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

Bush Puts Brakes on Memorial To Reagan.

The Bush administration surprised Republican members of Congress yesterday by saying that it is too soon to build a memorial to honor former president Ronald Reagan on the Mall.

The spectacle of the new GOP administration casting doubts on a proposal to speed a monument to the party’s most admired living hero arose when Richard G. Ring, an assistant director of the National Park Service, testified to the House that it was Reagan himself who signed a 1986 law that barred any memorial on the Mall until 25 years after a person’s death. Washington Post

Boy, 14, Gets Life in Prison. “A boy who says he was
imitating body-slamming pro wrestlers when he killed
a little girl at age 12 was sentenced to life in prison
without parole Friday after a judge refused to reduce
his first-degree murder conviction.”

The Elvis Costello 500: “From Abba to Zamballarana, and from Mozart to Eminem, one of rock’s finest talents has
identified 500 albums essential to a happy life. It was a long, tortuous undertaking, but the man
knows music – and his aim is true.” Compare and contrast with the Recording
Industry of America/National Endowment for the Arts 365 best songs of the century. And the National Public Radio top 100, to which I previously blinked.

Canadian student plans to set up Napster clone in Sealand, beyond the reach of copyright law …if he can raise enough money. The Register

Google Search: “-pound gorilla”, à la Jorn Barger’s cliché searches.

Neil Gaiman uses Blogger to keep a journal about slouching toward the June ’01 publication of his new book American Gods

Rebecca Blood muses about fighting the merchants of cool after watching the Frontline documentary and digging into the website, which I previously blinked.

The Web Standards Project: Fighting for Standards in our Browsers: “Old browser versions are keeping the Web (and your
experience) from being all it could be. Please consider upgrading to one of the following
browsers, which make it easier for Web builders to be sure the sites you visit will work
correctly.”

Three big corporate giveaways by the Shrub’s administration are probably just the beginning of repaying those who bought him the Presidency:

Bankruptcy reform for MBNA

repeal of the Clinton administration’s expensive workplace ergonomic regulations to prevent repetitive strain injury

In a bitter battle, pork producers who voted in January to end mandatory fees on their hog production which funded the promotion program responsible for the famous “other white meat” advertisements have had their vote disregarded and are being forced to continue in the “checkoff” program which funds the National Pork Producers’ Council. This organization, a large contributor to the Shrub campaign, represents the interests of the large agribusiness concerns in whose hands pork production is increasingly concentrated at the expense of independent, family hog farmers being squeezed out of the market.

ACLU Action Alert: Stop Wrongful Executions, Support a National Moratorium! ‘Senator Russell Feingold
(D-WI) has introduced the “National Death Penalty
Moratorium Act of 2001″ (S. 233). This legislation would
impose a moratorium on federal executions while
creating a National Commission on the Death Penalty to
review fairness in the administration of capital
punishment.’ One-click fax support for Feingold’s bill.

Hubble Spies Huge Clusters of Stars Formed by Ancient Encounter

Studying galactic interactions is like sifting through the forensic evidence at a crime scene. Astronomers
wade through the debris of a violent encounter, collecting clues so that they can reconstruct the celestial
crime to determine when it happened. Take the case of M82, a small, nearby galaxy that long ago bumped
into its larger neighbor, M81. When did this violent encounter occur? New infrared and visible-light pictures
from the Hubble telescope reveal for the first time important details of large clusters of stars, which arose
from the interaction. Space Telescope Science Institute (StScI)

Several letdowns in today’s New York Times:

Bush Tells Seoul Talks With North Won’t Resume Now. In one fell swoop, Dubya reverses two years of careful building toward reconciliation and misses what experts call a narrow window of opportunity before North Korea retreats to a hardline stance. New York Times

Parkinson’s Research Is Set Back by Failure of Fetal Cell Implants “A carefully controlled study that
tried to treat Parkinson’s disease
by implanting cells from aborted
fetuses into patients’ brains not only
failed to show an overall benefit but
also revealed a disastrous side effect,
scientists report.

In about 15 percent of patients, the cells apparently grew too well,
churning out so much of a chemical that controls movement that the
patients writhed and jerked uncontrollably.

The researchers say that while some patients have similar effects
from taking too high a dose of their Parkinson’s drug, in this case the
drugs did not cause the symptoms and there is no way to remove or
deactivate the transplanted cells.” Sad news; this technique had excited high hopes for Parkinson’s patients and their doctors, as well as those with other neurodegenerative conditions. New York Times

The problems of preserving dance legacies. Trademark and copyright complications prevent the performance of the works of some choreographers after their death… until they’re too far from living memory to pass on the nuances of their work any longer. Martha Graham’s work is hopelessly entangled, for example. Boston Globe

The Next Wave: ‘What’s got people in the industry buzzing these days really could
be the next great leap forward in broadcasting. Within months,
radio audiences around the world will be able to install
appliances — whether for Internet radio or for satellite radio —
in their homes and automobiles that will dissolve borders and
allow listeners to tune out commercials, silence, moronic
talk-show callers and processed music for good.

True, the technology won’t be free. But for many listeners, a
few bucks a month is a small price to pay for real choice.

“We’re going to flip people’s concept of radio on its head,” said
Joe Capobianco, a senior vice president for New York-based
Sirius Satellite Radio at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show.’ Chicago Tribune

Potter fans rally to boycott film: “Warner’s legal wizards have alienated
children by cracking down on fan Web
sites. ” Ottawa Citizen

Arnold Schoenberg: guilty as charged? Is it just to blame him for all that’s wrong with modern music? Independent And: The madness of art: “Robert Schumann spent the last two and a half years of his life
wretchedly incarcerated in a mental asylum. The composer’s
psychiatric condition had never been robust and his fate has
been considered an accident waiting to happen by those who
shake their heads over the angular themes and complex
harmonies in his later works or the gloom of the Manfred
overture.

