There has been much speculation, conjecture, outrage, and confusion over an announcement by Google, the famed Internet search engine, over the consolidation of its various services. In a message to Internet users who use Google’s services, the U.S. based company told customers in an email, “We’re getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google.” The change is set for March 1.

Besides the change in its privacy policy, Google continues to garner attention for what critics fear is a form of collaboration with governments that has implications not only for customers’ privacy but human rights as well. Member of Congress have requested that Google answer a series of questions about the new policy before March 1. Members of the Energy and Commerce committee, including ranking minority member Henry Waxman (D) and subcommittee chairman Cliff Stearns (R), signed the letter that demands that Google describe “describe all information that Google collects from its consumers now.”

The letter also asked, “How will this information change after the new privacy policy has been implemented?” in addition to requesting clarification about how the company will use the new information it collects. The letter also asked “Please explain if consumers will have the option to op-out of any data collection, usage practices, and infromation sharing between Google’s many services, including Gmail, Google Search, and YouTube. If so, how can a consumer make this request successfully? If not, why not?” A blog entry for Google provided an intial response to public concerns:

You still have choice and control. You don’t need to log in to use many of our services, including Search, Maps and YouTube. If you are logged in, you can still edit or turn off your Search history, switch Gmail chat to “off the record,” control the way Google tailors ads to your interests, use Incognito mode on Chrome, or use any of the other privacy tools we offer.
We’re not collecting more data about you. Our new policy simply makes it clear that we use data to refine and improve your experience on Google — whichever products or services you use. This is something we have already been doing for a long time.

Apparently seeking to allay customer concerns over privacy, Google declared on a webpage dedicated to privacy concerns, “Our goal is to provide you with as much transparency and choice as possible, through products like Google Dashboard and Ads Preferences Manager, alongside other tools. Our privacy principles remain unchanged.” Google promises that it will not sell customers’ information to third parties; “And we’ll never sell your personal information or share it without your permission (other than rare circumstances like valid legal requests).”

“Extinct” Galápagos Tortoise Still Exists

The giant Galápagos tortoise Chelonoidis elephantopus, long thought to be extinct, likely still exists and was producing offspring as recently as 15 years ago. These tortoises can go for months without food and can grow to be a half a ton, and for hundreds of years, they were heavily hunted by whalers who considered them an ideal source of fresh meat on long voyages. For 150 years, experts believed that C. elephantopus was extinct. Now, however, researchers have found 84 tortoises, 30 of which are under 15 years old, that appear to have a pure-bred C. elephantopus as a parent. More

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Genetic or Not, Gay Won’t Go Away

That has long been one of the rallying cries of a movement, and sometimes the gist of its argument. Across decades of widespread ostracism, followed by years of patchwork acceptance and, most recently, moments of heady triumph, gay people invoked that phrase to explain why homophobia was unwarranted and discrimination senseless.

Lady Gaga even spun an anthem from it.

But is it the right mantra to cling to? The best tack to take?

Not for the actress Cynthia Nixon, 45, whose comments in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday raised those very questions.

For 15 years, until 2003, she was in a relationship with a man. They had two children together. She then formed a new family with a woman, to whom she’s engaged. And she told The Times’s Alex Witchel that homosexuality for her “is a choice.”

“For many people it’s not,” she conceded, but added that they “don’t get to define my gayness for me.”

They do get to fume, though. Last week some did. They complained that she represented a minority of those in same-sex relationships and that she had furthermore handed a cudgel to our opponents, who might now cite her professed malleability as they make their case that incentives to change, not equal rights, are what we need.

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Jan 27, 2012 – If Peyton Manning isn’t the greatest quarterback of all time, he’s one of only three or four guys in the conversation, and that speaks volumes. We know this. He’s an 11-time Pro Bowler with an NFL-record four MVPs — there’s no drama about how he’ll be remembered. If anything we’ve taken it all for granted.

Which brings us to this week, where Indianapolis is getting ready to host Tom Brady and Peyton’s little brother on the biggest stage in sports, while Peyton Manning’s career quietly fades away in the background. On Tuesday, an article ran in the Indianapolis Star in which Peyton talked about watching some his close professional friends get fired.

“I guess it’s the reality of the football world,” he told Bob Kravitz. “Just not something I’ve had to deal with very often. This is so … sudden. Their keys didn’t work the next day. There’s no other way to do it? I don’t know. That’s hard to see, all these people leaving. And I may be behind them. Who knows?” This a new Peyton Manning: Frustrated, uncertain, vulnerable.

