Monthly Archives: December 2008
What Ails Literary Studies
“The major victory of professors of literature in the last half-century — the Great March from the New Criticism through structuralism, deconstruction, Foucauldianism, and multiculturalism — has been the invention and codification of a professionalized study of literature. We’ve made ourselves into a priestly caste: To understand literature, we tell students, you have to come to us. Yet professionalization is a pyrrhic victory: We’ve won the battle but lost the war. We’ve turned revelation into drudgery, shut ourselves in airless rooms, and covered over the windows.”
via The Chronicle.
Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008
![//cache.daylife.com/imageserve/08xj2lwduLfNT/150x97.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/08xj2lwduLfNT/150x97.jpg "Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank, UK")
Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank, UK
George Tenet’s Drunken Tirade
- George Tenet
‘A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes. “They’re setting me up. The bastards are setting me up,” Tenet said, but “I am not going to take the hit.” …According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the rlght wing of Israel’s political establishment, referring to them with exaxperation as, “the Jews.” ‘
Pretty damning, if true. Tenet, of course, has denied it all.
The ‘So What?’ Presidency
ABC’s Martha Raddatz has twice provoked a terse, some would say cavalier response from the White House to a question about the war in Iraq…
via The World Newser.
Drillers break into magma chamber
“Drillers looking for geothermal energy in Hawaii have inadvertently put a well right into a magma chamber.
Molten rock pushed back up the borehole several metres before solidifying, making it perfectly safe to study.
Magma specialist Bruce Marsh says it will allow scientists to observe directly how granites are made.
“This is unprecedented; this is the first time a magma has been found in its natural habitat,” the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, professor told BBC News.”
via BBC.
Racial Extremists: Infiltrating the Military for Chance to ‘Kill a Brown’
New evidence suggests that skinheads are infiltrating the US Army as a result of lowered recruiting standards and lax enforcement of anti-extremist regulations. With genocide on their minds they are positioning themselves in units where they can receive combat training, attract fresh recruits, learn such skills as tactical bomb making, and gain access to weapons and ordnance. White supremacist leaders are encouraging followers without documented histories of neo-Nazi activity and without insignias of their affiliation such as tattoos to enlist as “ghost skins.” One wrote,
“Us racists are actually getting into the military a lot now because if we don’t every one who already is [in the military] will take pity on killing sand niggers. Yes I have killed women, yes I have killed children and yes I have killed older people. But the biggest reason I’m so proud of my kills is because by killing a brown many white people will live to see a new dawn.”
via AlterNet.
Related?
The living dead
![Ascent_of_the_Blessed.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/bb/Ascent_of_the_Blessed.jpg/202px-Ascent_of_the_Blessed.jpg "Hieronymus Bosch's <i>Ascent of the Blessed</i>")
Hieronymus Bosch's Ascent of the Blessed
Related:
- Near Death Experiences Linked to REM Intrusion (sleepdoctor.blogspot.com)
The 150,000-Word Sentence
- The Anglophone world…
Take that, all you doomsayers of the English language in the age of texting. Comes now word that the 517-page French novel Zone, by Mathias Enard — consisting of one 150,000-word sentence — will be published in English. Told from inside some guy’s mind as he takes a train trip, the story “has a lot of commas.” To which we can only add, exclamation point!
The Young and the Restless:
- Barry McCarthy
Why Infidelity Is Rising Among 20-Somethings
“Why is there so much cheating? All of the scholars I spoke with point to the higher median age at which young people get married as the most likely explanation. Since 1950, the age of first marriage has risen to 25 from 20 for women and to 27 from 22 for men. “It’s more common for people to be hooking up or having relationships with multiple partners” before marriage, says Prof. Laumann.
Even young people who engage in monogamous relationships before marriage may be hurting their prospects for a faithful married life. The habits they form in those premarital relationships are likely to affect their marriages, according to Barry McCarthy, a psychologist and professor at American University in Washington. “The most common way that dating couples end a relationship is by starting another” — that is, by cheating on their current partner. Moreover, once people have gone through a couple of breakups of long-term relationships, they may not be as worried about what will happen at the end of their marriage. “The costs of exiting have changed,” says Mr. Laumann.”
via WSJ.com.
So Different?