Generations later, an American academic has taken up his
cause, contending that this was a brutal and unnecessary fate
for a man who was not so much deranged as depressed.
Schumann was not only denied his freedom, but at times even
denied the paper on which to compose. He confronted that
most horrifying of fates: being the one sane man in a house of
the mad. ” The Times of London

Descramble That DVD in 7 Lines. “A new, slimmed-down version of DVD descrambling now exists: a mere
seven lines of Perl code. It’s so lean, you too can attach it to your
e-mail signature file. Hello, movie industry lawyers… The probable spread of qrpff on business cards, on T-shirts, and bumper stickers closely
resembles the distribution of encryption code in signature files and T-shirts a few years ago.
Such civil disobedience flouted U.S. export laws in a kind of global keep-away game. “

Here you go:

$_=’while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;$t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=(
$m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;$t^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16
-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271);if((@a=unx”C*”,$_)[20]&48){$h
=5;$_=unxb24,join””,@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[–$h+84])}@ARGV;s/…$/1$&/;$
d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d8^($f=$t&($d12^$d4^
$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e8^($t&($g=($q=$e14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q<<6))<<9,$_=$t[$_]^
(($h=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x”C*”,@a}’;s/x/pack+/g;eval

Wired

As Buddhas Fall: Richard Cohen’s op-ed piece in the Washington Post suggests that the Shrub’s faith-based initiative ought to be seen in the light of what the “pathologically pious” Taliban are doing to Afghanistan.

Who’s Obscene? Hackers Put Pornography on Hamas Web Site. “Hackers invaded the Internet site of the Muslim militant group Hamas
to make it show pornography on Tuesday, after the fundamentalist organization
claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that killed three Israelis.

Web surfers trying to access http://www.hamas.org were re-routed automatically to a
pay-for-view pornographic site offering a fare ranging from ‘kinky co-eds” to
‘Latina fetish.’ ” Reuters’

Five factors caused sub collision, admiral testifies. Rear Adm. Charles Griffiths Jr. said a longer periscope search could have averted the disaster and cited five contributing factors:

Lack of qualified sonar operators.

Broken equipment that could have helped detect the Japanese ship.

The number and location of the civilian visitors.

A rush to complete the emergency surfacing drill.

A command climate in which crew members were unaccustomed to questioning the commanding officer because they trusted his skills. AP

WHO retracts statement backing South Africa in drug companies’ lawsuit. South Africa is in the midst of an epic patent-infringement lawsuit battle against pharmaceutical giants for the right to import cheap generic equivalents of AIDS drugs to deal with its HIV emergency — an estimated 10% of its population are HIV (+). The WHO now says a spokesperson was in error in stating that the agency believed South Africa’s actions were defensible under international law. AP

FBI protecting actor Russell Crowe. “The FBI is investigating a possible plot to kidnap Oscar-nominated
Gladiator star Russell Crowe.” Life imitating art? “… Crowe played a kidnap-and-ransom expert in his latest movie, Proof of Life.

Don’t look at your nakedwife Geek.com

US couple give up fight for twins BBC

Tim Wise: School Shootings and White Denial. “I can think of no other way to say this, so here goes: white people need to pull our
heads out of our collective ass… I said this after Columbine and no one listened so I’ll say it again: white people live
in an utter state of self-delusion. We think danger is black, brown and poor, and if
we can just move far enough away from ‘those people’ in the cities we’ll be safe.” AlterNet

Add 2 Sperm and Stir:

‘Dr. Calum MacKellar, a bioethicist associated with the University of Edinburgh,
has been outspoken about egg nuclear transfer, expressing a concern that it could
be used to “mate” the genetic material from two sperm cells to create a biological
child from two men. Theoretically, the technique could be used to introduce sperm
DNA into an enucleated egg, fertilize this “male egg” with another sperm and
gestate the resulting embryo in a surrogate mother. (Of course, this could be done
with the DNA of two female eggs as well.) […and recent speculation suggests it’s not impossible to alter a man’s body and hormonal environment to allow gestation…]

As simple as it might sound, this scenario is still somewhat remote, since the
creation and fertilization of a male egg would require researchers to overcome
certain biological obstacles, not just legislative and psychological ones. One such
impediment would be the automatic response that mammalian gametic DNA seems
to exhibit in which it recognizes the DNA of the opposite sex, otherwise known as
imprinting. Nevertheless, MacKellar is concerned that loopholes in the British
legislation allow research that could bring about the male egg. In the draft of a
recent article, he asks rhetorically: “Would society accept such motherless
children?” ‘ AlterNet

Eye of the Beholder?