It’s no small twist.

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BOB WILLS: DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS

The 11 Special Forces soldiers were speeding along in three Humvees. The call for help had come from an Iraqi army scout.

The Iraqis had moved a little after dawn to arrest what they thought were about 30 potential troublemakers.

The SF team members had no clue they were racing into a 24-hour battle, vastly outnumbered and outgunned by a heavily armed militia of about 800 cult-like Shiite warriors.

See More Video From Military Times

The “Soldiers of Heaven” were dug in to fight to the death in their quest to take over the city of Najaf and its holy shrine.

The fighting that erupted Jan. 28, 2007, turned out to be some of the fiercest of the Iraq war. U.S. and Iraqi soldiers killed 373 enemy fighters, and more than 400 surrendered. The U.S. Army awarded more than 100 combat decorations for bravery that day, including at least eight Silver Stars and a Distinguished Flying Cross.

The battle has since been reconstructed in some media accounts ,but the fight against the Soldiers of Heaven remains little known outside the circles of those who were there.

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Simple Ideas That Are Borderline Genius

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How do you design a utopia? In 1972, John B. Calhoun detailed the specifications of his Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice: a practical utopia built in the laboratory. Every aspect of Universe 25—as this particular model was called—was pitched to cater for the well-being of its rodent residents and increase their lifespan. The Universe took the form of a tank, 101 inches square, enclosed by walls 54 inches high. The first 37 inches of wall was structured so the mice could climb up, but they were prevented from escaping by 17 inches of bare wall above. Each wall had sixteen vertical mesh tunnels—call them stairwells—soldered to it. Four horizontal corridors opened off each stairwell, each leading to four nesting boxes. That means 256 boxes in total, each capable of housing fifteen mice. There was abundant clean food, water, and nesting material. The Universe was cleaned every four to eight weeks. There were no predators, the temperature was kept at a steady 68°F, and the mice were a disease-free elite selected from the National Institutes of Health’s breeding colony. Heaven.

Four breeding pairs of mice were moved in on day one. After 104 days of upheaval as they familiarized themselves with their new world, they started to reproduce. In their fully catered paradise, the population increased exponentially, doubling every fifty-five days. Those were the good times, as the mice feasted on the fruited plain. To its members, the mouse civilization of Universe 25 must have seemed prosperous indeed. But its downfall was already certain—not just stagnation, but total and inevitable destruction.

Calhoun’s concern was the problem of abundance: overpopulation.

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A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.

MARK D. PAGEL is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Evolutionary Biology; Head of the Evolution Laboratory at the University of Reading; Author Oxford Encyclopaedia of Evolution; co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology. His forthcoming book is Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind.

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50 Most Influential Books of the Last 50 (or so) Years

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Is there anything better than cold beer? Homer Simpson didn’t think so, and on this point a lot of Americans would agree with him. So no surprise that some fine pieces have been written about the beverage.

Abigail Tucker profiled a beer archaeologist. “Dr. Pat is the world’s foremost expert on ancient fermented beverages, and he cracks long-forgotten recipes with chemistry, scouring ancient kegs and bottles for residue samples to scrutinize in the lab. He has identified the world’s oldest known barley beer (from Iran’s Zagros Mountains, dating to 3400 B.C.), the oldest grape wine (also from the Zagros, circa 5400 B.C.) and the earliest known booze of any kind, a Neolithic grog from China’s Yellow River Valley brewed some 9,000 years ago,” she wrote. “Widely published in academic journals and books, McGovern’s research has shed light on agriculture, medicine and trade routes during the pre-biblical era. But it’s also inspired a couple of Dogfish Head’s offerings, including Midas Touch, a beer based on decrepit refreshments recovered from King Midas’ 700 B.C. tomb, which has received more medals than any other Dogfish creation.”

The Fix interviewed the creators of America’s most hated beverage. “Before it was banned nationwide, Four Loko, the popular energy beer denounced by the White House as ‘liquid cocaine,’ was blamed for a surge in underage binge drinking, scores of date rapes, and a vicious gay bashing,” the magazine wrote. “Stunned by the criticism, the company’s young founders dodged the press for almost a year. But last month The Fix convinced them to tell their story for the first time. And they’re not apologizing for anything.”

READ.

Google Collaborates with Foreign Governments and Courts to provide Private Information

“Extinct” Galápagos Tortoise Still Exists

Genetic or Not, Gay Won’t Go Away

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