Josh Marshall observes in Talking Points Memo:
“Since the story broke a few days ago, I’ve been extremely interested in the arrest of Bernard Madoff, former Nasdaq chief, whose investment business has been revealed as a massive scam with loses of as much as $50 billion. Since I’m in the news business a lurid story with gargantuan bad acts and fabulously wealthy people claiming they’re on the way to the poor house is irresistible at some level. But that’s not the root of my interest. What we’re hearing is that this was a classic, if vast, Ponzi scheme. So in the annals of the great financial sector collapse of 2008, unlike the various Wall Street firms and high flyers who were ruined because of the Real Estate Bubble, illiquid mortgage-backed derivatives and generalized speculative euphoria, Madoff’s operation was just a scam, an old-fashioned fraud, that a lot of big players got suckered into.
But put me down as suspicious — suspicious that the difference between Madoff’s and the other investment implosions we’ve seen over recent months will turn out to be so clearly one of kind rather than degree.
Did Madoff start his operation as a consciously fraudulent enterprise? Or was he another operator who was massively over-leveraged, made a bunch of bad calls (you don’t have to make many if your leverage is high enough), lost virtually everything but then was able to keep operating and taking in money and claiming high returns because he had such insanely tight control over his books? In other words, did he start legit, get into trouble and then evolve, for lack of a better word, into a Ponzi scheme?”
I have been waiting for someone to ask if this was really so different from the credit collapse, but I would go even further. The entire economy has been built upon a pyramid scheme in which the losers — the poor suckers who are late investors — are the working poor whose real earnings have consistently eroded and whose debt burdens have steadily grown while the rich get richer. And the bailout is just an effort to prop up the scam so it can continue unabated.
Related:
Shoes Prohibited in Iraq
After yesterday’s events, the US Iraqi Command has moved swiftly to ban shoes as a security threat. US forces have completed house-to-house sweeps of seven metropolitan areas in Iraq, confiscating all footwear with enough heft to be thrown. Those resisting turning over their shoes, and their families, are being preventively detained. A US spokesperson denied that the move is Draconian, promising that the Command will be issuing foam rubber slippers and flip flops to all who queue up at local police stations to apply.
Related:
- Bush & The Two Shoes
- Man Throws Shoes at President Bush in Iraq
- George W. Bush: Pay No Attention to that Ingrate Shoe Thrower, the Iraqi People Love Me
- Epitaph of the Bush Years?
Palm Pins Its Hopes on Nova
I am a longtime Treo user (on my third upgrade at present) and have long been a fan of Palm devices, although no one can deny that the operating system is antiquated and anemic. On the other hand, you cannot scoff at the plethora of third-party developers who have made wonderful products for the Palm platform. Palm was long expected to have a new OS in store and now comes word it will be introduced at CES next month. Of course, the market now is a far different animal than when Palm dominated the handheld spectrum and they are looking for only a modest bite out of market share. Speculation is that the new OS, dubbed Nova, will have to be applicable to far more platforms than just smartphones to situate them properly. They tried to take a tentative step up with the ill-fated Foleo, which they withdrew from sale immediately at the point of launch. I for one have hopes that Nova makes it and that my peripheral brain can continue to exist on a Palm platform.
Report Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders
“An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.”
via New York Times.
Maliki takes revenge over new mandate
“British forces in Iraq are facing a humiliating end to their six-year mission in the country as the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, takes his revenge for what he regards as the British surrender of Basra to hardline Shia Muslim militias.
Mr Maliki, incensed by Britain’s perceived failure to deal with the Mahdi Army of his bitter Shia rival, Moqtada al-Sadr, is stalling on a deal on Britain’s continuing presence in Iraq, barely a fortnight before the current arrangement expires. Frantic diplomatic efforts are under way to secure a legal framework for British forces after 31 December, when the current United Nations mandate expires.”
via The Independent.
Related
- Editorial: Mission unaccomplished (The Guardian)
- ‘Endgame’ for US mission in Iraq (BBC)
- Iraq: after Basra a new reality (Telegraph.UK)
- UK forces no longer needed in southern Iraq, says Maliki (The Guardian)
- Nouri al-Maliki Concedes The Obvious (The Moderate Voice)
Bush’s Final F.U.
“With president-elect Barack Obama already taking command of the financial crisis, it’s tempting to think that regime change in America is a done deal. But if George Bush has his way, the country will be ruled by his slash-and-burn ideology for a long time to come.
