Albertson's is installing 4,500 NCR self-checkout terminals in its 2,300 stores at an estimated cost of $16 million to $20 million. The machines normally cost about $20,000 each, but the company snagged the first 4,000 "for pennies on the dollar" from lessor GE Capital, which had picked them up from bankrupted retailer Kmart.

Of course, that very fact illustrates that technology alone can't save a struggling retailer.

My wife choose to keep her last name after we were married. As an active duty service member (at the time) she had already gone through two name changes first for her first marriage and the ensuing divorce. No more of that.

We decided our child would carry both family names,
First Name: Timothy
Second Name: Frederich
Family Name: Gunechtel Forrester. (no hyphen)

Society assumes Timmy's last name is Forrester and treats his matrilineal name as a middle name. Had my son been a daughter she could both bow to societal expectation by dropping Forrester at marriage and still maintain the matrilineal name. If he chooses Timmy can do something similar with Gnuechtel or come up with something even more bizarre.

From reasder Janna Joseph:

I, also, look forward to more tech innovations to make in-store shopping more self-service. In my rather small town, our WalMart this year put in self-service lines. For a while few customers availed themselves of them. Free checkers cast a disparaging eye with a fearful warning, "You won't be able to figure them out," if they saw you approaching the self-serve counter. A few months later I see increased usage of these self-check lines. Also our Home Depot has them, but so far no grocery stores,

Two difficulties I have noticed are purchasing items like glue, paint products and anything else the kids like to sniff. The machine stops the check and calls for someone to intervene to approve the sale. Here, I think they could add a drivers license scan (my license from Arizona has a bar code on back) to indicate an adult is the purchaser. The second is the annoyance of the weight-sensitive packing area. Pick up a bag to put in your cart for departure and the machine scolds you and stops the check. Other than this, I love the self-serve lines and will welcome the scanners when they get here.

Janna's note points to the many details and quirks that any new system has to master, some of which, like approving restricted purchases (alcohol, tobacco, and spray paint), still require human intervention. After many trials with the weight-sensitive self-checkout, I've learned that if you ignore the little voice it will shut up and let you continue checking. But reader Charles Compton points out the good reasons behind that sometimes-annoying feature:

A fascinating piece today on your hand-held scanner experience.

Here in Tenessee, the Ingle's supermarket chain last year began installing automated checkout stands, which I find work quite well.

Items are passed over a scanner, then placed in bags on a carousel.

The computer, it turns out, knows not only the item scanned, but the weight of each item. If you scan a half-gallon conatiner of orange juice, the computer expects something weighing roughly 64 ounces to be placed in the bag on the carousel.

That makes it just about impossible to cheat, even accidentally.

The system accepts cash and coins, and credit/debit cards. You can get up to $100 cash back if you use a card.

It also lets you scan your discount card to take advantage of in-store specials.

There was a brief problem with acceptance of the newly redesigned $20 bills, but that's now been fixed.

Overall, the system works so well that for most grocery trips, I don't even have contact with a live person.

It's pretty clear that grocery checkout clerks are going to go the way of bank tellers. They won't disappear altogether, but there will be many fewer of them. Grocery employees will have to add value to the customer's experience, not simply process their purchases.

Thought I'd toss in my family's approach to naming. My wife's parents followed the traditional approach -- the male surname became the family name. In their case, the original name in Germany was Weihrauch (incense or, literally "holy smoke"). When they made in to the U.S. (the family barely made it out of Germany in 1938), they changed the name to Wyle.

In patrilineal descent, the family name is passed down through the father's line. The idea of the female's family name disappearing when the woman marries has always seemed grossly unfair to me. I don't see matrilineal descent as being any better, though it has never existed in the U.S., as far as I know. The hyphenate name approach -- I don't know what to call it -- is problematic because if you want to keep the family names through multiple generations, you end up with ridiculously long names. The alternative would have to involve some sort of complex formula for dropping one of the hypenates when the hypenate marries.

Back when I was studying cultural anthropology, I came across a different approach called bilineal descent. In bilineal descent, sons take the father's name and daughters take the wife's name. This made a lot of sense to me. I suggested this approach to my wife, who kept her family name -- I also pointed out that the Wyle line in the U.S. had produced many more females than males and I thought it particularly appropriate for a Jewish line that had escaped the Holocaust to continue whether it produced males or not. So, we adopted bilineal descent.

We now have two daughters -- Liana Valentina Wyle and Alissa Lise Wyle -- and no sons. Works for me.