‘Traditionally a procedure sought only by patients with excess eyelid skin or those hoping to lessen signs of aging,
eyelid surgery or Blepharoplasty has become popular among young Asian American women and accepted as
just another cosmetic choice in an array of many — like tinting your eyelashes or straightening your teeth.
Approximately half of Asians are born with eyelids that are naturally smooth and uninterrupted by a crease in the skin. Asian patients
seek out blepharoplasties to create or exaggerate a crease in their eyelids commonly referred to as “double eyelids.” … Critics of eyelid surgery believe it is a cosmetic cop-out for Asian Americans who want to downplay their race,
since all Caucasians and most non-Asians are born with the crease. Still others argue personal confidence is the issue, since an estimated
fifty percent of Asians are also born with the eyelid fold. But Asians have been characterized by their eyes more than any other feature by
Westerners (think Fu Manchu-style caricatures and slant-eye miming in the schoolyard.) This deep-rooted, racist cultural imagery makes
it somewhat impossible not to see the widespread effort to alter this trait as a reaction. as well as a statement about the effects of
Westernization on Asian Americans.’ Wiretap

Microsoft seeks revenue boost with rush Office release: “Within days of launching the Office XP preview program, Microsoft has released final, or gold,
code to manufacturing. In past projects, a gap of up to two months has separated final beta, or
preview, versions and the product’s gold release. The rush this time may well be inspired by
Microsoft’s sagging financial fortunes recently, as the Office line has been one of the software
giant’s most reliable money-makers.” c/net

Emotions and Disease, an exhibit “developed by the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine… to explain to the general public the meaning and relevance of scientific developments linking neurophysiology to the functioning of our immune systems… One of the paradoxes we found was that the close relationship between health,
disease, and the emotions seemed to be more readily accepted in popular culture than
within the contemporary scientific community. Why, we asked, has the close
relationship of emotions to disease been so central to the long history of medical
practice, yet has been regarded with suspicion by some sectors of the modern
biomedical community?

This exhibition evolved as a dialogue between scientists and historians pursuing answers
to these questions.”

Taking the wraps off “Ginger”. Let’s not forget this flash in the pan quite yet. “An article in the March 20 issue of Inside magazine claims that Ginger is indeed a
two-wheeled scooter-like device and further asserts that it will run nearly emission-free using a
hydrogen-based engine. In theory, the engine could power a range of devices.” c/net

Sharp to challenge Palm, Pocket PC with Linux PDA: “Osaka-based Sharp will be the first major maker of PDAs (personal digital assistants) to introduce a Linux OS-based PDA… The new models will be available in the United States and Europe from October… c/net

Life Is a Cabaret, And Death Is Conceptual Art :

In a show that pushes the boundaries of the controversial, a German doctor is displaying real cadavers. Skinned and dissected, the preserved bodies, which were donated by fully informed volunteers, are recomposed in abstract and representational forms for aesthetic effect…

But von Hagens’s “creations,” which are drawing huge crowds to a converted train station in East Berlin, are stirring an intense debate about the limits of expression and the dignity of the dead. And many find something deeply disturbing in this baroque intersection of science, art and entertainment, which invariably resonates with questions about a particular German responsibility to respect the dead. Washington Post

“I console myself with the thought that it
is far better to live in a world with too many books than too
few…” Humiliations: the books that book critics and literary journalists are embarrassed to admit they’ve never read.

The Internet’s public enema No. 1:

‘Rotten.com’s sole purpose is to “present the viewer with a truly unpleasant experience,” and its proprietor is doing a dandy job of that. If it involves bizarre
sex, gruesome death or the sordid side of celebrity, you will find it on this site. “End times are here!” crows Rotten.com, and after a gut-wrenching hour or
two perusing the hundreds of images … archived here, it’s hard not to
agree: We are one screwed-up species.

It’s horrible. And yet, the Net is fascinated. About 200,000 visitors come to Rotten.com every day. … But Rotten.com isn’t just a database of the disgusting; it’s also a venue for making a point about censorship, at least according to “Soylent,” the
pseudonymous proprietor of Rotten.com, whose highly graphic content has earned him enemies around the world. The site is currently being investigated by
Scotland Yard and the FBI for cannibalism. The German Family Ministry has threatened Soylent with legal action if he doesn’t find a way to shield minors
from his site. And then there’s the endless cease-and-desist letters that flood in from a long list of major corporations that object to the site.’ Salon

Browsing my referrer log, it turns out someone got to me by doing an AOLSearch on “clitoral regeneration”. FmH was the 12th of 38 results of that search, because of this article from my archives. Oops, now a “clitoral” search will probably point to the current (March ’01) page as well, and I may even rank higher on “clitoral regeneration” searches. Now, if we only knew what in the world they were really after… Another search that pointed to FmH was a Google query on “prisoner’s right to give interviews in India”; it pointed to one month’s archive in which I had several blinks with the word “prisoner” in them, and several (different) blinks referring to India.

The Disturbing Search Requests weblog, whose founders started out by monitoring their referrer log, is having a similar problem, reports the Village Voice: ‘…by spotlighting the freakiest of the freaky, Disturbing Search Requests has become so loaded with
hot-button search terms that it is itself pulling in plenty of traffic from confused search engines. The site
gets more than 1500 visitors a day, most of them more interested in “nude tennis” or “hairy armpits” than in
meta-Web humor.’

How Enlightened! China takes homosexuality off list of mental illnesses. “In a reversal of previous policy, psychiatrists have decided to stop
classifying homosexuality as a mental disease.

New guidelines to be issued next month by the Chinese Psychiatric
Association will drop all references to homosexuality as a pathological
condition…” Sydney Morning Herald

A Machine Called Z: “Under a ring of water in a sealed chamber in the
middle of the New Mexico desert lies the heart of a
machine that could change the world.” Guardian [thanks, Abby]

The Swoosh Stumbles: “Why is it so tough to find a pair of Air Force Ones?” The software system to zip the right shoes into the right stores, for which Nike plunked down millions, doesn’t work. One casualty has been Nike’s stock price, of little interest to me. The Industry Standard But shoe stampedes closed several malls around the country (here’s a report from the March 4th Sacramento Bee), in this age of consumerist depravity, when queued customers — some of whom had been camped out since 3:00 a.m. — were unable to get their $140 pair of newly-launched hot shoes in the right color. “I’ve never seen anything this crazy before. It’s not worth it. I’m happy I got them, but they shouldn’t be limited. Everyone should be able to have a
pair. My little nephew almost got run over, and some guys went diving over the counter and hurt the girl at the
cash register. That was uncalled for.”