In its final days, the administration is rushing to implement a sweeping array of “midnight regulations” — de facto laws issued by the executive branch — designed to lock in Bush’s legacy. Under the last- minute rules, which can be extremely difficult to overturn, loaded firearms would be allowed in national parks, uranium mining would be permitted near the Grand Canyon and many injured consumers would no longer be able to sue negligent manufacturers in state courts. Other rules would gut the Endangered Species Act, open millions of acres of wild lands to mining, restrict access to birth control and put local cops to work spying for the federal government.
“It’s what we’ve seen for Bush’s whole tenure, only accelerated,” says Gary Bass, executive director of the nonpartisan group OMB Watch…”
via Rolling Stone.
Related:
‘Earth’ , Calling Space…
“Twentieth Century Fox’s remake of sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still will be the widest release ever –if you count outer space.
At the same time that the film opens today in theaters, Fox and a privately owned celestial communications network will use equipment at Cape Canaveral, Fla., to begin beaming “The Day the Earth Stood Still” to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to Earth. The galactic stunt is a first-ever for a Hollywood studio.”
via Variety.
Colin Powell on the Failure of GOP ‘Polarization’
“I think the party has to stop shouting at the world and at the country,”Powell said. “I think that the party has to take a hard look at itself, and I've talked to a number of leaders in recent weeks and they understand that.” Powell, who says he still considers himself a Republican, said his party should also stop listening to conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
“Can we continue to listen to Rush Limbaugh?” Powell asked. “Is this really the kind of party that we want to be when these kinds of spokespersons seem to appeal to our lesser instincts rather than our better instincts?”
via CNN Political Ticker.
Tallest Bridge in the World Nears Completion in Hubei, China
Sign the ACLU’s Petition to Shut Down Guantanamo Bay
Five high-profile detainees this week attempted to submit guilty pleas before the government’s ill-conceived military commissions at Guantánamo Bay. But, by the end of the day, their pleas were tied up in a blizzard of confusion over unresolved legal questions.
Whatever happens, it is abundantly clear is that, no matter how hard the government tries to advance the military commissions, this process doesn’t work.
What’s happening at Guantánamo flies in the face of justice, fairness and our American ideals. Please take a moment to tell President-elect Obama to close the prison at Guantánamo. Click here: http://action.aclu.org/openletter
It will take just a few minutes –and the public pressure is critical.
ACLU.
Meet the GOP’s wrecking crew
“This week Southern Republicans had a chance to go to bat for foreign automakers while simultaneously busting a union… The fiercest opposition to the loan proposal — and nearly a third of the 35 votes against ending debate on the deal — came from Southern Republicans, and the ringleaders of the opposition all come from states with a major foreign auto presence. Not coincidentally, nearly all of those states — except Kentucky — are also “right-to-work” states, which means no union contracts for most of the employees at the foreign plants. The Detroit bailout fell victim to a nasty confluence of home-state economic interests and anti-union sentiment among Republicans.”
via Salon News.
Related:
- Rachel Maddow: GOP’s Platform is Now to Reduce the Wages of American Workers (Crooks and Liars)
- Carl Levin questions Richard Shelby’s ethics on the Auto rescue plan (Crooks and Liars)
- New GOP Memo entitled Action Alert about the Auto Bail Out makes clear that it’s all about “Union Busting” (Crooks and Liars)
Decline, fall and then some
- The New Jerusalem (Tapestry of the Apocalypse)
“…[T]here is no shortage of doctors who excel at the literary arts. And none writes more elegantly and eloquently than the British essayist Theodore Dalrymple, the nom de plume of Anthony Daniels, a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. The pseudonym was chosen, he tells us, to convey the sense of a curmudgeon’s stubborn refusal to go along with the defining orthodoxies and pieties of his age.
He believes that man is a fallen creature and so is dismissive of the idea of perfection or utopian thinking of any kind. He is unmoved by Marxism, or indeed any other ideological system that posits causation by abstract social forces. For Dalrymple, the locus of moral concern falls on personal behaviour rather than on social structure, and he is caustic about any notion that negates the idea of personal responsibility, or that suggests that we are simply passive victims of our environment. And unlike so many of the intelligentsia, he is ever mindful that, in this world at least, we do not get something for nothing: Improvement usually comes at a cost. Ideas that arise from the very best of intentions often result in disastrous social consequences.
