Normally an attempted terrorist attack on U.S. soil would be highly publicized, but if it wasn’t for Digg.com I would never have found out about the following story: Bomb found at women’s clinic - CNN.com.

My wife tells me that abortion clinic bombings used to be big news, but I saw little evidence of this story outside of CNN, which had a link on its home page. The New York Times doesn’t seem to have covered the story; neither does Fox; the Boston Globe simply carried an AP wire; and I’ve been unable to locate the story in MSNBC’s “Crime and Punishment” or “US Security” sections.

I think it would be safe to assume that the terrorist (a man has been arrested) is a fundamentalist Christian. If he’d been Muslim I wonder if the news coverage would have been more intense?

This was just passed on to me by a friend. I thought it might be an elaborate hoax, but I checked the archive for the paper in question and there was a letter published under the title given. This gives a fascinating insight into the mind of one of those hard-core 35% who insist Bush is “doing a heckuva job.”

Daylight exacerbates warning (sic)

You may have noticed that March of this year was particularly hot. As a matter of fact, I understand that it was the hottest March since the beginning of the last century. All the trees were fully leafed out and legions of bugs and snakes were crawling around during a time in Arkansas when, on a normal year, we might see a snowflake or two.

This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they?

Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before Congress passes laws with such far-reaching effects.

CONNIE M. MESKIMEN
Hot Springs

Actually, this is so dumb I suspected the letter was written by a liberal pretending to be a right wing nut, but it turns out (according to whitepages.com) that there is a woman of that name living in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Mouse brain simulated on computer

As a Buddhist and a tech-geek I’m really excited to hear that a team from IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Nevada created a simulation of half of a mouse brain, which means that the supercomputer had virtually recreated 8,000 neurons and the many thousands of connections between them.

The experiment demanded so much computer power that it could only run at 1/10 of the rate of activity in a real mouse brain, and since it ran for only 10 seconds it amounted to recreating one second of mouse-brain activity.

The team saw the groups of neurons form spontaneously into groups. They also saw nerves in the simulated synapses firing in a ways similar to the staggered, co-ordinated patterns seen in nature.

The researchers say that although the simulation shared some similarities with a mouse’s mental make-up in terms of nerves and connections it lacked the structures seen in real mice brains.

This strikes me as being an enormous step toward creating artificial consciousness. This mouse-brain simulation could probably be said to have been conscious during its 10 seconds of activity.

If we can simulate half a mouse brain this year, what will we be able to do next year? And how long before we can simulate a human brain?

After taking a taxi ride through the crowded streets of Addis — blue Lada taxis, modern buildings surrounded by crooked wooden scaffolding, and people everywhere being the most outstanding sights — we arrived at the Ghion Hotel, whose website claims that it boasts “specious” gardens.

We showered in our rather funky room, sitting in the tub rather than standing because the attachment for the shower head was broken, and dried ourselves on tiny towels the texture of Swedish crispbread.

The orphanage was kind enough to arrange for a ride over for us so that we could meet our daughter, Maia Bereket. The orphanage is tucked away at the end of an alley off a sidestreet that comes off of Ras Biru, and protected by heavy metal gates and a guard.

It turned out that we’d arrived on the morning that the staff were cleaning out the babies’ dormitories (the babies sleep eight to a room) and all the children were lined up on the floor of one of the rooms in the adjoining guest house. It’s rather terrifying to walk around in a room in which around 25 babies form a living, crawling, crying carpet.

Fortunately one of the four nurses in the room brought Maia Bereket to us. I’d been told they sometimes play a game of making adoptive parents figure out which child is theirs — no easy task when you’ve only seen one or two photographs and when the babies are all so young.

Maia was very calm and content to be held by us. We sat with her for a while, taking turns to hold her. With so many kids being crowded into a small room with so few adults I ended up being a makeshift nurse, feeding and comforting other children. Eventually we took her through to the dining room where we were able to give her more attention.

It’s a strange thing to meet your child for the first time, especially when you’re jet-lagged after 23 hours of traveling. I looked at this tiny, beautiful child and found it hard to believe that she was really ours, and that she would be part of our lives from that time on.

Flying into Addis Ababa I was reminded of Missoula, Montana — a place I lived in for several years. Like Missoula, Addis is in a relatively flat-bottomed valley high up in the mountains and surrounded by rounded hills covered in patches of trees. In both cases you get a strong impression of aridness in the countryside. And both cities are, in contrast to their surroundings, very green, with the tops of buildings showing through an abundance of trees.

One difference, however, was that on landing in Addis our plane was brought to a halt by a pack of wild dogs that were sunning themselves on a runway. Unable to proceed, we sat until a man arrived on a tractor and ran towards the dogs waving what I first thought was a rifle but which turned out to be just a stick. The dogs ran a little way off the runway and flopped in the grass. And we were on our way.

Since I last wrote I’ve been to Ethiopia, adopted Maia, come back, spent a weekend in hospital (Maia had a chest infection and malaria to boot), caught up on the several hundred emails that had accumulated while I was away, and started learning how to be a dad.

In short, I’m too busy doing life to be able to write about it. I’m hoping that will change as I get used to my new roles.

Oh, and Maia’s a wee smasher!