Similar stampedes have occurred recently in Oakland and Cincinnati. And two months ago in New York, a
Brooklyn Foot Locker manager allegedly set fire to his store to cover up the fact that 446 pairs of new Nike Air
Jordan sneakers were missing from his inventory. The $125 shoes were not scheduled to be released until later
that month, but the manager had been peddling them from a shop three doors down the street, authorities said.

The Retro style Air Jordans that caused such a frenzy Saturday are selling for more than $200 on eBay; chat
rooms on the Internet are devoted to when and where the latest styles will arrive.

This in the face of a recent New Scientist report on how innately human it is to cooperate while waiting in line [not on the web, I think].

“Oh, Calm Down!” James Fallows: “Some economic downturns are worse than others. This is one of the good ones.” We’re not experiencing negative growth. A downturn won’t negate “an astonishing period of material progress.” The deep forces affecting the economy remain positive, not negative. And the layoffs have hit people best positioned to adapt to them. The Industry Standard

Ten Ways to Make Windows 98 Run Better. Bought that faster Windows machine but still unsatisfied with your processing performance? It’s likely that, unless you’re a dedicated tweaker who’s done all these things already, the culprit is the operating system, and that you’ll find at least one or two helpful hints in this story. Since it’s just a modified Win 98, the tips are useful for WinME as well.

Korn, Radice and Hawes’ Cannibal: The History of the People-Eaters reviewed:

I once met an academic who was convinced that
there never had been any genuine cannibalism,
anywhere, ever.

All such stories
were a racist,
imperialist
construction of the
“other”, she
explained. She’d
had to have been
put in a pot and
boiled till she was
done to convince
her otherwise.
Such disbelievers
are now in retreat,
the authors of this
television spin-off
say.

Indeed, they propose that “cannibalism as a
feature of human behaviour is something that
has taken place throughout history, in every
continent on our planet”. Eating people is
commendably multicultural, then.
Thisislondon

Star thinkers in ‘e-learning’ launch: Filmed lectures by twelve of the “world’s greatest thinkers” will be available to the public for a month before they become the foundation of a growing archive which universities will pay a fee to access, at Boxmind.com, which is apologetic about the need to charge money for the service. Licensees will also be able to record and archive their own faculties’ lectures in the same innovative format, which its founder describes as “the Internet library students have dreamed of”:

Because the lectures are not delivered by a live webcast
but by a broadcast of filmed material, users can stop the action
at any point and follow the extensive links on each page for
in-depth background information on specific points. The lectures
can also be rewound and examined line by line for weaknesses
in the argument.

The technology used for the site – www.boxmind.com – is as
inventive as the concept. Each lecture screen is split into four. In
the top left, a talking head delivers the lecture, while
synchronised slides run in the top right. In the bottom right there
is a synchronised transcript of the entire lecture – complete with
embedded footnotes – next to the relevant web links.

The initial twelve lecturers in the series, accessible here, are:

Richard Dawkins,
Fellow of New College, Oxford, and Charles Simonyi, professor
of the public understanding of science. Survival of
the Fittest – the Fittest What?

Niall Ferguson,
Professor of political and financial history, at Oxford. The Cash Nexus – Money and Power in the Modern World

Sir Martin Rees,
Astronomer Royal and Royal Society professor at Kings
College, Cambridge. Cosmic Evolution

Daniel Dennett,
Professor of philosophy, and director of the Center for Cognitive
Studies at Tufts University, Massachusetts.
Consciousness: More Like Fame Than Television

Peter Atkins,
SmithKline Beecham fellow and tutor in physical chemistry at
Lincoln College, Oxford. The Second Law

John Kay,
Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, and visiting professor of
economics at the London School of Economics.
The Foundations of Corporate Success

David Womersley,
Fellow and tutor in English literature and senior tutor of Jesus
College, Oxford. Tragedy and Individuality in
Othello

John Searle,
Mills professor of the philosophy of mind and language,
University of California at Berkeley.
Consciousness, Free Will and the Brain

Sir David Weatherall,
Regius professor of medicine at Oxford. The
Human Genome Project and the Future of Medical Practice

Ian Stewart,
Professor of mathematics at Warwick University.
Order and Chaos in Mathematics and Nature

Nicola Lacey,
Professor of criminal law at LSE. Criminal Law and
Modern Society

Steven Pinker,
Peter de Florez professor in the department of brain and
cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. The Ingredients of Language

I am interested in trying out this format, which sounds on the surface as if it is a great way to utilize web capabilities for disseminating information rather than trying to sell anything. I do wonder how much bandwidth a home user will need to view these without it being a frustrating experience. The Guardian

Some police see through killer’s lies. “Shown
videotapes of an interrogation of a murder suspect speaking a language
they didn’t understand, some British police officers consistently knew
when the man was lying and when he was telling the truth. Other officers
detected lies and truths about as well as if they had guessed, and some
detected lies less often than if they had guessed, report Aldert Vrij and
Samantha Mann, both psychologists at the University of Portsmouth in
England.