…Not with a Bang is Dalrymple’s third collection of essays on the decline of British society. …[T]hroughout these essays, two themes predominate.
The first is the state’s aggressive and grinding intrusion into the daily lives of its citizens, “… a juggernaut that cannot be stopped and is no longer under anyone’s control.” The state’s attempts to regulate its citizens, whether by passing explicit laws or by promulgating the official orthodoxies via speech codes, human rights tribunals and other such bureaucratic constructs, has resulted in a neurotic and dependent citizenry. For Dalrymple, such state-sponsored schemes — whether emanating from the political left or right — can be attributed to the naive view that “dissatisfaction and frustration arise from error and malice, rather than from the inescapable and permanent separation between man’s desires and what the world can offer him.” He is scathing in his condemnation of those politicians, bureaucrats and professors who, in the name of building the New Jerusalem, tread recklessly over civilization’s hard-won freedoms, and who are ready to sacrifice truth on the altar of political expediency: “… we have come to an almost totalitarian uniformity of the sayable, imposed informally by right-thinking people in the name of humanity but in utter disregard for the truth and reality of their fellow citizens’ lives.”
The second theme is that despite the fabulous wealth and prosperity of the Western nations, there is a deepening social malaise. In the midst of plenty, after all an individual’s material wants have been satisfied, we have nonetheless spawned new and quite horrific kinds of cultural impoverishment. Despite the fact that even the least-favoured citizens among us can now enjoy diversions and luxuries undreamt of by the monarchs of an earlier age, we have nevertheless invented new ways of imperilling the mind and soul: “Mankind has laboured long and hard to produce a cornucopia for itself, only to discover that the cornucopia does not bring the happiness expected, but only a different kind of anxiety.”
…Dalrymple’s essays provide a kind of eulogy for those public virtues that the world once associated with Britain: reasonableness, honour, stoicism, fair-mindedness, civility and courteousness. His analysis of the British fall from grace also provides fair warning to those nations…which, having travelled some way along the path pioneered by Britain, might yet avoid such a fate.”
via The National Post [thanks, walker].
The tyranny of the to-read pile
“Advice to beat the credit crunch by reading those books you own but never read isn’t as straightforward as it sounds”
via guardian.co.uk.
Total Information Awareness
“No campaign in history has ever compiled and stored more information on its supporters than the Obama campaign did. Should we be worried about this now that they won?”
via The New Republic.
And now for a world government
- The map of all UN members.
“I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to take over the US. I have never seen black helicopters hovering in the sky above Montana. But, for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible.”
[Besides, wasn't Obama just elected first world President? — FmH]
via Financial Times.
The Last Dick
‘When Richard B. Cheney exits his undisclosed location next month, he will probably be the last major figure in American life to answer to the name “Dick.” ‘
via The Daily Beast.
Get Office 2007 from your boss for $30
“A lesser known part of Microsoft’s volume licensing programs for large companies and organizations is the Home Use Program (HUP).
It’s so little known many companies don’t seem to know about it and let their staff take advantage of it.
How it works
Organizations that subscribe to Microsoft’s Software Assurance program (part of Volume Licensing) can allow employees to buy a special license to use MS Office on a home computer.
Each Office license bought with the Volume License is actually two licenses – the Office application for use in the organization plus a corresponding Home Use Program license.
In other words, the HUP involves no additional cost to a company (except a little time to setup the HUP in-house). The organization has already paid for HUP entitlements as part of the Volume License / Software Assurance agreement.
Which organizations?
Any organization that has signed up for Software Assurance can become part of the Home Use Program if they are in one of these Volume Licensing programs: Open License, Open Value, Open Value Company-wide, Open Value Subscription, Select License, Select License Software Assurance Membership, Enterprise Agreement, Enterprise Subscription Agreement, Campus Agreement or School Agreement.
Most small, medium and large companies fall into that category as well as non-profits, schools, colleges and government departments.”
via Office Watch.
Immaculate perception (or: It’s All in Your Head)
“It had to happen really. After years of religious images seeming to appear in windows, cement, trees and even toast, someone’s ‘identified’ an image of the Virgin Mary in a brain scan.