Additional note on the middle names, which I picked. Valentina is for Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Lise is for Lise Meitner, who was robbed of a Nobel Prize in physics for the 1938 discovery of fission in uranium because she was (1) female and (2) Jewish.

Canada last week passed a bill that bans human cloning but permits research using stem cells derived from embryos -- research that scientists hope will lead to therapies for many of the worst human diseases. The bill states that "No person shall knowingly create a human clone by using any technique," which would include therapeutic cloning, a technology researchers believe could lead to revolutionary treatments. The bill still requires "royal assent" from the governor general before it becomes law, but that is considered a formality.

The U.S. also has political gridlock--the best way to block new forms of regulation.

The Saudi crackdown began Monday with the arrest of at least five prominent intellectuals, including professors Abdullah Hamed, Matrouk Faleh and Mohammed Said Tayeb; by yesterday the number of detained was reported to be as high as 10, though several were said to have been released. Those arrested include several leading political liberals as well as moderate Islamists. Most signed a petition in December calling on Crown Prince Abdullah to lay out a timetable for making Saudi Arabia a constitutional monarchy -- a demand that sounds far-fetched now but sets a reasonable goal for the long run.

That, it seems, was not their offense. What prompted the arrests, Saudi sources say, was a plan by the reformers to establish an independent human rights organization. The professors first asked permission to set up the group, only to be told that the government planned to establish its own human rights organization. Predictably, the official group rolled out last week excluded the dissidents as well as other notable government critics. So the reformers revived their plan for an independent organization -- only to be dragged from their classrooms by Interior Ministry officials, purportedly for "questioning." The point was obvious: to stifle what would have been a genuinely independent movement to advocate for political freedom, women's rights and other reforms.

When we were married almost 13 years ago, my wife and I combined our last names with a hyphen. It wasn't too bad. I liked Mallon-Kraft better than Kraft-Mallon, so my wife's name went last.

I got a bit of grief from some of my buddies, but no real hassles, so it wasn't much of a problem personally. However, the general public couldn't figure out a hyphenated name for the life of them. I got mail to Mallonkraft, Mallograft, Maccon-karft, Kraft D. Mallon,....

People would abbreviate, "the M-Krafts are coming... the M-Ks.... the Mallon-Ks..."

When our son was 2, we changed to just Mallon. I believe my wife felt sufficiently liberated in our marriage that the consequences of the kid with a hyphenated name were more pressing. It's not that there'd be big consequences, but rather a matter of inconvenience. My wife said something to the effect, "If people are just going to abbreviate it, the whole point of retaining both names doesn't make much sense."

The Menlo Park, Calif., company hopes that injecting stem cells -- which have been modified to become the naturally unreplacable cells that insulate nerve cells -- into the site of a spinal trauma will help reduce the severity of paralysis.

It worked in mice. The company anesthetized the rodents and broke each of their backs in the same way. The control group ended up paraplegic, unable to move below the waist. A video showed these mice dragging around hindquarters. For the others, Geron scientists injected the site of the injury with human embryonic stem cells. Within a couple of weeks, these mice were walking on their hind legs.

Dr. Okarma said he expects this to help only for new cases of spinal injury. "Scar tissue gets in the way, so this won't help the Christopher Reeves of the world," he said. But it could be a potential answer for the 11,000 Americans who suffer spinal-cord injury each year. "What we are achieving in this model is what no drug could ever do," he said.

Next year, the company plans to file for FDA approval to start studying stem cells in humans with new spinal-cord injuries.

Rodman & Renshaw analyst Ren Benjamin expects the agency to ask for substantial animal safety data before allowing human studies because the company obviously won't be able to test the safety of the stem cells on healthy adults who haven't already suffered spinal injury. Mr. Benjamin doesn't own Geron shares, but his firm did investment banking for Geron in the past 12 months.

If the process ends up working, Geron would probably be able to charge a hefty sum for the treatment. "Think of the benefit to those patients versus the economic burden if you remain crippled," Mr. Benjamin said.

The one flaw in the system is that today's grocery carts don't accommodate bags, and Shop 'n' Scan assumes you'll bag as you go. We need a redesigned version of IDEO's famous shopping cart, one that takes cheap, disposable bags instead of fancy plastic boxes.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Well into what paleontologists of the future might call the Fast Food Drive-Thru Epoch, the most complete body survey conducted in 50 years shows Americans have super-sized, particularly in the waist and hips.

