BBC News | EUROPE | Pinochet ‘brain damaged’: The Spanish press

and ABC reportedly have extracts from the crucial medical report

into the former Chilean dictator’s health which prompted British Home Sec’y Jack Straw to say he intends to allow him to return home. Pinochet, who has diabetes and a pacemaker and has reportedly suffered two recent strokes, is said to have extensive frontal and temporal lobe dysfunction from progressive cerebro-vascular injury. A medical analysis in lay terms explains this.

The Peculiar Practice of Dr. John Ronald Brown: The story of a California back-alley surgeon convicted of murder after his patient died in the aftermath of the amputation of his healthy leg on demand, apparently to gratify the patient’s bizarre sexual fetish. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of this graphic and disturbing story.

Who’s Alive and Who’s Dead: “the site that helps you keep track of which famous people

have died and which are still alive!” Journalists can avoid those embarrassing gaffes; you can settle those arguments with friends or family; search for your own name…

Music lovers ‘have fish to thank’: Researchers suggest that a vestigial part of the vestibular system passed on evolutionarily from fish to humans, and without significance to normal hearing, is sensitive to loud sounds at the frequencies that predominate in music. We may have fish to thank for the pleasure we experience in listening to loud music.

Urban Legend Machine: Generate your own.

Are you part of a Newer, Lonelier Crowd? [New York Times]

Who’s Alive and Who’s Dead: “the site that helps you keep track of which famous people

have died and which are still alive!” Journalists can avoid those embarrassing gaffes; you can settle those arguments with friends or family; search for your own name…

Urban Legend Machine: Generate your own.

Are you part of a Newer, Lonelier Crowd? [New York Times]

Seeing Is Deceiving ‘”Once upon a time, Antonio J. Mendez, 59, a lifelong student of the “accumulation of millimeters” that form the human identity, could alter your appearance so profoundly that not even your mother could tell who you were.

Though his disguises often had to work only for a day, or an hour, or a split second, his audience could be extremely judgmental. A sloppy job could mean death.

Nine years ago, Mendez, the son of a Nevada copper miner, retired from the CIA after a quarter-century. He had worked his way up from the lowly forgery unit–bogus signatures, altered documents, counterfeit currency and the like–to become head of the espionage agency’s division of disguise, with a rank equal to that of a two-star general.

He created some of the CIA’s most elaborate, if little-known, productions–the ploys, skits, scams, masquerades and sleights of hand designed to dupe foreign agents and enemy surveillance teams. His specialty, he writes in a new memoir, “The Master of Disguise,” was “exfiltration,” wherein endangered persons are whisked away from bad guys and taken to safety.’

Astrobiology: on interplanetary biotic transfer.

Paul Davies (Imperial College London, UK) presents a

review of current ideas concerning the seeding from elsewhere of

life on Earth.

The latest issue, as always, of the Flummery Digest fires refreshing potshots — or at times withering blasts — at the absurdities of political correctness, excess regulation, and our litigation-proneness each month.

Slow Down: If your car sports a transponder for “Fast Lane” (MA), “EZ-Pass” (NY), or a similar automated toll collection system, read this. Apparently they are monitoring the speed with which you pass through the tollgates. It also occurs to me that they could determine from the time interval between your entry to and exit from the tollway whether your average speed exceeded the speed limit. [via CamWorld]