And from the look of the scan, the Holy Virgin has decided to make a divine appearance in the upper tip of the cerebellum.
Inevitably, the scan is being auctioned off on EBay, although at least on this occasion it’s to help pay for the uninsured patient who has racked up huge bills due to her having the misfortune of being ill.”
via Mind Hacks.
Filmmaker Plans to Install Camera in His Eye Socket
“Rob Spence looks you straight in the eye when he talks. So it’s a little unnerving to imagine that soon one of his hazel-green eyes will have a tiny wireless video camera in it that records your every move.
The eye he’s considering replacing is not a working one — it’s a prosthetic eye he’s worn for several years. Spence, a 36-year-old Canadian filmmaker, is not content with having one blind eye. He wants a wireless video camera inside his prosthetic, giving him the ability to make movies wherever he is, all the time, just by looking around.
“If you lose your eye and have a hole in your head, then why not stick a camera in there?” he asks.
Spence, who calls himself the “eyeborg guy,” will not be restoring his vision. The camera won’t connect to his brain. What it will do is allow him to be a bionic man where technology fuses with the human body to become inseparable. In effect, he will become a “little brother,” someone who’s watching and recording every move of those in his field of vision.”
Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison
I'm getting very old. If I were a mutt in dog years I'd be seven, not stray so far. I am large. Tarpon my age are often large but they are inescapably fish. A porpoise my age was the King of New Guinea in 1343. Perhaps I am the king of my dogs, cats, horses but I have dropped any notion of explaining to them why I read so much. To be mysterious is a prerogative of kingship. I discovered lately that my subjects do not live a life, but are life itself. They do not recognize the pain of the schizophrenia of kingship. To them I am pretty much a fellow creature.
via The Writer’s Almanac. Happy birthday to Jim Harrison.
Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong
“Cultural gadfly Pierre Bayard returns to the genre of “detective criticism,” which he invented fifteen years ago (in his rereading of Agatha Christie’s Who Killed Roger Ackroyd), and immerses himself in Arthur Conan Doyle’s imaginary universe. The result is a new, startling way to think about one of Sherlock Holmes’s most famous cases.”
via Very Short List.
Related:
Why Do Men Buy Sex?
“Some researchers say johns seek intimacy on demand; others believe these men typically want to use and dominate women…”
via Scientific American.
Mukasey’s smarmy Nixon defense of Bush crimes
Jason Leopold:
‘When it comes to protecting George W. Bush and his administration, Attorney General Michael Mukasey is stretching legal arguments as far as his predecessor Alberto Gonzales ever did – now even invoking the “Nixon Defense” for justifying presidential wrongdoing.
This week, Mukasey argued that there is no legal basis to prosecute current and former administration officials for authorizing torture and warrantless domestic surveillance because those decisions were made in the context of a presidential interest in protecting national security.
“There is absolutely no evidence that anybody who rendered a legal opinion, either with respect to surveillance or with respect to interrogation policies, did so for any reason other than to protect the security in the country and in the belief that he or she was doing something lawful,” Mukasey said during a Dec. 3 roundtable discussion with reporters.
Mukasey’s argument is, in essence, the same as Richard Nixon’s infamous declaration in his 1977 interview with David Frost that – in the context of Nixon’s illegal wiretappings, black-bag jobs and infiltration of antiwar groups – “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.” ‘
via Consortiumnews.com.
Related?
What do the Clintons have on Obama?
- Camille Paglia
Camille Paglia doesn’t have any answers, but she deserves props for raising the question:
“As for Obama’s appointment of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, what sense does that make except within parochial Democratic politics? Awarding such a prize plum to Hillary may be a sop to her aggrieved fan base, but what exactly are her credentials for that position? Aside from being a mediocre senator (who, contrary to press reports, did very little for upstate New York), Hillary has a poor track record as both a negotiator and a manager. And of course both Clintons constantly view the world through the milky lens of their own self-interest. Well, it’s time for Hillary to put up or shut up. If she gets as little traction in world affairs as Condoleezza Rice has, Hillary will be flushed down the rabbit hole with her feckless husband and effectively neutralized as a future presidential contender. If that’s Obama’s clever plan, is it worth the gamble? The secretary of state should be a more reserved, unflappable character — not a drama queen who, even in her acceptance speech, morphed into three different personalities in the space of five minutes.