TC2, a company based in the Raleigh suburb of Cary, used light-pulsing, 3-D scanner technology to measure some 10,000 Americans of all ages and ethnicities. The SizeUSA survey confirmed that all those extra french fries have come with a price.

The study was funded by clothing manufacturers, the military and colleges and universities, all of whom have a keen interest in body sizes.

Size 8 has long been thought to represent the measurements of the average American woman. In the clothing industry, a size 8 officially is supposed to be a 35-inch bust, a 27-inch waist, and 37-1/2-inch hip.

But in the survey, white women ages 18 to 25 came in, on average, at 38-32-41, with white women ages 36 to 45 coming in at 41-34-43.

In truth, some manufacturers made the adjustment years ago. Some sell a size 10 as a size 8 to flatter women's vanity, TC2's Jim Lovejoy, who conducted the survey, said in a telephone interview Monday.

Of course, as ergonomic experts have started to notice, no one really comes in a standard size. There are too many potential variables. No matter how you renumber the sizes, I'll always have short arms and long legs, a short waist, and a very small waist-hip ratio. So nothing will fit. (And don't get me started on shoes.) That's why there are tailors.

On the many occasions I've been asked to defend my choice of surnames, I've always said that I love my father but I chose my husband and, besides, I legitimately get the initials V.I.P. (Another bonus is a name no one else has. Postrel is an Ellis Island concoction and, since most Jews wrongly believe my first name refers to Jesus's mother rather than Elizabeth I, there are no other Virginias in the family.) Fortunately, today's brides don't make such a big deal of the name game, as Katie Roiphe (her maiden name) explains:

Interestingly, over the past 10 years fewer and fewer women have kept their maiden names. According to a recent study by Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldin, the number of college-educated women in their 30s keeping their name has dropped from 27 percent in 1990 to 19 percent in 2004. Goldin suggests that this may be because we are moving toward a more conservative view of marriage. Perhaps. But it may also be that the maiden name is no longer a fraught political issue. These days, no one is shocked when an independent-minded woman takes her husband's name, any more than one is shocked when she announces that she is staying at home with her kids. Today, the decision is one of convenience, of a kind of luxuryï¿‘which name do you like the sound of? What do you feel like doing? The politics are almost incidental. Our fundamental independence is not so imperiled that we need to keep our names. The statement has, thanks to a more dogmatic generation, been made. Now we dabble in the traditional. We cobble together names. At this pointï¿‘apologies to Lucy Stone, and her pioneering work in name keepingï¿‘our attitude is: Whatever works.

True liberation makes the personal apolitical.

You cannot believe how many people in France do not believe me when I say that an attack on the US would favor Bush. They say, an attack by Al Qaeda would show that Dean is right, Bush lied, etc. And I go, HUH???!?

They think that an attack before the election would help Kerry win. The fact that so many bozos on the left in Europe think this, is probably a sign that Al Qaeda is gonna try real real hard to hit the US before November.

Otherwise I figure, Italy, Poland, or Greece is on their hit list.

Maybe Kerry can explain to his foreign friends that this theory about American reactions to terrorism is 100% wrong. Let's hope Al Qaeda is not as naive as the French.

More than 50 woman have enrolled since the study was launched Feb. 23 by the UW School of Pharmacy and Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology with funding from the National Institutes of Health. Researchers hope to enroll 300 women.

Women 18 to 45 years old can visit any of eight Fred Meyer or Bartell pharmacies in Seattle and its suburbs, complete a health questionnaire and have their weight and blood pressure checked.

If they pass a good-health checklist, they can obtain three months of birth-control pills or patches right away, and an additional nine months’ worth at a follow-up visit. The price is $25 per visit plus the medicine. Insurance companies generally will not pay.

Yes, yes, yes, it's a good idea to have an annual physical, and the need for a birth control prescription often prompts women to see their doctors. But it's also a good idea to floss your teeth and watch your diet. Just because something is a good idea doesn't mean your right to buy birth control should be contingent on that practice.

Yet with many terrorist groups -- like ETA, like al Qaeda -- violence has become an end in itself. They want a lot of people dead, period.

Some in Spain have argued that if an Islamic group proves to be the culprit, Spaniards will blame Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. It was his support for America and the war in Iraq that invited the wrath of the fundamentalists. But other recent targets of Islamic militants have been Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, not one of which supported the war or sent troops into Iraq in the after-war. Al Qaeda's declaration of jihad had, as its first demand, the withdrawal of American troops from Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden does not seem to have noticed, but the troops are gone -- yet the jihad continues. The reasons come and go, the violence endures.