Their study, published in the March-April Applied Cognitive Psychology,
assesses, for the first time, people’s ability to size up a highly motivated
liar.” The study showed police officers a foreign videotape of a suspect denying a murder accusation during an interrogation; he later confessed to the crime. I’d be interested in interviews with the officers who could easily recognize a liar to see if they could articulate the nonverbal cues they use. Science News

New Files Tie U.S. to Deaths of Latin Leftists in 1970’s. “A
recently declassified State
Department document shows that
Latin American officers involved in
Operation Condor, the joint effort in
the 1970’s by right-wing
governments to crush left-wing
opposition, used an American communications installation to share
intelligence.” New York Times

Promise-Breaker  – George W. Bush retracts his foreign policy campaign pledges: “… isn’t it a tad
peculiar to shoot your mouth off about U.S. military readiness
first, and then assign fact-finders to verify?” Slate

Although I’m glad the upshot appears to be that there will not be a vast increase in military expenditure, I also appreciate someone’s pointing out that he campaigned in ignorance and/or dishonesty, taking nonviable positions to get elected by pandering to rightwing sentiment. And it’s worth noting that revising his position is less a matter of having “come to his senses” than a realpolitik recognition that an illegitimate and crippled administration presiding over a legislative branch and an electorate neatly split down the middle is (thankfully) not likely to accomplish anything sweeping. How he spins things in an ongoing attempt to save his hide in the face of this inherent ineptitude is likely to remain entertaining viewing for at least four years.

Drug’s Effect on Brain Is Extensive, Study Finds

Heavy users of
methamphetamine …
are doing more damage to their
brains than scientists had thought, according to the first study that
looked inside addicts’ brains nearly a year after they stopped using
the drug.

At least a quarter of a class of molecules that help people feel
pleasure and reward were knocked out by methamphetamine, the
study found. Some of the addicts’ brains resembled those of people
with early and mild Parkinson’s disease. But the biggest surprise is
that another brain region responsible for spatial perception and
sensation, which has never before been linked to methamphetamine
abuse, was hyperactive and showed signs of scarring. New York Times

Despite Blocks, Napster Users Can Still Get Protected Files. ‘…the system for restricting access to files
could only block files by a specific name; a misspelling, intentional
or unintentional, could stump the blocking software. Thus a user
looking for Metallica’s “Fade to Black” would not be able to get the
song, while one typing in “Fade 2 Black” would turn up numerous
entries…’ New York Times

“The most dangerous psychiatrist in America”? A Critic Takes On Psychiatric Dogma, Loudly. Dr. Sally Satel, in magazine articles, op-ed pieces in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and her Dec. 2000 book PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine, about which I previously blinked,

describes well-known public health researchers as “indoctrinologists,” accusing them of
promulgating a “social justice agenda” by focusing on racism and
poverty rather than health education and disease- fighting
strategies. She criticizes feminists for construing
wife-battering as a symptom of a patriarchal society. She argues that psychiatry is being co-opted by a culture of
“victimology,” which undermines personal responsibility and
ultimately damages patients. Dr. Satel shares office suites with such conservative luminaries as
Newt Gingrich, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Robert H. Bork in her tenure as a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the Shrub sought her counsel on drug policy during his campaign and has reportedly invited her into his Administration. While, as a clinical psychiatrist, I find her views on increased personal responsibility among our patients and avoiding the medicalization of social ills superficially beguiling until you examine the public policy implications of voicing them loudly instead of patiently within our interactions with those we treat. New York Times

Yes, Size Matters: Gene-tweaking British evolutionary biologist believes that the genes that control body size also control longevity, and smaller is better. The Times of London

Press release: Juno Announces Virtual Supercomputer Project. “Distributed
computing facility to harness unused resources of Juno subscriber
base, with theoretical computing power of world’s fastest supercomputer.”

Australia Outlaws E-Mail Forwarding: ‘Outrageously strict Internet copyright laws which have just gone into
effect throughout Australia make it illegal to forward an e-mail memo
without the author’s permission, and could result in fines of $60,000
or five years in the slam, according to a story by the Aussie Sunday
Telegraph.

“It’s quite possible that the forwarding of an e-mail could be a
technical infringement of copyright,” an unnamed legal advisor to Oz
Attorney General Daryl Williams told the paper.

“E-mailing is a ‘communication’ under the Digital Agenda Act, and
so is putting something up on a Web site,” the source added.

This could rank as the world’s most copyright-friendly and
common-sense-hostile piece of legislation yet devised.’ The Register

After Three Strikes, Is La Niña Out? “La Niña-like conditions that have persisted in the
Pacific Ocean for three years might finally subside
this Fall. The change could pave the way for a weak
El Niño — and a surge of hydroelectricity for
power-starved California.” NASA

1,300 Media To Cover McVeigh Execution. It’s projected to be not only a media circus but a bonanza for local commerce.

isometric screenshots: “A series of drawings from an isometric perspective, in the style of a computer game. The subject of each drawing is the image, or
images, that created a popular cultural event. Historical events (like the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel)
are used interchangeably with fictionalized events (like the picnic scene from The Sound of Music).” Click on each picture to seee the full 800×600 image, which the artist executed in Photoshop. Go to the FAQ for identifications of each picture you don’t recognize.

Government’s 50 Greatest Endeavors: An Opinion Survey for the Brookings Institution: “…a project on
what the federal government tried to do and what it achieved. The project began
with a cataloging of major laws passed since World War II, followed by the
grouping of these statutes by their objective, and the selection of the top 50
endeavors for a national survey of historians and political scientists. The survey
results identify government’s greatest achievements and failures taking success,
difficulty and importance into account.” When was the last time you believed your government could achieve difficult, important objectives for the good of the country or the world?

