Chinese herbal medicines are well-known for often containing rare animal ingredients like tiger bone. In my opinion, a lot of this probably originated more from social/political pressure to make remedies for the Emperor or nobility from rare ingredients than from any increase in efficacy over plant materials, but regardless of the origin it's a common feature of Chinese herbal formulas, and most practitioners seem to accept it without question.

So I was pleased to stumble on this excerpt from the work of Sun Simiao. Sun was a Tang dynasty physician born around 581; he wrote the classic herbalism treatise Prescriptions for Emergencies Worth a Thousand Gold and is so highly regarded in the history of Chinese medicine that he has been worshiped as the "King of Medicine". He wrote:

From early times famous persons frequently used certain living creatures for the treatment of diseases, in order to thus help others in situations of need. To be sure, it is said: "Little esteem for the beast and high esteem for man," but when love of life is concerned, man and animal are equal. If one's cattle are mistreated, no use can be expected from it; object and sentiments suffer equally. How much more applicable is this to man!

Whoever destroys life in order to save life places life at an even greater distance. This is my good reason for the fact that I do not suggest the use of any living creature as medicament in the present collection of prescriptions.

You may know that Issac Newton is a contender for the greatest physicist of all time. You may know that he invented calculus to amuse himself. But did you know he was a serious alchemist? Natalie Angier discusses Newton's fascination with alchemy in The Hindu.

How did one of the greatest scientists of all time get caught up in what is usually thought of today as superstition? She cites William Newman, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University in Bloomington, who has extensively studied Newton's alchemical work. "Alchemy was synonymous with chemistry," says Newman, "and chemistry was much bigger than transmutation."

Security expert Bruce Schneier discusses a recent case where Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old marketing college student in Silicon Valley of partially Egyptian ancestry, found a big ugly tracking device attached to his car. Turns out it was placed there by the FBI -- sans a warrant, in keeping with the recent Ninth Circuit Court ruling.

The scary part is that all Afifi had done was be friends with a guy who made a blog post noting that it's logistically easy to carry out a suicide bombing. The friend didn't say such attacks were good, recommend them, or anything like that: he noted that "if terrorism were actually a legitimate threat, think about how many fucking malls would have blown up already," since such attacks are not difficult. That's it: a legitimate analysis of a common terrorist tactic.

Schneier says the case raises three questions: 1) Is the FBI's car surveillance technology that lame? 2) If they're doing this to someone so tangentially connected to a vaguely bothersome post on an obscure blog, just how many of us have tracking devices on our cars right now? (I've been net active since the late 80s. I've posted much more interesting stuff than the post by Afifi's friend in question. And you're reading my stuff...we might as well all paint "suspect" on our foreheads.) 3) How many people are being paid to read obscure blogs, looking for more college students to surveil?

One amusing bit, though: the FBI demanded that Afifi return the gizmo. A note to my fans in domestic surveillance: it's finder's keepers as far as I'm concerned, and without a court order to the contrary any spook gear I find will end up on eBay. Or maybe just shipped directly to WikiLeaks for an informative dissection.

Zeldas at PDF, sitting in the middle of a field writing. Today's exercise: write a pet story

if I try to tell you stories about my dogs
what comes is always some misadventure
some loss and grief, or some dog crime or medical emergency
because that's the easily tell-able part

i can tell you the story of Chewbacca swallowing my earring, or Piccolo's last days, or the time Kato bit me
but that's not the truth of my time with them

that's something quieter and less effable
sitting on the couch with a dog head in your lap
walking the fields together in the sun and snow
it's mutual trust, living with wolf-cousin whose jaws could crush my bones
it's knowing there's someone who will welcome me home

The latest SurveyUSA poll of California voters has Democratic incumbent Barbra Boxer narrowly ahead 46% to 43% over Republican Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard who got a golden parachute for running a once-proud tech company into the ground (the source of much of the fortune she's spending to buy this Senate seat) and is campaign as a demagogic know-nothing science denailist. I'm not a fan of Boxer, but a win for the Palin-endorsed Fiorina would be a sure sign that the U.S. is no longer interested in being a civilized nation; for the love of whatever gods you believe in, if you live in California, please help see that Fiorina is defeated.