Read the whole thing.

Warning to terrorists: Americans do not draw the same conclusions from massacres that the Spanish did. Americans tend to rally around the president and direct our anger outward.

My friend Xavier Lewis writes from Brussels:

Demonstrations took place across Europe to express sympathy for the victims and anger at the perpetrators. We had one in Brussels, attended by several thousand Spaniards and non Spaniards like me nothwithstanding the cold and rain. I took a few not very good photo.

The husband of a lawyer I know in Madrid is a surgeon. According to him the injuries were ghastly. A couple of details of the attacks emphasize their callousness (if need be). The train stations targeted bring into the city people from working class suburbs--there were lots immigrant workers on them. The stations also serve a line to a big university town-- hundreds of students were making their way to classes. And next to one of the stations is a large school. Hence the high number of children and young people among the victims.

A controversy is raging as to whether ETA or Al Quaeda is responsible. Frankly it does not really matter to the rest of us who did it. Our sympathy for the victims remains the same and it is wrong to do it regardless. The press is working itself up about it, though. If it was Al Quaeda, the press seems to think it was revenge on Spain for supporting the US in Iraq. But Sept 11, 2001 was not revenge on the US for its role in toppling Saddam was it?

Wired News has an interesting piece on the massive online response to the bombings.

I am an 20-year veteran, operating executive at a rather gigantic company and we are hiring, but mostly for replacement and some niche growth areas (sales, engineers, product managers etc.). I think we'll just barely grow our employment year over year.

I don't think one can characterize the American economy by what us Big Multinationals do, but all of you are on to something regarding how expensive and risky it is to do business now than it was 5 years ago.

All of the [Sarbanes-Oxley] costs are going to be amortized on employees...so we've made it even more expensive to hire people. Already, we put aside nearly 40 cents on the dollar for every employee we hire for benefits, pension, healthcare etc. How long until that is dollar for dollar? Are you kidding me?

The structure costs of business reporting are brutal also. I am sure you've seen the report from Emerson on US competiveness.

And frankly, people can be a pain in the rear. At 5.6% unemployment, you just can't convince me or any of my peers that the people out there looking for work are top notch...and as expensive as it is to hire someone, we want the best. Otherwise, you'd be surprised how well you can get by without someone, especially someone of mediocre professional value.

So we are either hiring from campus (aren't in the 5.6%) or from other companies (ditto).

I know this "get by" without hiring is real because we've never seen the leverage on sales like we are seeing now. That is, our revenues have grown double digits, and we've not added anyone, or even added any physical capacity.

I'm sure this doesn't help Bush, but it has very little to do with him or his team anyway. I laughed out loud when I heard Carville's response on Meet The Press this weekend. Russert asked him what specifically the Democrats would do to help improve job growth and he said something like "spend more money on roads and infrastructure to make us more productive" I thought Industrial Policy was the 1992 mantra?

The 5.6 percent unemployment isn't equally distributed across professions; in fields with lots of layoffs, job seekers may in fact be highly qualified. But Tim's note captures the risk aversion that's holding down hiring. It also points to the unmentionable reason high-tech companies are looking abroad for programmers: When you're trying to get the very, very best--the top 1 percent--it helps to expand the pool to a billion Indians, not to mention drawing from an elitist education system that leaves lots of children behind but gives the geniuses unsurpassed training.

Kass stumbled on another count, one that I think speaks to a profound problem with the council and one that I haven’t read much comment on. Kass claimed that Blackburn had to be replaced because the council will now be focusing on neuroscience, rather than reproduction and genetics, Blackburn's areas of expertise. If that’s true, then the council is not ready for a shift to the brain. If the Bush administration wanted to beef up the council's neuroscience credentials, surely they would have replaced Blackburn and May with neuroscientists. They did not. In fact, the council as it's now constituted has only one member who does research on neuroscience.

Even more troubling, though, is the indifference the council has shown to what neuroscience tells us about bioethics itself.

Kass has written in the past about how we should base our moral judgments in part on what he calls "the wisdom of repugnance." In other words, the feeling you get in your bones that something is wrong is a reliable guide to what really is wrong. The Council on Bioethics embraces Kass's philosophy. They have declared that happiness exists to let us recognize what is good in life, while real anger and sadness reveal to us what is evil and unjust. "Emotional flourishing of human beings in this world requires that feelings jibe with the truth of things, both as effect and as cause," they write. By extension, repugnance is a good guide for making decisions about bioethics. If cloning gives you the creeps, it’s wrong.