Given Obama’s elaborate deference to the Clintons, beginning with his over-accommodation of them at the Democratic convention in August, a nagging question has floated around the Web: What do the Clintons have on him? No one doubts that the Clinton opposition research team was turning over every rock in its mission to propel Hillary into the White House. There’s an information vacuum here that conspiracy theorists have been rushing to fill.”
via Salon.
Paul Krugman’s depression economics
- Paul Krugman
Krugman interviewed by Andrew Leonard:
“The revised and expanded edition of Paul Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics, originally published in 1999 but back in bookstores last week, features, in a reasonably large font on the front cover, the mini-bio: “Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics.” The choice of the (re)publication date couldn’t be better. Not only are Krugman’s predictions of economic doom, first made in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, even more relevant as 2008 comes to a close, but he is also accepting his award in Stockholm, Sweden, this week. When I reviewed The Conscience of a Liberal a year ago, I wrote, “Now is a good time to be Paul Krugman.” I spoke too soon. Now is an even better time to be Paul Krugman.
You write that some economists (and this certainly goes for many Salon readers) believe that recessions and even depressions are necessary mechanisms for purging economies that have gotten out of control. There’s even a moralistic aspect to it: In the U.S., all those greedy investment bankers and housing speculators and overconsuming Americans are getting their comeuppance. But you seem to be suggesting something different: that the government can kick-start the economic machine back into motion, that we don’t have to be subjected to the torture of a severe recession. What do you say to those critics who claim that stimulating the economy out of this recession will just lead to bigger problems down the road?
My favorite Keynes essay is “The Great Slump of 1930,” in which he says “We have magneto [alternator] trouble.” If you’ve got electrical problems with your engine, that doesn’t mean you should junk the whole car. If part of your financial system has gone haywire, that doesn’t mean that millions of workers have to be unemployed.
There’s kind of a weird double-think involved in arguments that the slump should be allowed to follow its natural course. It’s true that classical economics says that we should let market forces do their work; but classical economics also says that severe recessions can’t happen. This idea that we must not intervene is based on a worldview that is refuted by the very fact that the economy is in the mess it’s in.”
Wirehead hedonism versus paradise-engineering
A rodent wirehead.
“Within a few centuries, it will be technically if not ideologically feasible to abolish suffering of any kind. If we wish to do so, then genetic engineering and nanotechnology can be used to banish unpleasant modes of consciousness from the living world. In their place, gradients of life-long, genetically pre-programmed well-being may animate our descendants instead. Millennia if not centuries hence, the world’s last aversive experience may even be a precisely dateable event: perhaps a minor pain in an obscure marine invertebrate.
Far-fetched? Right now, the abolitionist project sounds fanciful. The task of redesigning our legacy-wetware still seems daunting. Rewriting the vertebrate genome, and re-engineering the global ecosystem, certainly pose immense scientific challenges even to a technologically advanced civilisation.
The ideological obstacles to a happy world, however, are more formidable still. For we’ve learned how to rationalise the need for mental pain – even though its nastier varieties blight innumerable lives, and even though its very existence will soon become optional.”
via wireheading.com.
Related:
Experimental Musical Instruments
![//www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/labels/various/ella3530.gif' cannot be displayed]](http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/labels/various/ella3530.gif "Gravichords, Whirlies and Pyrophones...CD accompanying the book by Bart Hopkin")
My friend of almost forty years, Bart Hopkin, was in town this week giving a talk to the MIT Media Lab. He is the founder-editor of EMI, which was a journal for many years and is now a website for the design and appreciation of unusual instruments. He is himself an builder of unusual instruments, each of them beautiful, whimsical or outrageous, and each exploring a design issue or deep principle of music-making or what we think of as music. The site has photos of some of his instruments and links to his recorded music.
Although the boundaries have progressively loosened over the years, he has always had a prejudice in favor of acoustic instruments to the exclusion of electronic. At first it seemed a little odd that he was invited to talk to the Media Center. But the Media Center is all about interface design and Bart’s fascination with unusual instruments entails a preoccupation with interface in a creative endeavor. So it ended up making sense. The audience was entranced by the talk. It occurred to me that, as far as I recall, I had never blinked to his site. Enjoy, both producers and consumers of music among you.
Experimental Musical Instruments Home Page.
