Although scientists still aren’t sure what human consciousness is, they are coming up with something just as
intriguing — neurobiological evidence for the human unconscious state. In psychoanalysis, a core concept is that signal anxiety — the unconscious anticipation of an adverse outcome when presented with a situation reminiscent of an unpleasant event from the past — prompts our neurotic reactions. Now two scientists — Philip Wong of the New School in NY and Howard Shevrin of U. Michigan — have demonstrated neurobiological evidence for the existence of this “immaterial” unconscious process. Psychiatric News

A reader pointed me to this — Frontline: the merchants of cool, a report on the creators and marketers of popular culture for teenagers and the symbiotic relationship they have with modern youth. Interviews with cultural critics, media executives and market researchers, as well as reactions from teens and a dissection of media conglomerates. There’s a feature on “how to get really close to teens’ lives” and another on “what it’s like hunting for ‘cool’ “. It’s going to take some delving into…

The Browser in the Belly. Jorn Barger, of Robot Wisdom, thinks web-based phrase-searching is the key to success in scholarship:

“Searching at http://www.google.com has been made so efficient that I
almost called this article ‘the Google in the Belly’: the first step to
becoming an Internet scholar is to train yourself so that whenever
and wherever you see an unfamiliar phrase, your immediate gut-
instinct is to copy it into Google…

But for literary research in particular, Web search-engines offer
something far, far more powerful than a super-encyclopedia– they
effectively offer a _super-concordance_ of every document on the Web…
and not just the simple word-by-word concordances that scholars have
learned to settle for– if you understand the search-syntax, you can
search for any _phrase_ in every document on the Web.”

Here’s Jorn’s customized Finnegans Wake search page (you might find it useful for other things too…)

‘Noted Weed’ (sonnet 76): Bard ‘used drugs for inspiration’. “Scientists in South Africa have uncovered
evidence that Shakespeare might have been a
cannabis user who took the drug as a source
of inspiration.

Research published in
the South African
Journal of Science
shows that pipes dug
up from the garden of
Shakespeare’s home in
Stratford upon Avon
contain traces of
cannabis.” BBC

At Lehman’s, the Only Thing That Gets a No Is Electricity. This mail order company has provided the Amish community with a source of non-electric alternatives to all sorts of appliances and equipment for more than 40 years. (Ironically, its website brings in a good proportion of its sales). Now the California energy crisis has greatly boosted the company’s sales volume. LA Times

Not-Really-Surprising-News Dept.: ‘Community work linked to happiness, a new study finds.

A nationwide survey conducted by Harvard University and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University
examined “social capital” — the connections that bind people together and strengthen the places they live.

Researchers found that areas where residents had high civil involvement were happier than those with more
wealth but less community participation.’ Nando Times

The keys to a quick mind: “If you want your children to extend their
minds, develop skills in multiple dimensions
and become ‘whole’ human beings, forget
yoga, vitamin C and green vegetables. Insist,
instead, that they learn music.” The Telegraph

Soul-Searching Doctors Find Life After Death. ‘The first scientific study of “near-death”
experiences has found new evidence to suggest
that consciousness or the “soul” can continue to
exist after the brain has ceased to function.

The findings by two eminent doctors, based on a
year-long study of heart attack survivors, could
provoke fresh controversy over that most profound
of questions.’

Silence of the Lambs: the election story never told. All along, it’s seemed that this was the bigger travesty in Jeb Bush’s Florida, as investigative journalist Greg Palast reports:

Here’s how the president of the United States was
elected: In the months leading up to the November
balloting, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary
of State, Katherine Harris, ordered local elections
supervisors to purge 64,000 voters from voter lists on the
grounds that they were felons who were not entitled to
vote in Florida. As it turns out, these voters weren’t
felons, or at least, only a very few were. However, the
voters on this “scrub list” were, notably,
African-American (about 54 percent), while most of the
others wrongly barred from voting were white and
Hispanic Democrats.

Beginning in November, this extraordinary news ran, as
it should, on Page 1 of the country’s leading paper.
Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain.

An examination of the docility of the American press. mediachannel.org

Expert proposes new ideas about technology and evolution. “Complex tool-making, which required fine motor skills, problem-solving
and task planning, he argues, may have influenced the evolution of the frontal lobe, and co-evolved with the gift of
grammatical language 300,000 years ago.” EurekAlert!

Hallucinogens on the Internet: A Vast New Source of
Underground Drug Information: “Using the Internet, potential hallucinogen users can
bypass traditional channels of medical information and learn in great detail how to obtain and use numerous drugs with unknown hazards”. American Journal of Psychiatry

Fourth Alzheimer’s Drug Approved: “Alzheimer’s sufferers are about to get a fourth
medication option to help slow the worsening of the devastating
brain disease.

