Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is a stereo view of astronaut Pete Conrad on the lunar surface. Got your red-green glasses handy? The link will only work today, as the APOD site posts a different image each day, but that’s no reason not to click on it tomorrow or thereafter…

Helena Norberg-Hodge, a linguist by training and a native of
Sweden, has been extremely critical of conventional notions of
development. She is the author of the highly acclaimed Ancient
Futures: Learning from Ladakh. She first went to Ladakh in
1975 and shortly thereafter founded the Ladakh Project, with
the goal of providing Ladakhis with the means to make more
informed choices about their own future. For her work as
Director of the Ladakh Project, Helena Norberg-Hodge shared
the 1986 Right Livelihood Award, otherwise known as the
‘Alternative Nobel Prize’. She is the Director of the <a href=”http://www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/International Society for
Ecology and Culture in London.

In this interview…, Ms. Norberg-Hodge discusses the implications of
development as it is currently constituted and also what her vision of an
alternative development would consist in.”

Conditions are not ideal is most rural areas of the so-called “Third World” (terrible poverty following generations of colonialism, monocropping, an exploding population, to give only a few indicators), but they are vastly better than in most urban slums. Asia Source [via Jim Higgins]

Strong Imagination: Madness, Creativity and Human Nature, a new book by Daniel Nettle. How
could (psychotic disorders ) persist in the human population, when their effects are so obviously deleterious? “The hypothesis that the traits underlying psychoticism
can also have beneficial effects, specifically in creative thinking, is critically examined, and the evidence for it laid out. Implications of this
hypothesis for mental health, for culture, and for the evolution of the mind are then examined.” And depression, creativity and the meaning vortex, some musings on vtheory about the work-in-progress of psychiatrist Eric Maisel about just this conjunction.

Museum of the Sub-Conscious,

located in Namibia, Africa, … has as its purpose, the task to solicit donations of human sub-conscious, to store them,
to catalogue them and to make them available for study and research.
But why in Namibia? Well just think for a moment. The materials (human sub-conscious) to be deposited in this
museum are simply immaterial. Thus, they exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time. So, why not select an
obscure landmark in a country, not on the major tourist routes, as the principal entrance to this museum.
(Conceptually, to appreciate this museum and its collections(s) it is not necessary to ever visit the physical place,
designated as the “Public Entrance”.) Also since we are talking about “art”…did you know that the “Charcoal
drawing of an antelope” (charcoal and ochre on shale – 9.5×12.5/1.5 cm) and the “Charcoal drawing of
animal-human figure” (charcoal on shale – 11x8x9.5 cm)–both in the State Museum of Namibia, Windhoek–are
now considered by scholars to have been created sometime between 27,000 and 25,500 years before now! This
suggests that these “drawings” are probably the oldest “art works” yet discovered anywhere!

By the way, the State Museum of Namibia has a robust web presence, as this Google search indicates, although it doesn’t appear the above-mentioned charcoal drawings are depicted anywhere…

The Bush-Kim-Moon Triangle of Money: “At this past week’s summit, George W. Bush and South Korean President Kim
Dae Jung disagreed publicly on how to deal with communist North Korea – Bush
advocated a harder line. But the two leaders have a little-known bond in common:
the political largesse of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

For more than three decades, Moon, the founder of the South Korea-based Unification
Church, has spun a worldwide spider’s web of influence, connecting to hundreds of powerful
leaders through the silken threads of his mysterious money.

Moon’s beneficiaries include the Bush family and, according to U.S. intelligence reports, Kim
Dae Jung.” Ties with the Reagan-Bush administration are well known, emanatig from his financing of right wing causes and his control of Reagan’s “favorite” newspaper, the reactionary Washington Times. His ‘in’ with Kim Dae Jung emanates from his having turned to funding the South Korean opposition after his overtures to the former South Korean administration of the despotic Roh Tae-Woo. Consortium News

