Nooze.

[elfs]

Harry Potter has been banned at a College in Australia. Does the word "college" have a different meaning in Australia? The school has a "principal" who's quoted as saying, "As a mature reader I can see the difference between fantasy and reality but some children cannot and this is where it becomes dangerous."

One of America's deepest secrects has finally been revealed: thirty years ago, the Feds set about defending Santa Claus. The "joke" memo was apparently saved according to policy, and the government fought to keep it classified. The National Security Archive got their hands on the document and the director called "more evidence that most 'top secret' material is held back not to protect national security but to avoid embarassment."

A middle school in Tennessee is in trouble for setting up a digital camera to film students undressing, and the computer on which these images were stored was Internet-accessible that may have been hacked into-- or worse. File this under "an outraged 'hmmm....'"

Human Rights Watch has more to say about the horrors in Gujurat. I'm not going to comment further. India scares me because it produces so many competent people and has the kind of violence and horror we associate with the past.

Good news: scientists have now confirmed that pain sensitivity is all in your head. It seems that people who report high sensitivity to pain have a missing 'pain regulation mechanism' in their hypothalamus. This is "good" in that it allows doctors to better judge what kinds and how much pain medication some people should receive.

For fallenpegasus: A report on brain structure and associative memory demonstrates one of the primitive technologies that gets us closer to the Introdus.