From this recent story:

…[T]he First Amendment is a second-rate issue to many of those nearing their own adult independence, according to a study of high school attitudes released Monday.

The original amendment to the Constitution is the cornerstone of the way of life in the United States, promising citizens the freedoms of religion, speech, press and assembly.

Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.

This is a trend worth keeping abreast of, especially given that loss of freedom of the press is one of the four key characteristics that Ayn Rand identified as a hallmark of a dictatorship. (The full list can be found in her essay “Collectivized ‘Rights’” in The Virtue of Selfishness, and it includes “one party rule — executions without trial or with a mock trial for political offenses — the nationalization or expropriation of private property — and censorship”.)

According to this fascinating article, there’s new evidence that the North Korean regime is on the verge of collapse. Some relevant quotes:

According to exiles, North Korean agents in Beijing and Ulan Bator are frantically selling assets to raise cash — an important sign, says one activist, because “the secret police can always smell the crisis coming before anybody else”.

…Word has spread like wildfire of the Christian underground that helps fugitives to reach South Korea. People who lived in silent fear now dare to speak about escape. The regime has almost given up trying to stop them going, although it can savagely punish those caught and sent back.

…Bush’s re-election dealt a blow to Kim, 62, who had gambled on a win by John Kerry, the Democratic candidate. Kim used a strategy of divide and delay to drag out nuclear talks with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea through 2004. Kim lost his bet and now faces four more years of Bush, who says that he “loathes” the North Korean leader and has vowed to strip him of atomic weapons.

…An attempt to kill Kim would come as no surprise. Defections by party officials and army officers have increased as the elite senses that it faces disaster. Japan is considering economic sanctions to retaliate for the kidnappings of its nationals by North Korea and some American policymakers think that the regime should be pushed to the point of self-destruction.

Nonetheless, Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, wants to keep pressurising North Korea through negotiations. “The military option is not on the table for the United States,” said an American aid official who is up-to-date with her thinking.

If they really are that close to collapse, I don’t think any option should be off the table.

A man who has been blind since birth “paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he’s never seen any of these things. He depicts colour, shadow and perspective, but it is not clear how he could have witnessed these things either.” Apparently, he is able to integrate the information from other sensory modalities, along with what sighted friends have told him about the world.

One tidbit from the article:

He confides that for a long time he figured that if an object was red, its shadow would be red too. “But I was told it wasn’t,” he says. But how do you know about red? He knows that there’s an important visual quality to seen objects called “colour” and that it varies from object to object. He’s memorised what has what colour and even which ones clash.

Neuroscientists at Harvard and Boston University have been running a number of tests which show some fascinating differences from (and similarities to) the visual cortex of normal sighted people. Here’s the article as well as one of his paintings. (Via Linkfilter.)

Back in early August, I blogged about my problem with pain in my right knee during running. An MRI (courtesy of Paul) showed that the problem was an inflamed ilio-tibial band. From the research I did at the time, it sounded like the problem could be fixed with a different pair of orthotics.

Shortly thereafter, Paul and I bought a rowing machine, so I wasn’t running as often or as much. In the weeks of recovery from my fall flu and winter cold, I was even rowing exclusively, since running made me too woozy. Even though I wasn’t running so much or so often, the knee pain still bothered me regularly, such that I couldn’t generally run more than three miles in a stretch. But I put off making the appointment, as I was busy with other matters.

Lately though, I’ve been particularly eager to get back to running, as it’s a harder cardio workout than rowing. So yesterday, I finally called Dr. Ng, the podiatrist recommended by Dr. Heble, my excellent family practice doctor. To my amazement and delight, he had an open appointment that afternoon.

Dr. Ng determined within just a few moments that my regular three-quarter length orthotics (which enable me to walk about town without intense foot pain) were causing my knee pain during running. They were rotating my knees too far outward, thus putting pressure on my ilio-tibial band. They also lacked the necessary cushioning, as they are completely rigid. He took a plaster mold of my feet for a new pair of full-length sports orthotics. They should be arriving in about two weeks.

In the meantime, I’ve started running without any orthotics at all. Last night, I ran four miles without a hint of pain. And I just ran three miles, again without a hint of pain. It was delightful! Notably, merely running without orthotics isn’t a good long-term solution. After all, the reason that I started wearing my orthotics while running in the first place was an almost constant ilio-tibial band tightness in my left hip. In hindsight, it’s pretty clear that wearing the orthotics while running solved that problem, but then created my much more severe (albeit limited) ilio-tibial band pain in my right knee. But in two weeks, I’ll have my some spanky new sports orthotics to wear during running.

Hooray!

As you ought to have already noticed, I’ve designed (and reorganized) the web site. Mostly, I was tired of my old design; I wanted the site to be both more subdued and more compact. A few points of note:

• I added some new pictures of the beasts. Finally, you can get a good look at the horses! (I didn’t even realize that I got a picture of Jackson sticking his tongue out until I downloaded the pictures to my computer. But it’s quite perfect for him.)
• I converted all of my more recent (i.e. post-undergraduate) papers and lectures to PDF files. Any HTML files are entirely gone for various reasons, but the MS Word files are still available. If those would be of greater interest than the PDFs to some of you, let me know and I’ll add links to them.
• I finally updated my TOC page. It now links to all the relevant blog entries on The Objectivist Center, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, the Ayn Rand Institute, and so on. It also has a bit of introductory commentary, including a short but clear statement of my view of ARI.
• I added a general cautionary note to the web site: “The inclusion of a writing on my web site ought not be regarded as an endorsement of either its content or the forum for which it was written. I now disagree (to varying degrees) with many of the claims and/or arguments made in my old work; I have cut my ties to some of the organizations mentioned. Sometimes, my change in views was related the issues discussed on this page. In other cases, I changed my mind for more mundane reasons. Nonetheless, I have chosen to retain these writings on my web site as part of the record of my intellectual history, warts and all. To have selectively removed objectionable writings would not only have been an impossible chore, but also an unseemly act of whitewashing in some cases. Anyone with questions about a particular writing is welcome to e-mail me at diana(at)dianahsieh.com.”

  Just for the record, not a single person has ever pressured, encouraged, or even suggested that I remove those outdated or objectionable portions of the web site. But I do get tired of this sort of stupidity. (Of course, it is precisely because I am not willing to “rewrite my own history” that Michelle Cohen was even able to find that old blog post of mine. Oh, I hid it ever so cleverly… on my web site!)

  Obviously, the basic point of the warning is to alleviate the confusion of reasonable people unfamiliar with my unfortunate history with The Appeasement Center.

  If you run into any problems with the redesign of the site, by all means, let me know. If you just hate the new design… well… too bad.