Related:
- Guthman musical intstrument competition (Make)
- How the Drawdio was invented (Boing Boing)
- Do You Consider This Tool to be a Musical Instrument? (Chris Pirillo)
- Gallery: Eight Futuristic Musical Instruments (Wired)
- Meet Keromin: Half stuffed frog, half musical instrument (Crunchgear)
- The Daxophone (thanks, Seth)
Will Cholera Bring Down Mugabe?
- African Union
“Kenya’s prime minister has called for foreign troops to enter Zimbabwe to help end that country’s deepening humanitarian crisis.
Speaking in Nairobi Sunday, Raila Odinga said the African Union must immediately authorize sending troops into Zimbabwe.
He said if no AU troops are available, the AU must allow the United Nations to send its own forces into Zimbabwe. Mr. Odinga said the foreign troops would, in his words, take over control of the country and ensure urgent humanitarian assistance to people dying of cholera and starvation.
Nearly 600 people have died from cholera in Zimbabwe since an outbreak that began in August. The country is also suffering from widespread food shortages and a breakdown of its health care system.
Elsewhere Sunday, a group of international statesmen said the current Zimbabwean government cannot lead the country out of its humanitarian crisis.”
via Voice of America.
Zombie Hand Mushroom
“Some days ago, a strange plant grow itself in my garden. I know that Indonesia is a country rich in biodiversity, but most people, including me are ignorant about it. Anyway, Indonesia’s biodiversity, never failed to make me wonder about how creative the nature is.”
via orimath.
A short, disgusting life
Obituary for the Hummer
via Salon News.
Related:
- Hedging its bets – HUMMER dealer anticipates doom, pre-emptively downsizes
- Report: GM Caught Not Soliciting Hummer Offers [Hummer For Sale]
- More Evidence Points To Hummer Sale; Russians, Chinese Interested? [Industry News]
- GM: Sale Of Hummer Is “Urgent” [Hummer For Sale]
- Nobody Seems To Want To Buy Hummer [Industry News]
- Hummer Drivers – Colbert Report on America’s Hero’s (video)
- GM offering buyouts and bonuses to HUMMER dealers
Newsweek Poll: Support surges for gay marriage
Majority now oppose federal ban
via The Raw Story.
Orwell Strikes Again
“The White House altered documents regarding the nations involved in the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” that aided the US invasion of Iraq.
A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign political science professor says he found that the White House had modified elements of its website dealing with the coalition and in some cases deleted key documents in the public record.
At the onset of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the White House released a list of the nations participating in the coalition, an important part of Bush Administration PR efforts, as the war was not UN-endorsed. Over a period of years, however, the original releases were modified to account for the diminishing number of nations.
Two releases were deleted from the White House website entirely, the professor says.
“I think that it raises the question of whether or not we can trust the government to maintain public records of things that were said or done that later prove embarrassing,” Illinois political science professor Scott Althaus said.”
via The Raw Story.
Related:
- The Bush Administration is font of incompetence that keeps on giving
- George Orwell and where we are today
- Stuart Evers: You don’t get to choose your literary heroes
- Paul Anderson: What would George Orwell have made of events at Tribune?
- Christopher Brauchli: Bush Lies and Deception-A Farewell
- Iraq Ally Lists Were Altered, Study Shows
- The “Coalition of the Willing” Comes to an End
Suit contesting Obama’s citizenship heads to Supreme Court
“The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Friday whether to take up a lawsuit challenging President-elect Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship, a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by some opponents of Obama’s election.
The meeting of justices will coincide with a vigil by the filer’s supporters in Washington on the steps of the nation’s highest court.
The suit originally sought to stay the election, and was filed on behalf of Leo Donofrio against New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells.
Legal experts say the appeal has little chance of succeeding, despite appearing on the court’s schedule. Legal records show it is only the tip of an iceberg of nationwide efforts seeking to derail Obama’s election over accusations that he either wasn’t born a U.S. citizen or that he later renounced his citizenship in Indonesia.”
via Chicago Tribune.
Related:
- Guerrilla Law At Work (Plastic)
- Why Stories About Obama’s Birth Certificate Won’t Go Away:
“Barack Obama was, without question, born in the U.S., and he is eligible to be president, but experts on conspiracy theories say that won’t ever matter to those who believe otherwise.”