We Can Always Hope: ‘Heat vent’ may diminish global warming: ‘The Pacific Ocean may open a “heat vent”
above it that releases enough energy into
space to reduce projected climate warming
caused by the build-up of greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere.’ BBC

‘Snuffy Smith’ cartoonist Fred Lasswell dies at 84.

The picture is cribbed from the “vast repository of toonological knowledge”, Don Markstein’s Toonopedia.

But Markstein’s site has neither hide nor hair of some of my favorites, Dan O’Neill‘s “Odd Bodkins” and the late Vaughn Bodé‘s Deadbone (“…a billion years ago, across the winter blue past, there is
a ugly mountain standing in the cold afternoon wind. It is
the first place to look for the roots of western sanity… “) etc.

Duke researchers reverse damage of heart failure with gene therapy. “After previously demonstrating that they could use gene therapy to prevent heart damage in rabbits with
congestive heart failure, Duke University Medical Center researchers have now gone one step further to use gene therapy to
actually reverse the damage already done to the rabbits’ heart tissue.” EurekAlert!

Moderate earthquakes rattle Acapulco. More clustering? Does the earth groan in discontent?

Members of Blue Man Group say they haven’t sold out. Guerrilla theatre does Intel and Grammy. Nando Times

Data Accessory Musings: Handspring hopes to gain an “edge”. “The new device will have an all metal case, PalmOS 3.5, 8MB RAM, a
lithium (ion or polymer are uncertain) battery, a detachable Springboard adaptor, and it will be the the lightest
& thinnest Visor yet” … Especially if it comes with a color display, the combination of that and the expansion slot might make me abandon brand loyalty and upgrade from my invaluable Palm Vx, even with the rumors of a color version coming this spring. On the other hand, there’s the Kyocera Smartphone, which integrates a Palm organizer into a cellphone neatly; this has apparently just been spotted in Verizon stores. This degree of integration of my two most important data accessories is appealing. I’ve tried some wireless web access on my current cellphone but it’s a brain-dead process with the small screen size and crippled data entry via the twelve-number keypad; I cancelled web services on my cellular account after a trial month. Here’s a primer on short messaging service (SMS), the wireless instant-messaging technology that’s very popular with the European market and, apparently, especially with the young. I honestly can’t see this catching on with me, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve scoffed at geeky developments I later came to depend upon.I don’t even see any use to instant messaging on my wired desktop, like ICU or Yahoo’s instant messaging client. As the article describes it, this appeals mostly to the Britney Spears set. Here’s an article on using an instant messaging client with a connected Palm device. Then there’s the two-way paging world of the Blackberrys etc., which I haven’t even thought about. If not a dot.com executive, I hear I’d have to be a nightclubbing NBA star for that. Your next net appliance, however, is of course going to be your car…

Update: From Robot Wisdom comes thsi pointer to Simson Garfinkel’s rave about the Handspring Visorphone PDA-cellphone combination in Salon.

Student kills 2 classmates, wounds 13 near San Diego CNN; New York teen kills father after noise dispute Nando Times; News analysis: When Children Kill BBC

Convergences: The essayist writes, “In the late 1960’s, as a college junior, I drove John Fahey through
Massachusetts for a week. He was playing a series of gigs
from Williamstown to Wellesley. Well after midnight,
somewhere on the Mass Pike, he began to ramble on about
his music and the odd and often inappropriate places it had
found a home. He told me that there were mental hospitals
in Massachusetts where his music was played over
loudspeakers as part of the therapeutic regime; psychiatrists
had decided it had the power to soothe the more agitated
patients.

‘I’m always amazed it doesn’t drive them to immediate
suicide,’ he said, cackling.”

“Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a
thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a
pufferfish.” — Bruce Sterling [via apathy] It turns out this was from a speech, “The Wonderful Power of Storytelling”, from the Computer Game Developers Conference in San Jose CA in March 1991.

Who Hit Who? Apart from the grammar, there are problems with this piece I’ve seen linked to by others. The author, Robert Morningstar, a “computer systems and imaging specialist”, says he wrote this on behalf of the captain, crew and passengers of the USS Greenville “all of whom had the duty and the right to be there.” He goes to great lengths to assert that the sub and the US Navy could not possibly have been remiss in the incident, claiming that the Ehime Maru was not really an innocent fishing vessel but probably had stealth capability, was stalking the submarine for Japanese intelligence-gathering and R&D purposes, and that it hit the sub rather than vice versa. He uses “patriot” phraseology which identifies him with the radical right. (He says he’s written for the “American Friends and Patriots Network”; a web search on that comes up with nothing, but the “American Patriot Friends Network” [“we believe Patriots should rule America”] is there and clearly comes from militia territory on the political map.)

Quinacrine Non-surgical Method of Voluntary Female Sterilization: “…already used by over 100,000 women with no reported deaths or life
threatening complications.”