The Future of Psychiatry: Eric Kandel Says It Lies With Biology. Kandel is a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist who has elucidated some of the basic neural principles behind behavioral and cognitive functions by studying the simple nervous system of Aplysia (a snail). His most renowned findings relate to the structural changes associated with learning and memory, and the gene expressions that control them. But his proclamation that “the time has come
for psychiatry, … long an art
more than a science, to reinvigorate itself by embracing
biology” has been old hat for fifteen to twenty years already to anyone practicing in the field! Modern psychiatrists have evolved beyond the old dichotomy between “organic” disorders marked by obvious brain lesions and “functional” ones reflected solely in behavior. Kandel’s observation that, “Insofar as
psychotherapy works, it’s got to be doing
something [in the brain], and if it does, one should be able
to detect it with various imaging techniques” is trivially, reductionistically, obvious to us all. I know I link to all those exciting functional MRI findings pouring out these days, showing the localization of various cognitive functions, but that’s just entertainment in a sense. Neural insights and behavioral insights have a profound mismatch of scale; the former are either too fine-grained or too coarse-grained to contribute measurably to the latter or, certainly, to have any impact on clinical mental health practice .

Kandel is more right than he appears to know with his following statement — that “…it’s
really a question of time and resolution…” It’s a long way from a nervous system whose connections you can count on the fingers of one hand to the operation of human consciousness (or the unconscious) embedded in the almost infinite connectivity of the brain, which remains a “black box”. A mechanistic understanding of the complexity of its function or dysfunction is still overwhelmingly — some might say impossibly — distant, and modern psychiatry will for a long time — certainly for the remainder of my professional career, and those of my trainees — have room for and require “artistry”, Kandel’s straw man. Believe me, our nonpsychiatric medical colleagues scoff at psychiatrists as much for going too far as pretenders to a scientific grasp as for the nonscientific “witch doctor” aspects of our practice.

Kandel appears to acknowledge some of this, as the essay indicates in its penultimate paragraph, in a reply to his critics. And he’s absolutely right about the potential for the cross-fertilization with neuroscience to go the other way: “As psychiatrists and neuroscientists
find more common ground, the former could help define for
the latter the mental functions that should be most closely
studied.” Most neurologists make the sign of the cross and cower in the corner when confronted with a consultation question about the higher mental functions such as cognition, emotion or complex behaviors. They remain much more comfortable with disorders of more ‘lowly’ functions such as sensation, balance, coordination or movement that can be tested and measured readily.

According to Education World, Secret Service Report Targets School Violence. But no, it doesn’t, really. It sidesteps the social emergency that creates the climate in which this can happen so viciously and frequently, which of course the Secret Service is unqualified to think about. Instead, it targets the shooters as lone gunmen in an otherwise-intact environment, missing the point and proposing remedies including early recognition of troubled kids and encouraging other students to inform on them. If there ever was going to be a move that accentuates disenfranchisement, alienation and divisiveness, it’s this. Media critics have derided the crop of newspaper columns empathizing with Griffith’s chronic schoolyard victimization, as if it’s only kneejerk emotionalism from isolated others unlucky enough to have had a history of being bullied themselves. I agree that the shooters shouldn’t be exonerated by a blaming-the-victim defense, but the social intolerance and anomie that epitomize American social life guarantee a continuing crop of these incidents. I’m a psychiatrist with a special interest in clinical populations with impulsivity, aggressiveness and irritability, but those whose violence-proneness is neurobiologically mediated form only the smallest segment of our societal violence epidemic, IMHO. The Surgeon General’s Report on Youth Violence is more thoughtful, providing a public health perspective and expressing prominent concern about the availability of firearms.

I share the esteem in which my comrade-in-arms to the north holds Bruce Cockburn, just inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. Toronto Star [via wood s lot] People have been scared by his faith and his political commitment, which are IMHO foundations of his authenticity and intensity. Here, also thanks to wood s lot, is The Bruce Cockburn Lyric Library.

It’s been too long since I’ve read vtheory. Via another weblog, I was alerted to the fact that tjw’s essay “textured concepts, patterned thinking” takes off from my musings on synaesthesia… and goes wide and deep. Thank you, there’s gold to mine there.

I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ve noticed a number of webloggers’ excited anticipation of the upcoming film Black Hawk Down, based on the October 1993 Battle of Mogadishu.

Battle of the celebrity gender theorists: ‘Christina Hoff
Sommers (Who Stole Feminism?; The War Against Boys) skewers
Carol Gilligan,
Jane Fonda and
their “girl crisis”
rhetoric’ after Fonda donates $12.5 million to Harvard for a gender studies center, endowing a chair in Gilligan (In A Different Voice)’s name. Salon