But what exactly produces those creeps? In recent years neuroscientists and psychologists have made huge strides in understanding both emotions and moral judgments. They've scanned people's brains as they decide whether things are right or wrong; they've looked at the brain's neurochemistry, and they've gotten insights from the brains of animals and the fossils of ancient hominids as well. And their conclusions seriously undermine the philosophy of the council.

Read the whole post and its links. Of course, this irreverently materialist approach to the brain is exactly what we can expect the Kass Commission to attack next. Get ready to hear about how authentic human beings don't take Prozac.

Gary Johnson is having a very good 2004, too. His Santa Clara, Calif.-based shop, PortalPlayer Inc., supplies the chips and internal software that power Apple's iconic music player. More than 2 million of the white beauties have sold so far, with PortalPlayer grossing about $15 a pop.

Time for some boasting, no? No. Though PortalPlayer's connection to the iPod has been an open secret since 2002, Johnson doesn't dare acknowledge the relationship, for fear of offending his best--and a notoriously secretive--client. "I'm not even going to refer to those guys," he says.

Which is a shame, since Apple plays a starring role in PortalPlayer's success story. (Apple, for its part, will only confirm that PortalPlayer supplied "one of many components" for the iPod.) Privately held PortalPlayer says its revenue more than doubled to $20 million last year. In the fourth quarter it broke even for the first time (in the sense of earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation). Some people say the outfit could go public later this year....

Apple's in-house designers provide the look and feel that make the iPod so distinctive; PortalPlayer provides the innards that lie beneath. It won over Apple with a design that uses two modest processors and an operating system two years in the making.

PortalPlayer's "firmware" makes it easy for makers to mix and match features and rapidly stamp out upgrades without having to start from scratch. Apple picked PortalPlayer in the summer of 2001, and the iPod was in stores in November of that year.

This vertical disintegration is known as "outsourcing," whether it takes place at home, abroad, or in some combination. Companies, like individuals, specialize at what they do best, their partners to do the same, and the result is an increase in economic value all around. Self-sufficiency--for individuals, nations, or companies--sounds like a romantic ideal, but it's really a prescription for mediocrity and hardship.

I can't begin to answer the jobs question, but I can provide some shreds of anecdotal evidence, drawn from recent conversations with business executives in the United States and abroad.

My sense is that investors and managers are still traumatized by the shocks to the system of the past three years--a chain of events including the collapse of the high-tech bubble; the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; a global war against Islamic terrorism; and the fallout from the Enron scandal.

These shocks, taken together, have made investors more risk-averse and cautious. Economists would define it as a change in the mental "discount" rate by which investors calculate how big a return they'll require in the future to part with their cash today. And at the very time investors are looking for this higher risk premium, prospective annual returns have settled back toward historical levels from the 20 percent-plus rates of the bubble years.

Adding to this culture of caution are the regulatory changes that followed the tech collapse, the Enron fiasco and other Wall Street scandals. Hoping to restore investor confidence, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, which required corporate chief executives, in effect, to take personal responsibility for what their underlings were doing in complicated financial transactions. That sounds great in principle, but in practice it has added to the wariness of CEOs, and probably reduced the job-creating dynamism of the economy.

One unintended consequence of the new rules is that they make it costlier for small start-up companies to go public. Ann Winblad, who is one of the principals of a big San Francisco investment firm, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, estimates that for a company with $50 million in revenue, the extra cost of compliance could total $1 million to $3 million annually -- when you add in the three required independent directors, the outside auditors, the internal auditors, the directors' and officers' insurance, and other costs.

Certainly the venture capital business reflects the new caution: Where 629 venture funds raised a total of $105.4 billion in 2000, last year there were just 113 funds that raised $10.8 billion. Warren Buffett, the iconic figure of American capitalism, expressed the new wariness in his annual report released Saturday. Noting that he's sitting on a company-record $36 billion in cash, he explained: "Our capital is underutilized now. . . . It's a painful condition to be in -- but not as painful as doing something stupid."

Read the whole (short) thing.

