Duh: Reasons to Live Help Prevent Suicide During Depression, says new psychiatric research. However, as a psychiatrist treating suicidal patients every day, I largely disagree with the article’s inference that treatment of a suicidally depressed patient be directed toward instilling hope. You can rarely persuade a hopeless patient that they should not be hopeless. If they were susceptible to that kind of reasoning, they wouldn’t be as desperately depressed,would they? And, more important, if you contradict their hopelessness, you’ve usually just made them feel you don’t take their complaints seriously and you’ve blown your alliance with them. One of my mentors once said that treating the suicidal means, first and foremost, paradoxically empathizing with the desireability of death.

I knew they couldn’t pull off the (derivative) public fiberglass animal art in NYC as they did in Chicago. Holland, Mich. is having difficulties too. And Toronto as well.

Steven Baum’s feeling abit peevish about some of the attributes of the weblogs he’s finding. I agree. [Ethel the Blog]

News of Palm’s next direction from the PC Expo, courtesy of Wired: “Palm, meanwhile, announced that it will support a different

module/expansion slot than those currently used by

Handspring and the soon-to-be-debuted Sony.

Palm’s official add-ons will be built around the Secure

Digital slot technology, from Toshiba, Matsushita, and

SanDisk.”

Jorn Barger, at Robot Wisdom, has been doing what he calls

Cliche Watch for awhile. He posts the links to Google searches he’s done of various phrases to elucidate their net.overuse. Search on “cliche” in the Robot Wisdom weblog page to find recent examples, which have included “half full half empty”, “in your pocket or are you just”, “ways of looking at a” (not “blackbird”), and “portrait of the artist as a” (not “young man”). A Google search of “cliche AND ‘robot wisdom’ ” lets you glimpse some of the recognized impact of Barger’s Cliche Watching.

Apparently partners.nytimes.com doesn’t work anymore. If you need to get to some of the previous New York Times links I’ve posted, reportedly you can use www10.nytimes.com. I can’t tell if these things are functional because I’m a registered NYT reader (and I don’t think, in this case, that’s such a bad thing), so they let me in on anything that redirects to nytimes.com itself. Thanks for readers informing me of links that don’t work for them…

The news doesn’t have to be logged, but I think the quote does:

“We have caught the first glimpses of our instruction book,

previously known only to God.”

–Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human

Genome Research Institute.