I love the melding of the old computer world with the new computer world — and that’s why I’m getting a kick out of AOLiza. This guy has hooked the old ELIZA online analyst software up with AOL Instant Messenger, and for every random chat request he gets, ELIZA answers. Much hilarity ensues.

Oxymoron of the day: Catholic Woodstock.

I’m still trying to digest the way-too-long Atlantic Monthly article by Charles Mann about Napster and music on the net. My reaction so far — it’s very thorough and deals with the issue mostly fairly, but it peddles out the same arguments that drive me crazy about most articles on the subject. Just because there are artists that support Napster doesn’t mean those who don’t should lose their ability to control distribution of their music; just because artists sign terrible contracts with recording studios doesn’t mean that I should break the law to somehow right that wrong.

I love when Linus Torvalds shows his irritable side, and makes a lot of sense in the process. The best quote in the email: “It’s also realizing that maybe, just maybe, UNIX didn’t invent every clever idea out there.”

This article about HIV disbelievers scares the hell out of me. The fact that this total loon not only believes that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS isn’t as bad as the fact that there are people listening to her. And more disgusting is that her pediatrician hasn’t called child services on her, seeing as she’s HIV positive and breastfeeding her child; I’m truly appalled.

Some resources that will help people refute people who deny the HIV-AIDS connection (if you even want to engage them in an argument):

• the NIH has a detailed fact sheet on the evidence that’s been amassed to date; this is possibly the most thorough single resource, and it’s updated regularly.
• Science magazine published a five-part series on HIV dissenters, going to great lengths to provide all the available evidence. They have made access to these articles free forever, based on their fear that the dissenters will actually convince people because of a lack of credible refuting evidence on the web.
• Current Opinion in Immunology published an article in 1996 demonstrating how the HIV-AIDS link now fulfills all of Koch’s Postulates, the litmus test in science for causation.
• AIDS Treatment News has a brief how-to-respond article which lists the most common points made by HIV denialists.
• the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease has put together a bibliography of further resources, and it appears to be regularly updated.

Unrelated but still medical, Arthur Allen has a good article in Salon about conflicts of interest in medical research. As federal medical research money dries up, private money fills the vacuum — and sometimes, it buys positive studies, studies that help shape enormous parts of medical policy. (That’s why it’s so important that our government continue to fund medical research.)

When did Manila start adding newly-created sites to a GDB named “manilaWebsites” rather than to their own individual GDBs? This decreases the portability of the sites; I don’t know why they did this.