Thanks to Jeff Taylor for sending this article about the early sales results:

Apple found sweet success last year with the original iPod, which, paired with legitimate song service iTunes, has won the company dominant market position in both market sectors. Apple said it intends to broaden the market further for iPod by pushing the mini version--a 3.6-ounce player capable of holding 1,000 CD-quality songs.

Early indications are that iPod mini, which garnered more than 100,000 preorders since being announced in January, is outdoing the success of the original iPod, which sold 125,000 units in its first quarter of availability, Apple said.

"The customer response has been incredible--it's just been off the charts," Apple worldwide iPod marketing manager Danika Cleary told TechNewsWorld. "It's meeting and exceeding our expectations."

Referring to long lines at Apple stores for the iPod-mini debut, Cleary said the smaller player, priced at US$250, is riding the wave of popularity generated by the original iPod, which Apple has sold to more than 2 million customers. The company sold 730,000 of the music players during the holiday quarter alone, she reported.

The mini's stylish charm is captivating even tech columnists:

At a Best Buy store in Manhattan a week ago Friday, they lined up to plunk down $250 on the newest flavor, the iPod Mini. Queues like this one used to form only on very special occasions--the release of a Rolling Stones album, Springsteen tickets--but not for a battery-operated music player. By 7 p.m., the thing was sold out. "Try next week," said the clerk. "Come early."

Cuddliness has been one key in driving the success of iPods in the past couple of years. And, this low-carb South Beach model arrives in a rainbow of metallic hues. Compared to its snow-white big brother, the Mini is less than half the size and only about half as heavy. The guts, however, are a different can of technology: While the least-expensive "normal" iPod spins a dense 15-gig hard drive that holds nearly 4,000 tunes, Junior is built around a 4GB Hitachi-built hard disc with a max capacity of about 1,000 songs.

The difference in price is $50; the trade-off--sex and style and wow, for more data storage in the more expensive large 'Pod--is your choice to make.

Of course, I'll choose the Mini. For cachet, it's without peer, the Louis Vuitton of portable audio. Sonically, it's a match for anything else MP3-ish on the market.

I didn't buy a mini iPod today, but that doesn't mean I didn't want to.

Ultimately, both fiscal and economic futures depend on economic growth. If productivity (measured and unmeasured) keeps rising, even the fiscal problems become less significant. If our grandkids are filthy rich by today's standards, which is actually quite possible, they won't have as hard a time covering social security's promises. Medicare's, which rise with the medical standard of living, are a different matter--unless, of course, medical care somehow gets cheaper as well as better.

For the paperback edition of TSOS, I did a Q&A that included a question about what recent designed objects I like. Among the answers: the Cross Ion pen, which comes in more colors and styles than I imagined before I went online to check the spelling of Ion. (I don't get any money if you order one, but don't let that stop you.)

President Bush gathered Republicans together north and south this week, picking up cash and praising Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the political star who he said has shown "no party can take California for granted.''

Problem: The star was noticeably absent.

Schwarzenegger did not appear at public events for Bush on Wednesday in Los Angeles or Thursday in Bakersfield and Santa Clara.

And it showed.

The cavernous Santa Clara Convention Center was only half full at Bush's fund-raiser in Silicon Valley, normally a piggybank for political campaigns. Curtains masked vacant areas, but the sense of excitement was harder to cover.

Bush's solo act took in just $700,000, the smallest take of any of his eight California fund-raisers since last June, when Bush-Cheney '04 began to rake in the dough for the coming campaign.

Compare that with the night before. At an exclusive Republican National Committee fund-raiser in Los Angeles--the only one of three Bush fund-raisers the governor attended--the take was a juicy $3.5 million.

Why the small turnout for the president, whose office usually rates top billing? Several possibilities come to mind. His Silicon Valley support may simply be weak. High-tech types can't stand aggressive social conservatism, and that goes double when it comes to attacks on science. It's also possible that Bush's fundraising success has been so well publicized that "swing funders," as opposed to hard-core supporters, figure he just doesn't need the money and spend their political dollars elsewhere. State politics is hot right now.

It's tacky to say it, so no one to my knowledge has. But I'll risk noting that in the head counts that characterize such commissions, Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson is probably not the replacement for Elizabeth Blackburn, as Kass maintains, but a more relevant and eminent substitute for Stephen Carter. The Bush administration is not colorblind, and the council needs to have a few public Christians among all the Straussians.

