Romania builds Dracula Land: “The Romanian Government has announced
plans for a theme park in honour of the
controversial figure of Count Dracula.
Tourism Minister Matei Dan told journalists the
park – Dracula Land – would open in the
summer of 2002, at an as yet undisclosed
location, widely assumed to be in Transylvania.” BBC
Vintage Violence: “What does old-time music have in common with gangsta rap?
But old-time music and gangsta rap have more in common than their homicidal tendencies. Both
forms were born of poverty and cultural isolation. Both have a mercenary attitude towards tradition,
which the individual artist pillages, strips of its context, and reconfigures into something original. Both
are marketed to affluent whites via their gritty, “authentic” appeal. Both are racially charged, to say
the least. Both began as party music, but ended up meaning something more. The more you listen,
the more similarities emerge.” Feed
One of the weblogs I read (I’m sorry, I don’t remember whom to credit) linked to this page on the folklore of the sneeze. But it’s only one of 132 pages, each on a category of superstitions and folklore. Here’s the index.
“Men with chronic schizophrenia lose brain volume at a faster rate than the normal aging changes seen in men without the
mental illness, a study by a researcher at Yale shows.” Studies for a long time have shown lower volumes of brain tissue than matched controls in some schizophrenics, but I and others who study schizophrenia have thought this was a static finding representing the neurodevelopmental aberrations that underlie some schizophrenia. Instead, this study followed patients with progressive MRI scans over an average four-year interval, demonstrating tissue loss. And the extent of this progressive change correlated with the severity of their illness in the interim. This suggests ongoing neurodegeneration.
Enjoyed this succinct and pointed observation from Metaforage/Metaphorage: what’s a meta for?: “The methodical re-engineering of the United States by conservatives
continues, as I predicted. This puts the lie to both the Naderites,
who said it does not matter who is elected, and the Republicans,
who pitched Bush as a moderate.” And, I’d add, to the Democrats, so bumblingly overconfident that they could save us from this outcome.
Welcome to From Hunger, “the web’s most taciturn cyberzine”, from HungerSoft Technologies, “where quality is an illusion.” This includes a link to their hilarious Ulysses for Dummies, of which many have taken notice.
How to make a thought screen helmet: “The thought screen helmet blocks telepathic communication between aliens and humans. Aliens
cannot immobilize people wearing thought screens nor can they control their minds or communicate
with them.
Results of the thought screen helmet are preliminary. As of June, 2000, aliens have not taken any
abductees while they were wearing thought screen helmets using Velostat shielding.” [via boing boing]
Annals of the Age of Ignorance (cont’d.): Arkansas considers banning evolution from textbooks. Here we go again. But this time state-sanctioned textbooks can’t even mention radio-carbon dating data on plants or animals! CNN
Brain image database benefits research and education worldwide. “Brain scans are an important tool for medical science, basic research and education, but this expensive technology is often out of reach for many
institutions. Now a team at Dartmouth College has developed a repository for images of human brain scans that is available free to researchers
and educators worldwide.
The National Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Data Center was established with a grant of $4.7 million over five years from the
National Science Foundation (NSF). The scientific research and education community recently gained access to the first data sets, which are made
available by Dartmouth on CDROMs.” EurekAlert! If you’ve been reading FmH for awhile, you’ll know that I’ve been blinking to the — literally — illuminating findings of fMRI studies whenever I can find them. Here’s a primer about how MRI and fMRI work. Here’s a Google search to take it further.
An interview with Kari Stefansson, who founded deCODE genetics in Iceland and thinks he knows the secret of how to find disease-causing genes. The controversial project, which faces Icelandic court challenges but has completed a successful $244 million IPO, is creating a “phenotype database” of the Icelandic population by correlating a
collection of the health records of all 280,000 Icelanders with Iceland’s extensive public genealogy records to “find
disease-causing genes, aided by the relatively homogenous genetics of Iceland’s population”. Discovered genes would be turned into drug targets. Stefansson:
“The database has been controversial mostly for the wrong reasons. There are
all kinds of reasons to be skeptical of collection of personal information, and I think that we can
never be too careful when we do that. But most of the controversy was focused on
misinformation, the insistence that we were working on biological samples without informed
consent and things of that sort.”
He feels that majority approval, rather than unanimous informed consent, is sufficient to proceed with the project. Public sentiment in Iceland ran around 3:1 in favor when polled, and the endeavor was authorized by an act of the Icelandic parliament. Here’s further coverage of the controversy about this and similar projects that are being done in other populations. Harvard’s geneticist and resident gadfly Richard Lewontin typifies these endeavors as conversions of “the health
and genetic status of the entire population into a tool for the profit of a single enterprise.” MIT Technology Review [thanks, higgy]
Signs of Life: Vote to Reverse Abortion Rule. Democrats may be turning the tables on the Blank Stare. Earlier this month, Republicans used a rarely invoked Senate rule — that can force a vote to rescind executive branch regulations — to reverse Clinton administration workplace safety protections. Now Senate Democrats, with the reported support of at least five Republicans (Olympia Snowe [ME], Jim Jeffords
[VT], Susan Collins [ME], Arlen Specter [PA] and Lincoln Chafee [RI] ), will use this maneuver to reverse Bush’s ban on US aid to advocates of abortion abroad. Recall that this was Bush’s first significant — and malignant — executive action after his inauguration, and that his responses to subsequent questions about the decision demonstrated his lack of understanding of its implications. Reuters
“Why would kids from a place like that do it? Because they can, because it’s been done.” From Classrooms to Chat Rooms, All Threats Turn Serious. One of the tragedies of modern life is the pitiful unoriginality of even violent pathological attention-seeking. ‘ “I think that we have reached a point where
this has become part of the repertoire of
acting out,” said Charles Patrick Ewing,
professor of law and psychology at the
State University of New York at Buffalo and
author of Kids Who Kill.’ And I’m amazed to hear about the modern equivalent of the ludicrous duck-and-cover exercises which in my grade school years were supposed to protect us in the event of a nuclear blast — drills in which students prepare for an imaginary terrorist attack by finding safe havens and escape routes from their schools. Is this preparedness or absurd hypervigilance which gives troubled kids a built-in avenue to act out? New York Times