— Alex Koppelman, Salon News.
- The fringe movement to keep Barack Obama from becoming president. (Slate)
- Obama’s citizenship: The wingnuts’ desperation is showing (Crooks and Liars)
Poor Children’s Brain Activity Resembles That Of Stroke Victims, EEG Shows
‘Previous studies have shown a possible link between frontal lobe function and behavioral differences in children from low and high socioeconomic levels, but according to cognitive psychologist Mark Kishiyama, first author of the new paper, “those studies were only indirect measures of brain function and could not disentangle the effects of intelligence, language proficiency and other factors that tend to be associated with low socioeconomic status. Our study is the first with direct measure of brain activity where there is no issue of task complexity.”
Co-author W. Thomas Boyce, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of public health who currently is the British Columbia Leadership Chair of Child Development at the University of British Columbia (UBC), is not surprised by the results. “We know kids growing up in resource-poor environments have more trouble with the kinds of behavioral control that the prefrontal cortex is involved in regulating. But the fact that we see functional differences in prefrontal cortex response in lower socioeconomic status kids is definitive.”
Boyce, a pediatrician and developmental psychobiologist, heads a joint UC Berkeley/UBC research program called WINKS – Wellness in Kids – that looks at how the disadvantages of growing up in low socioeconomic circumstances change children's basic neural development over the first several years of life.
“This is a wake-up call,” Knight said. “It's not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums.” ‘
via Science Daily.
R.I.P. Forrest J Ackerman
Sci-Fi’s No. 1 Fanboy Dies at 92: Ackerman was the beloved founder and editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, which was one of my mainstays throgh my childhood from as soon as I was allowed to watch monster movies. Some say he was the inventor of the term sci-fi.
BBC.
Free Public WiFi?
“Have you seen this wireless network? I see it *everywhere*, and it’s so suspicious because it’s always ad-hoc (meaning broadcasting from a computer rather than a regular access point). I imagined for a long time it was part of a virus; it waits for someone to connect, redirects to a page that exploits some hole in Internet Explorer, scrapes your hard disk and sends your social security number to Russia, sets itself up as “Free Public WiFi”, repeat.
After seeing it for the thousandth time at the train station Philadelphia yesterday I decided to look it up. Turns out it’s not a virus (at least not in the usual sense) but rather an interesting fuckup on Microsoft’s part, with viral consequences.” [Read on for the explanation...]
via JSTN.
Spirit of the Season
Not only that, it’s so-o-o-o patriotic to spend as much as you can to sustain the economy as well.
Self-Embedding Disorder: NOT
This is a newly-coined term appearing in a press release by the Radiological Society of North America to describe a form of self-injurious behavior, with which we psychiatrists are (unfortunately) far too familiar already. Placing foreign bodies such as hairpins and straightened paper clips into self-inflicted wounds and embedding them under the skin is, admittedly, a new trend in self-abuse, if we can believe the radiologists, whose press release describes the safety and efficacy of minimally-invasive image-guided treatment for the extraction of such objects. However, there is no need for a new diagnosis. Indeed, self-injuriousness in general is not an illness, or a diagnosis, unto itself, but rather a symptom of a variety of diagnoses. A fortiori for a particular kind of self-injuriousness. This illustrates one of the epistemological confusions plaguing the system for diagnosing behavioral problems, and is a perfect example of the needless proliferation of diagnostic categories.
Via The Neurocritic (By the way, I think the Neurocritic piece meant to discuss “foreign bodies”, not “foreign bodes”.)
The Five Stages of Collapse
Dmitry Orlov: “Hello, everyone! The talk you are about to hear is the result of a lengthy process on my part. My specialty is in thinking about and, unfortunately, predicting collapse. My method is based on comparison: I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and, since I am also familiar with the details of the situation in the United States, I can make comparisons between these two failed superpowers.”
Via Energy Bulletin via the null device. Orlov describes five stages of collapse — financial, commercial, political, social and cultural, and places the progress of the collapse of the US on that map.
The coming neurological epidemic
“Biochemist Gregory Petsko makes a convincing argument that, in the next 50 years, we'll see an epidemic of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's, as the world population ages. His solution: more research into the brain and its functions. He also shares a few simple things we can do for ourselves to keep our brains healthy. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 3:46.)”
via TED.