Democrat Jerry Brown is up 47% to 43% over Republican Meg Whitman in the Governor's race. Brown has more than doubled his lead among Hispanics since it came to light that despite her strong rhetoric on immigration, Whitman employed an undocumented immigrant as a maid for several years, throwing her under the bus once she became a political liability. (Has anyone else noticed how "throwing someone under the bus" has become a favorite political metaphor the past few years?)

I have fond memories of Brown being the last actual liberal-leaning candidate in the 1992 presidential race, holding on to his primary challenge against moderate conservative Bill Clinton; and I like that Brown took a strong stance against Proposition 8 and for constitutional democracy when he was Attorney General. I'd like to see him back in the governor's mansion.

Polling better than either Boxer or Brown is the chronic: Proposition 19, which would legalize recreational cannabis in the state, would pass 48% to 41% according to this poll. The demographics on this are quite interesting: men favor it 54% to 38%, while women are just about evenly split, 43% in favor, 44% against. Voters 18 to 34 and 50 to 64 both strongly favor it (60% to 30% and 50% to 38% respectively), voters 35 to 49 are split 47% to 45%, and voters 65 and older are strongly against it, 48% to 36%. Whites and blacks favor it by substantial margins; Hispanics and Asians are evenly split. I can see older voters being against it, and the families of more recent immigrants being more comfortable with keeping the law as it is also makes sense; I've no idea about the gender gap, or why there's a "donut hole" in support by age group here -- did "Just Say No" really bend the minds of my generation that much?

Republicans and conservatives oppose it; Democrats, independents, liberals and moderates favor it by large margins. This has not gone unnoticed; some Democratic strategists are exploring putting cannabis initiatives on the ballot in Colorado, Nevada, and Washington in 2012 to help energize young liberal voters -- rather like the GOP's homophobic ballot initiatives (along with a stunning amount of voter fraud) helped Bush II win in 2004.

Two signs that the End Times are surely nigh:

• The new Vdara hotel in Vegas has a problem with its pool. It's not the chlorine balance or a leak: it's an accidental death ray. The glass skyscraper is focusing sunlight to a degree that's burning people and has melted plastic. The "solar convergence phenomenon" was taken into account when the hotel was designed, and owner MGM Mirage hired a consultant -- who placed a filter over the window, reducing the effect by 70 percent, apparently not enough. (Imagine if this filter were to be removed, bwah-ha-ha.)
• The upcoming Commonwealth Games in Delhi also have a problem: monkeys. Rhesus macaques often cause property damage and occasionally attack people (they were indirectly responsible for the death of Delhi's Deputy Mayor S.S. Bajwa), but are protected by devout Hindus. Delhi has decided that the solution to monkey problems is more monkeys; in a scene that could be part of the next remake of Planet of the Apes, officials are deploying langurs, a larger species of monkey, to keep the macaques at bay.

  (Yes, I know monkeys aren't apes.)

This week's Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a poem about books.

someday, maybe soon, someone will write
the last poem about books

(maybe this is it?)

a vanishing species perhaps
victim of shortened attention spans, digitization, and the pay-per-view revenue model

I cleaned my house this week
couldn't get through the clutter
until I sorted the books

here! the Beats, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, Ferlinghetti
on the same shelf, other end, their forebearer Transcendentalists, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman

arrangement of volumes on the planks reflecting some
        relationships in my mind
so the physics and math books together here
the electronics books below them, next to home improvement,
        gardening, an old Boy Scout handbook
so it becomes theory here, practice here

front and center, the books chosen to show off, to make a
        statement to visitors
some religion and spiritualty, some literary fiction, a bunch of SF up
        on the top shelf, a bunch of graphic novels

no one will see the arrangement of your e-books
no scotch-tape to repair beloved old copies
no copies autographed by the author
no 100 year old copies, the yellowing pages, the out-of-style
        typography, the creaking cracking binding telling of the
        passage of time

the wabi-sabi of books will be lost to abstraction
the grittiness of the medium transcended by pure message

there is a beauty to that, too
but mess with my books and I will tear you like a page

The Sun reports that a Circuit Court judge in Harford County (Maryland) has dismissed wiretapping charges against Anthony Graber.

