of interest to a data thief, Mr. Dagon said. In some cases, people find that their outdated systems are simply overwhelmed by the attackers. Serry Winkler, a sales representative in Denver, said that she had turned off the network-security software provided by her Internet service provider because it slowed performance to a crawl on her PC, which was running Windows 98. A few months ago four sheriff’s deputies pounded on her apartment door to confiscate the PC, which they said was being used to order goods from Sears with a stolen credit card. The computer, it turned out, had been commandeered by an intruder who was using it remotely. “I’m a middle-aged single woman living here for six years,” she said. “Do I sound like a terrorist?” She is now planning to buy a more up-to-date PC, she said. Home

January 3, 2007 Michigan: Man Rescued From Trash Truck By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A man who awoke inside a garbage truck that was about to compact its load on Thursday in Oak Park, Mich., was rescued after making a cellphone call to the police, the authorities said. The man was scavenging for bottles when he fell asleep in a Dumpster, said Lt. Mike Pousak of the Oak Park police. He awoke when the container was unloaded into a truck. He told the police he did not know which truck he was in but gave a dispatcher the location of the Dumpster he fell asleep in, Lieutenant Pousak said. The police checked several trucks, including one in a parking lot. “An officer went and pounded on the side of the truck and somebody pounded back,” Lieutenant Pousak said. The man was not hurt.

Juanita Hall Hall Johnson Hall Overton

Rabbit Angstrom Strom Thurmond Thurman Arnold

Freddie Freeloader Clem Kadiddlehopper Cauliflower McPugg Tom Turnipseed Mr. Potato Head Dan Quayle

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By December 25, 2006 Sports of The Times A Saints Super Bowl Title Isn’t a Giant Leap of Faith By WILLIAM C. RHODEN EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. Until a few days ago, I dismissed the buzz about the Saints reaching the Super Bowl as romantic hype. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we began looking for something, anything, to ease the suffering of a region, a state and a city. The Saints became it. New Orleans, the city, is persevering; New Orleans, the professional football team, is rising. Last week, I attended a performance sponsored by Jazz at Lincoln Center featuring the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the musical director of the program and a New Orleans native. Marsalis made a bold prediction from the bandstand. He spoke about the city coming back, being revitalized, and he said the Saints would reach the Super Bowl and win the championship. I thought: What faith. In Marsalis’s lifetime, there has been no consistent history of winning professional football in New Orleans. It’s a wonder the city has any football fans at all. After the set, I asked Marsalis about his prediction, specifically if he really felt the Saints were good enough to win a Super Bowl. He said this wasn’t about sports and statistics. “It’s a spiritual thing,” he said. After watching the victory yesterday, Marsalis said in a telephone interview: “You got to believe. Sometimes you believe in something and it might not come true until 20 years later. Me and my brother were at the very first Saints game when John Gilliam ran back the first kickoff for a touchdown. We said, ‘We’re going win a championship.’ Now we’re old men, still looking.” There’s an inherent danger in placing the hopes of a decimated state and city on the shoulder pads of a pro sports team. It’s a nice story, as long as the team wins. What happens when the bubble bursts and the team loses? Does the spirit die? Marsalis was born in New Orleans in 1961. The city was awarded a pro football franchise five years later, and throughout his early life and teenage years, the Saints were losers. “But the players were always involved in the community,” he said. “When I was in elementary school, Howard Stevens came to the school to present us with some awards. Man, I’ll never forget that. “Everybody on that team stood for something in the community. That’s what I remember.” Including this season, the Saints have had seven winning seasons. Marsalis was 18 when the Saints enjoyed their first nonlosing season, 8-8. He was 26 in 1987 when the Saints finished with their first winning record, 12-3 (during a strike year). He will be 45 if the Saints march into the Super Bowl. Last season, the Saints were thrown into chaos with the rest of their city. Things got so bad that Aaron Brooks, the Saints’ starting quarterback at the time, blasted the team’s owner, Tom Benson, and the National Football League. The Saints lived a vagabond existence. Brooks told reporters that the league and Benson could have done much more to accommodate the players and coaches. The Saints had to use the San Antonio Water Works building as a temporary headquarters, and a high school baseball field for practices. Their weight room was inside a tent. The ultimate slight came when the Saints were ordered to play their first home game at Giants Stadium in front of a hostile crowd. Things do come back around: Yesterday, the Saints turned the Giants’ crowd against the home team. By halftime, the fans were calling for Coach Tom Coughlin’s head. The Saints’ surge this season is inspirational but also a story of good front-office moves and luck. The Saints began the season with 27 new players. They drafted Reggie Bush — not exactly rocket science — but also traded Donte’ Stallworth in anticipation of Hofstra’s Marques Colston being a solid receiver as a rookie, and took a calculated chance on quarterback Drew Brees. New Orleans clinched the National Football Conference South title last week. If Dallas loses to Philadelphia tonight, or if the Saints beat Carolina next week, New Orleans will clinch the conference’s No. 2 seeding. After the victory, Deuce McAllister, the running back who has been with the Saints since 2001, said: “I haven’t won 10 games since high school. That is definitely a special feeling just to be able to walk onto the field after last year and some of the things we went through.” This is a quirky franchise. Benson is quirky, too. I was thumbing through the Saints’ 2006 media guide, looking for the team’s history of wins and losses going back to 1967. That history only went back to 1985, although the team began play in 1967. I kept flipping pages: 1985, that was it. Not coincidentally, that was the year Benson took over as the Saints’ owner. Beginning with the 2002 media guide, the Saints would not recognize franchise history before 1985. Keep this man away from your history department. The Saints’ history in the Benson era is seven winning seasons. There were no winning seasons from 1967 to 1984. The Saints, the Chargers and the Jets are great stories for different reasons. One franchise is recovering from the effects of a natural disaster, another (the Jets) from a series of man-made blunders. The Chargers are the hot new face on the block. “Listen,” Marsalis said. “We’ll take whatever we can get. We got to win a championship sometime; this is as good a time as any.” I’ll consider jumping on the Saints’ Mardi Gras float. When Marsalis predicts, I’ll listen. E-mail: wcr@nytimes.com