Scientists have long suspected that humans evolved large brains because our hominid ancestors had to outwit and elude predators, learn to use fire, and develop complex social structures. The smart hominids survived, while the stupid ones were more likely to get eaten or freeze to death. Over millions of years, the result of this game of survival of the fittest was the appearance of big-brained, peculiarly intelligent modern humans. Now Bruce Lahn, a biomedical researcher at the University of Chicago, has found the first clear indication of the genetic changes that led to the rapid expansion of our brain.

Lahn and his colleagues looked at the abnormal spindle-like microcephaly associated (ASPM) gene, which scientists had previously identified as a key player in brain development. He grew intrigued by ASPM after other researchers discovered that serious defects in the gene cause microcephaly--a drastic reduction in the size of the brain’s cerebral cortex, the region responsible for such higher brain functions as abstract thought and planning. Lahn wondered: Could changes in this gene, favored by the pressures of natural selection, have directed the development of the big, modern human brain?

To find out, Lahn compared the sequence of the human ASPM gene with the equivalent gene sequences of various primates--including chimpanzees, gorillas, and gibbons--and with the sequences of nonprimate species such as mice, cows, and dogs. He isolated genetic mutations that altered the structure of the ASPM protein and thus could have affected brain size, while weeding out the random mutations that had no structural effect and hence would have been unaffected by evolutionary pressures. Lahn found that the ASPM gene in humans has undergone 15 important mutations since we last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees, about 5 million years ago. Significantly, compared with the other animals studied, humans have experienced the fastest overall rate of change in the gene since our evolutionary line parted ways with chimpanzees and other primates. Evidently, ASPM responded to natural selection, and the resulting changes contributed to our large brains.

This sort of indirect genetic evidence for human evolution is going to pile up until it resembles the overwhelming geological case against believing the earth is a few thousand years old. More important, and more interesting, will be how understanding the genetic origins of brain functions lets us affect how our minds work. With the Kass Commission hot to talk about brains, can proposals for new criminal laws against neuroscience be far behind? After all, that research might threaten classical conceptions of the mind. And if they were good enough for Plato, they're good enough for us.

People like me make up a bloc of sorts for this president, too: call it the "war base," perhaps. But I have found that the President's clarity of vision following 9/11 has not been maintained as the news cycle bogs down over the many months with Iraq and its reconstruction. I believe there is still much to do - involving Iran, North Korea, Syria, Algeria, Pakistan's ISI, and others - and the president has not articulated a clear vision of what's next now that the Taliban and Hussein have been dispatched.

To my mind, continued support of a president who has many objectionable policies in other areas of interest to me is dependent upon confidence in his future leadership on the war. I for one need to hear much more from him about the war objectives for his second term.

This "pandering" political strategy works only when voters such as myself sacrifice less-important principles in favor of the most important, the war. However, if I come to believe that a Democratic candidate can be as effective on the war as President Bush, or - worse - that President Bush in a second term will be as ineffective on the war as the likely Democratic candidates, then my heretofore solid support for the President will be far less certain this fall.

California Democrats were still heading to the polls late Tuesday afternoon when networks announced John Kerry as the likely Democratic nominee -- and John Edwards as a has-been.

By 5 p.m., a full three hours before polls closed in the nation's most populous state, CNN reported that Edwards was expected to drop out of the Democratic presidential race today. The announcement surprised party insiders and angered some supporters who hoped the North Carolina senator would grab enough of the state's 370 delegates to keep his hopes alive.

The networks make a big deal of not reporting results (except in Florida) while the polls are still open. But in national elections, the polls are still open on the West Coast for a long, long time. And then there's Hawaii (but at least it's small and overwhelmingly Democratic).

As a person, however, I was thrilled to hear from my sisters-in-law, Pam Postrel and Mindy Blum, that they'd driven all night from L.A. to San Francisco to tie the knot. (You have no idea how hard it is to get a Postrel to have a wedding....) They love each other, and I love them. They are wonderful people. They are--both of them--part of my family, regardless of what the law decrees.

I asked Pam, whose name will be familiar to regular blog readers, if she had thoughts she'd like to share with the world. Last week she sent the following:

Dear Virginia,

Ever since your kind invitation to share our thoughts on our marriage experience, I’ve wanted to get it all down, but I did my usual procrastinating.

I wanted to write about all the levels on which it resonated with us… some expected, some surprising, even to us.

I wanted to write about the incredible warmth and enthusiasm of the volunteers and employees of the City of San Francisco, who seemed genuinely delighted to be participating in this moment in history.