“Delivered by a trained midwife or MD in any office, using a modified
IUD inserter, a 252 mg dose of 7 tiny quinacrine pellets is placed at the
fundus of the uterus. The pellets dissolve quickly. The fluid causes
inflammation and then scarring at the opening of the fallopian tubes.
This prevents further births. With two treatments a month apart, studies
show low failure rates with no evidence of cancer. As the drug is
off-patent, the cost of the pellets and inserter is under $5. Surgical
sterilizations often cost well over $2000 in the United States.” However, the method has been banned in Vietnam, India and China after unfavorable publicity, including suggestions of carcinogenicity, its proponents call a “vast disinformation
campaign by uninformed feminists and traditional family planning
opponents (which) has now been fully discredited by sound scientific
investigations and a long favorable experience with QS in Chile.” I googled (I’ve started seeing this as a verb recently; what do you think?) on “quinacrine AND sterilization” and the words that leap out at me from the results include “controversial” (over and over again), “dangerous”, “painful”, “forced sterilization” and “guinea pigs”. [via Caught in Between]

Am I Going Down? ” A guide to your likelihood of personally experiencing full loss equivalency.” [via metafilter]

The Skyscraper and the Barometer

“What does the unique election of 2000 mean for health policy in the United States? The answer is complex. The closeness of
the presidential vote and the divided Congress suggest that changes will be modest and incremental. Yet Democratic
and Republican voters differ sharply in their views on many issues concerning health care, such as the role of the federal
government and access to abortion…. In this article, we use data from public-opinion polls and other sources to highlight the differences in views on health policy
between Republican and Democratic voters. We then discuss the implications of the 2000 election.” New England Journal of Medicine

You can buy happiness… it costs
£1m . “Economists have for the first time discovered the price of
happiness, and it is at least £1m. New research suggests that,
contrary to folklore, money can bring happiness, but it takes a
large amount.” Sunday Times of London

The Famine the World Forgot. More than a million reportedly face starvation in drought-ridden Afghanistan. The draconian policies of the Taliban are destroying the livelihood of the country and willl prevent access to international relief agencies. This regime runs a close second, IMHO, to the Khmer Rouge’s fabled reign of terror in Cambodia in their ability to destroy their country with a slavish adherence to doctrine. UN Sanctions against the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, compound the issue. Time

A couple of pieces about disparate English transplants to America:

“Swift, devastating and alert…, a first-rate hater”: The Guardian reviews Unacknowledged Legislation by Christopher Hitchens, English polemicist who has mastered “the fine art of causing maximum offence to most people,” although the reviewer admits he doesn’t understand much of what Hitchens fumes about, since Hitchens now writes from and about the U.S.

Getting uppity in suburbia: “While the sun has long since set on the
British Empire, its legacy lingers at a cul-de-sac near you.” Anglophilia graduates from cultural tradition to
powerful branding tool.
. Salon

Pylons are cancer risk – official. After many previous negative studies, an epidemiologist in the UK reports a small but significant increase in cancer risk among children living near high tension power lines. The article has links to take you further in investigating this issue should you desire. This finding may open a floodgate for lawsuits by affected families. Sunday Times of London

Knowing Thyself in San Jose: a visit to the world headquarters of the mysterious Rosicrucians. SF Weekly Online

CIA’s Anti-Drug Message for Kids; it joins other federal agencies in projecting a clean and sober message. However, it doesn’t come clean on its complicity in fostering international narcotrafficking.

I searched in vain on the CIA’s Web site for any mea culpa regarding the agency’s
support for counterinsurgency campaigns waged by various drug-smuggling “freedom
fighters.”

There was no mention of massive amounts of still unaccounted-for U.S. aid to
Pakistani military officers and Afghan mujahadeen rebel leaders, which helped
grease a major arms-for-heroin pipeline in Southwest Asia during the 1980s. Much of
the dirty cash was laundered through institutions such as the scandal-ridden Bank of
Credit and Commerce International, which functioned, not coincidentally, as a conduit
for CIA operations in the region.

At the same time in Central America, Lt. Col. Oliver North and high-level CIA
personnel aided and abetted big-time cocaine smugglers who ferried weapons to the
Nicaraguan contras fighting the Sandinista government.

How to Blow $700 Million a Year on a Bad Habit: “DARE, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, took
its first step toward recovery on February 14 — it admitted it had a problem.
Eighteen years after its inception, DARE finally acknowledged what study
after peer-reviewed study has found: Despite expending $700 million per
year, the DARE program has not helped reduce teen drug use. In fact,
according to the latest government study, teen drug use has risen since 1990
and remains stable at record-high levels.” Tompaine.com

Michael Kinsley among the snobs, on O’Reilly Among The Snobs Washington Post

How to say “Oh my God! There’s an axe in my head!” in 68 languages. [via Red Rock Eaters]

Levy’s Nine Laws of the Disillusionment of the True Liberal [thanks, Ivan]

On Day of Sub’s Accident, Tour Was Its Only Mission. “The Feb. 9 training run of the U.S.S.
Greeneville, which led to the
accidental sinking of a Japanese
fishing trawler, was made solely to
accommodate the Navy’s efforts to
promote itself.” New York Times

On Day of Sub’s Accident, Tour Was Its Only Mission. “The Feb. 9 training run of the U.S.S.
Greeneville, which led to the
accidental sinking of a Japanese
fishing trawler, was made solely to
accommodate the Navy’s efforts to
promote itself.” New York Times

On Day of Sub’s Accident, Tour Was Its Only Mission. “The Feb. 9 training run of the U.S.S.
Greeneville, which led to the
accidental sinking of a Japanese
fishing trawler, was made solely to
accommodate the Navy’s efforts to
promote itself.” New York Times

On Day of Sub’s Accident, Tour Was Its Only Mission. “The Feb. 9 training run of the U.S.S.
Greeneville, which led to the
accidental sinking of a Japanese
fishing trawler, was made solely to
accommodate the Navy’s efforts to
promote itself.” New York Times

Computer ‘can talk like a baby’.

“An Israeli company has created a
conversational computer program it claims
could revolutionise the way people interact
with machines.

Artificial Intelligence Enterprises (Ai) says its
Hal program can already converse convincingly
and has the vocabulary and grasp of language
of a 15-month-old child.

Already transcripts of conversations generated
by the computerised child have reportedly
fooled independent judges into thinking they
were reading a write-up of a real conversation.