I find it difficult to muster much enthusiasm for a celebration whose chief icon is a bare aluminum pole. I'm all for the airing of grievances, however: Seinfeld and its enduring legacy of silliness.

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By December 23, 2006 Guest Columnist A Holiday for Us All By ORLANDO PATTERSON Christmas seems to bring out the worst in America’s culture warriors. The Christian right continues its crusade against those waging “war against Christmas.” Multiculturalists have nearly banished “Merry Christmas” and “Silent Night” from the public domain and are now going after outdoor Christmas trees. Atheist activists like Sam Harris are goaded into defending the outing of their Christmas trees with the argument that it’s all secular anyway. Harris is only partly right. The whole truth about Christmas is far more interesting and reveals why all can enjoy it. It is the perfect example of America’s mainstream process, a national rite that dissolves the boundaries between sacred and secular, pagan and civilized, insiders and outsiders. From the very beginning Christians have always had a tenuous hold on the holiday. The tradition of celebrating Jesus’ birth on the 25th of December was invented in the fourth century in a proselytical move by the Church Fathers that was almost too clever. The pre-Christian winter solstice celebrations of the rebirth of the sun, especially the Roman Saturnalia and Iranian Mithraic festivals, were recast as the Christian doctrine of the re-birth of the Son of God. Like many such syntheses, it is often not clear who was culturally appropriating whom. Certainly, throughout the Middle Ages, Christmas festivities like the 12 days of saturnalian debauchery, the veneration of the holly and mistletoe, and the Feast of Fools were all continuities from pagan Europe. For this reason, the Puritans abolished Christmas. As late as the 1860s, Christmas was still a regular work and school day in Massachusetts. By then, however, its reconstruction was well on the way in the rest of the nation. America drew on the many variants of Christmas brought over by immigrants. It is telling that, in the making of Santa Claus, it is the English Father Christmas, derived from the pagan Lord of Misrule, rather than the more Christian Dutch St. Nicholas that dominates. The commercialization of the holiday began as early as the 1820s, and by the last quarter of the 19th century a thoroughly unique American complex had emerged — ornaments, Christmas trees and the wrapping of gift boxes. Christmas further evolved in the 20th century with department store displays, Santas and parades, the outdoor Christmas tree spectacle, postage cards and secular Christmas songs. All American ethnic groups contributed to this national ritual. The re-Christianization of the holiday emerged in tandem with its commercialization during the 19th century. Secularists did not distort or steal Christmas from Christians: in America they made it together. What’s more, as the cultural historian Karal Marling shows, the festival’s most compassionate aspect, charity, came mainly from the influence of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” which, however, drew heavily on the largely invented accounts of a romanticized Merrie Olde England by the American travel writer Washington Irving. The outcome of all this is a uniquely American national festival perfectly attuned to the demotic pulse of the common culture: its openness and vitality, its transcending appropriation of eclectic sources, its seductive materialism. It is, further, a mainstream process that dovetails exquisitely with more local expressions of America like Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, the former a reinvention of a minor Jewish rite, the latter a pure invention, in a manner similar to the wholly fictitious Scottish highland tradition that pipes up around the New Year. Kwanzaa borrowed heavily from Hanukkah, right down to the menorah, in fashioning the American art of mirroring the mainstream while doing one’s own ethnic thing. Decorating public Christmas trees with menorahs should be a soothing natural development in this glorious hall of cultural mirrors. Ejecting Christmas from the public domain makes little sense, and not simply because religion only partly contributed to its emergence as a national rite. It should be possible to enjoy Christmas while recognizing its muted Christian element, even though one is neither religious nor Christian, in much the same way one might enjoy the glories of a Botticelli or Fra Angelico in spite of the unrelenting Christian presence in their art. In much the same way, indeed, that one might enjoy jazz, another gift of the mainstream, without much caring for black culture; or the American English language that unites us, in spite of Anglo-Saxon roots that are as deep as those of Father Christmas. Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, is a guest columnist.

Anne of Green Gables Betty Grable Clark Gable

Gates McFadden Beverly Crusher Beverly D'Angelo Angelo Dundee Jimmy Mundy McGeorge Bundy

I like "Dawn Dance" by Steve Eliovson. Anyone have any information on this South African guitarist, who seems to have cut this one record, and then disappeared off the face of the Earth?

John O'Hara Elizabeth Taylor Velvet Brown

Vic Dickenson R.Q. Dickerson Nancy Dickerson

Brownie: I picked it up due to the historical interest. Musicially, it doesn't do too much for me. It's fairly stiff and run-of-the-mill Dixieland-type stuff. Only Don Ewell manages to catch your attention sometimes. The sound is also rather muddled on this private tape. Thanks for the review. I guess I'll pass.