I've previously mentioned Graber's story: he was (apparently) being a dangerous jerk on his motorcycle, and got pulled over by a Maryland state cop who made a illegitimate traffic stop, cutting Graber off in an unmarked car (no lights or siren either) and jumping out his his car with his gun in his hand. Graber was wearing a helmet camera which recorded the incident. When Graber posted the video to Youtube, Joseph Cassilly -- State’s Attorney for Harford Count -- threatened to prosecute Graber for violating Maryland's wiretap law, a felony carrying a penalty of up to five years. It was in an act of pure intimidation for daring to embarrass a cop gone wild.

In yesterday's ruling, Circuit Court Judge Emory A. Plitt Jr. quite sensibly noted that "Those of us who are public officials and are entrusted with the power of the state are ultimately accountable to the public...When we exercise that power in a public forum, we should not expect our activity to be shielded from public scrutiny." He added that the incident "took place on a public highway in full view of the public. Under such circumstances, I cannot, by any stretch, conclude that the troopers had any reasonable expectation of privacy in their conversation with the defendant which society would be prepared to recognize as reasonable."

Jackass Cassilly claims the ruling "will make it more difficult for the police to do their jobs"; I can only interpret this to mean that he thinks that cops' jobs include intimidation and abuse.

According to the Sun's coverage, cops throughout the state have been using the wiretap excuse to seize people's cameras; a Baltimore cop threatened to arrest an amateur cameraman recording the arrest of a woman at Preakness, telling him, "It's illegal to record anybody's voice or anything else in the state of Maryland."

Recognizing our right to watch the watchers is a small, but important, step to get our out-of-control police forces to respect citizen's rights.

I've previously mentioned vegan combative sports champions Mac Danzig and Keith Holmes. It turns out that a somewhat...different...sort of sport also has at least one vegan at the champion level: vegan pro wrestler Bryan Danielson (a.k.a Daniel Bryan, a.k.a. "The American Dragon") is now the WWE United States Champion.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write about something that you intended to or should have told someone, but never did.

Imagine a raindrop on a window. If you are in the right place, it may reflect some ray of light brilliantly at you, sparkling like a gem; but someone standing right next to you my not be in the path, and just see through the translucent drop to what's behind it.

So it is with moments in time. We share them with friends, family, lovers, teacher, students, but a moment that shines for me may be ordinary for the one with whom I shared it.

Twenty years or so ago, in the car with my father, headed back home after some errand...on North Point Road, if memory serves. Around the edges of the memory is a tinge or resentment -- had we been arguing? Perhaps. An inevitable part of the mitosis by which we separate from the parents to become ourselves.

The radio tuned to the oldies station. Chuck Berry. Perhaps it is impossible to hold on to resentment in the face of Johnny B. Goode. My father and I both start, softly, singing. And now there is a new tinge in the film of memory. No single word for it, that I know -- call it a recognition of humanity. The same color that tinges the memory of sitting in a ancient zendo in Japan, a temple founded by Dogen himself, and hearing the footsteps of the monk walking on the tatami behind me -- he too is "just like this", Kerouac's "equally a coming Buddha", Vonnegut's unwavering band of light.

Or perhaps that's all to abstract and literary-referencey for just knowing, in that moment, not just father-and-son, but two men.

Sometimes I think about mentioning this moment to him, asking if he recalls it, all these years later. But I suspect it is like those droplets of rain, a moment that glittered just for me, that trying to speak of it would be like reaching out to grab that drop on the window as if it were a gem and not a reflection, a temporary aggregate of circumstance, the radio and sound waves reflecting off of our relationship and into my own perception, with the man sitting next to me seeing a different reflection.