About the beauty of the people in line with us… the camaraderie, the instant connection to these couples who, like us, always said that if it was ever legal, they'd get married. (There was a couple behind us who drove in from Las Vegas. How ironic is that?)

About the moment of utter joy when we faced each other to exchange vows and realized that through nineteen years of ups and downs, the conception and raising of two children, all the apartments rented, the purchase of our house, the career support we’ve provided each other, the disappointments, the knock-down drag-outs… that we still actively and passionately wanted to say "I do." The emotion of that moment flooded us in a way it never could for those who have the freedom to rush into marriage. (If it’s possible there’s an advantage to this gross discrimination, I guess that’s it.)

About the real sense of belonging and acceptance (in spite of ourselves) as we received our marriage license LIKE EVERY OTHER TAX-PAYING CITIZEN IN THIS COUNTRY.

About waking up the next morning in a hastily-acquired hotel room at The Four Seasons in San Francisco in the most comfortable bed I’ve ever been in with… my wife.

About the six-hour drive home, where Mindy and I kept looking at each other with stupid grins saying, "We're married." And "How cool is this?"

About the director of our kids' school high-fiving Mindy… and the office full of balloons and thrilled colleagues I came back to after our not-quite 48-hour whirlwind excursion to San Francisco.

About the surprise of hearing our seven-year old daughter, who wasn't sure she was totally into this whole moms-getting-married thing, sing-songing into the phone to me days after the blessed event: "I have married parents, I have married parents."

I wanted to write about the humorous Postrel phenomenon of being the marryin' kind, but the wedding kind… not so much.

But I'm not feeling too damned humorous today. This morning I sat on my bed putting on my socks and watched the President of the United States of America declare war on my family. No, it wasn't unexpected. But, like the ceremony at the center of this whole hubbub, it had an unexpected emotional impact on me and, I'm sure the 3,300 others who've gotten married so far.

I wish I had written this before this morning's development. Well, as of today we're still married, dammit. And here are some photos. Told ya we were happy.

The U.S. Supreme Court left intact Monday a ground-breaking decision that validated a popular adoption procedure used by thousands of gay and lesbian couples in California. The court refused to review a California Supreme Court decision in August allowing second-parent adoptions, an arrangement in which a birth parent who intends to keep a child also agrees to have it adopted by a second parent. The state court's decision recognized as many as 20,000 adoptions by same-sex couples over the past two decades.

Imagine suddenly declaring 20,000 kids no longer part of their families--not just legally voiding their parents but their grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Legally, this case didn't seem all that strong--and you have to wonder about the moral compass of the woman who brought it--but it did go all the way to the supreme courts of both the state and the nation.

Thanks to economist Kris Mitchener and the wonders of Excel, I can now supply a better chart. (Unlike the original chart, these numbers don't account for regional price variations; they do show constant dollars, however, using the national GDP deflator.)

Since the beginning, America has struggled with the concept of free speech. It's a great idea in the abstract. But when reality hits - when free speech alarms, threatens and offends - the temptation is to rein it in. But then it's not free speech anymore.

Universities have become prime places to witness this free speech dilemma. Virtually all institutions of higher learning today declare devotion to free speech and encourage students from diverse backgrounds to express themselves in equal measure.

At the same time - as if terrified all this free speaking might cross too many boundaries - universities also routinely have instituted codes of conduct reining in expression and actions that some groups might find offensive.

Shippensburg University in south-central Pennsylvania had a code that hammered free speech down to a nubbin: Students had a "right to express a personal belief system" but only if the expression did not "demean," "annoy" or "alarm" others. The university was for freedom, but only if it was not "inflammatory or harmful."

In other words, you can say what you want - so long as it doesn't bother a single other person.

Note that Shippensburg "had" these policies.

A feisty organization called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education took Shippensburg to court. Lawyers for that Philadelphia-based group argued the university's policies violated students' rights to free speech, and U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III agreed. The judge said the university's policies could have a "chilling" effect on student expression.

Read the whole thing and learn more about FIRE here. I'm proud to be a member of their board of directors.

The problem isn't that you can't get nutritional info about restaurant food. The problem is that customers don't care. When they do, restaurants respond--not just with information but with menu revisions. The response is so swift that it makes an embarrassingly perfect libertarian just-so story. Exhibit A: the sudden proliferation of Atkins-friendly dishes and carb counts. Of course, sometimes it gets a little silly. My favorite example is Einstein Bagel's new low carb bagel.