Now, the company is working on giving its
creation the conversational ability of a
five-year-old. Then it plans to use the program
to do away with keyboards and let people
simply talk to their computers.”

BBC

If you lick your envelopes?? Latest urban legend/hoax meme chainmail I received via email. And a Google search on “lick envelopes cockroach tongue”. Update: As Ed Fitzgerald points out, this legend is debunked at http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/tacobell.htm, as part of the authoritative and entertaining Urban Legends Reference Pages site. [thanks, Ed]

Everyday fantasia: “With the help of sophisticated behavioral
brain-imaging and molecular genetic methods,
researchers are coming closer to
understanding what drives the extraordinary
sensory condition called synesthesia.” First psychologists showed that, in synaesthetes, the associations across sensory modalities are stable over time and involuntary (even when they interfere with normal perception), implying a fixed and automatic mechanism in their brains. fMRI studies showed that the cross-modality sensory areas were actually activated, as one would expect — for example, in a synaesthete who “sees” music s/he is hearing, the visual areas are active as well as the auditory.

In fact, it may be the concept, not the percept, that causes the sensory experience (for example, in one synaesthete tho experiences colors for numbers, presenting him with “5+2” causes him to experience the color associated with the concept “7”). This would turn on its head the usual “bottom-up” notion of sensory processing and would suggest that synaesthetes demonstrate a lack of the usual inhibition of “feed-backward” connections from high-level multisensory areas to single-sense cortical areas. Another theory suggests that synaesthetes’ brains may be richly crosswired with extra connections, perhaps a connectivity with which we are all endowed at birth but which normally devolves. This is not an alien concept; brain development is known in other regards to depend on the dying-off of neuronal connections as much as the elaboration of new ones over time. Any neurophysiological theory of synaesthesia would have to account for the fact that the phenomenon is temporarily induced by hallucinogenic drugs; it would be hard to imagine that the drug experience stimulates the rapid growth of new neuronal connections which then disappear after the drug is out of the user’s system.

Whatever theory is correct, an implication that occurs to me is that there is probably a continuum of synaesthetic experience from total absence to fullblown. While I’m certainly not a robust synaesthete, I suspect I have a degree of the overconnectivity, since I’ve always noticed I have vivid and enduring experiences of colors associated with various concepts — numbers, sounds, names of people and the days of the week. For example, “Monday” is a kind of lime green and “Thursday” a rose-tinged grey, and always has been — no, really! On the other hand (indulge me for a moment), these may not be neurophysiological correlations at all, but rather unconscious psychological ones — i.e. not classically-described synaesthesia at all. For example, while writing this paragraph, endeavoring to describe the color experience I have for “Friday,” I was just now surprised to find that what first came to mind was the phrase “fried-egg-yolk yellow.” It immediately made me wonder if the connection is the sound-association between “Friday” and “fried”, not a cross-modality experience at all. In other words, “Friday” may be that shade of yellow because it reminds me of “fried egg.” There may be similar associative reasons for the other color experiences that are there despite remaining opaque to me so far. Oh, well.

In any case, interesting to me in my professional work, where I focus on the phenomenology of psychotic symptoms, is the suggestion by some researchers that synaesthesia may share some neurobiological similarity with hallucinations. Could schizophrenics think thery’re hearing voices talking to them because they’re, unbeknownst to themselves, experiencing “crosstalk” from a sensory experience in a disparate modality such as taste or vision? This does not at all square with my own theory of hallucinatory experience, but it’s intriguing nonetheless, although difficult to study both because its experiencers are in distress to an extent that would make it hard for them to cooperate with neurophysiological investigation; and because most actively psychotic patients accessible to study are medicated (and it would be unethical not to medicate them, IMHO!).

One curiosity I’ve always had about synaesthesia is if the “crossed” sensory modalities ever include the kinesthetic sense. Often considered our “sixth sense”, this is our visceral body experience — i.e. our perception of the position, extent, and movement of our body parts in space. Are there synaesthetes who, for example, experience a sound or a color when they swing their arm around, take a step, open their mouth? How about the reverse — experiencing movement in or change of position of a body part as part of the perception of a sound or a shape? [Could this relate to the visceral component of aesthetic experience? (Benjamin Whorf: “Probably in the first instance metaphor arises from synesthesia and not the reverse.”)]

A number of fascinating hits emerge from a Google search on “(synesthesia OR synaesthesia) AND (kinesthesia OR kinaesthesia)”, including this collection of interesting analyses of Beatles music.

Love’s illusions: Americans tend to be overly optimistic about their chances of marital success.

Does Being a Jock Make a Man Gay? Timothy Noah:

‘The theory that ring finger size is destiny has resurfaced.
Faithful Chatterbox readers will recall that a year ago this
column asked, “Does A Short Index Finger Make You Gay?”
Chatterbox cited a study published in Nature (click here to
read a press release on the findings) maintaining that lesbians
tend to have ring fingers that are exceptionally long relative to
their index fingers, apparently because their mothers had high
levels of male hormones in the womb. A less intuitive finding
was that gay men also tended to have long ring fingers, owing,
again, to their mothers having high levels of male hormones in
the womb, though this correlation was more tentative. Mark
Breedlove, the Berkeley psychology professor who authored
the study, used the occasion to suggest that gay men, far from
being feminized men, were in fact hypermasculinized men.
Chatterbox himself struck a rigorously neutral pose, then
stated Chatterbox’s Law of Biological Determinism:
Conservatives believe that genes determine everything
except homosexuality, while liberals believe that genes
determine nothing except homosexuality.’ Slate