The Food and Drug Administration approved
Reminyl, a drug derived from daffodil bulbs, late Wednesday.” The generic name of Reminyl is galantamine. It works via the same mechanism of existing Alzheimer’s drugs — it’s an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. Early animnal research indicated that it might have other neuroprotective properties as well and, thus, be superior to existing medications for Alzheimer’s dementia. But in preapproval testing, the drug’s manufacturer Janssen tested it only agsinst placebo, nto against other Alzheimer’s drugs.

Pentagon Unveils Plans for a New Crowd-Dispersal Weapon. Non-Lethal Weapons: <a href=”http://www.zarc.com/english/non-lethal_weapons/nlt-usaf.html
“>Terms and References, and the British Non-Lethal Weapons Research Project Research Report [via Red Rock Eaters]

Scholars lament Afghan relic purge “Defying international
condemnation, Afghanistan’s ruling
Taliban turned to artillery and explosives
on Friday to destroy two giant rock-hewn
Buddhas they decry as un-Islamic.

Mortars and cannon were being used to destroy the Buddha
statues in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, defying protests and
diplomatic pressure, sources in Kabul said.” The Taliban have been deaf to plaints from the United Nations, the European
Union, Russia, Pakistan, and India to reconsider. They
consider their efforts to be a campaign against idolatry. I have long cherished my memory of my visit to the Bamiyan Valley in the mid-’70’s, and wish there were some effective way to halt this ignorant travesty. New York Times

Connection duo, WBUR disconnect permanently. The Boston Globe describes the concluding blows in this dispute on which I blinked earlier. While the WBUR management issued a statement describing Lydon and McGrath’s “inform(ing) WBUR that they are leaving their employment to pursue careers in a for-profit, independent production company”, Lydon countered with a statement that WBUR had unilaterally terminated negotiations afteer locking them out for a week. Both Lydon and the station are the losers here, but of course the real losers will be The Connection‘s listeners. WBUR says it will continue the show with a series of guest hosts until they designate a replacement in late spring, but it remains in doubt whether anyone can follow Lydon’s “tough act” of wit, depth, literacy and passion. Lydon and McGrath seem to want to find other outlets to deliver similar content, but an erudite, receptive audience will elude them unless Boston’s other NPR station WGBH hosts them. They’d be blown out of the water by audiences anywhere else in the talk radio universe. These competing statements sound for all the world like the positions the players take in a classical labor-management dispute — essentially, countercharges of greed vs. exploitation — and should be understood in the context of recent struggles between creative personnel and celebrities on the one hand and the producers and media channels that distribute their content on the other hand, for control of the equity value of thier charisma, celebrity or creativity.

Author Bill McKibben recently profiled Lydon and the dispute in Salon, making his biases clear at the outset:

“The
Connection” is the best call-in radio show that anyone’s ever
done; Lydon is America’s best interviewer; and the hours
between 10 a.m. and noon feel lonely as hell without him.

Those are large claims, but you can test them out for yourself at
theconnection.org, where a full archive of recent shows can be
accessed via streaming audio…

If you think this is easy, listen to “Talk of the Nation,” the main
NPR chat show, some afternoon. Juan Williams currently
presides over the festivities, sounding uncannily like a man
ordering cheeseburgers over a drive-through microphone. He
is no nincompoop; “Eyes on the Prize,” his TV history of the
civil rights movement, was hot stuff. But the radio has clearly
defeated him. With its intimacy and its acres of open time, it
requires a nimbleness that he can’t muster.

Pow! Wham! Permission Denied! No homoerotic exegesis of Batman for DC Comics, thanks. Lingua Franca

Arsenic: A new type of endocrine disrupter? “Recently, it has become clear that decades
of exposure to very low doses of arsenic — such as levels found in drinking water in many areas of the United States — may
substantially increase the risk of vascular disease, diabetes and several types of cancer. Until now, little was known about
how arsenic might contribute to these diseases, however.

Using cultured animal cells, a team led by toxicologist Joshua Hamilton, director of Dartmouth’s Toxic Metals Research
Program, found that exposure to very low concentrations of arsenic disrupts the function of the glucocorticoid receptor, a
steroid hormone receptor that regulates a wide range of biological processes.” EurekAlert!

You’re not as nice as you think you are. EurekAlert!

Evidence of Celtic ritual cannibalism in Iron Age Britain.

Slaughter of the innocuous. A vet and researcher into the history of
foot-and-mouth at the University of
Manchester (UK) writes: “From the panic and the headlines you would imagine that this
is a most dreadful disease. Yet foot-and-mouth very rarely kills
the animals that catch it. They almost always recover, and in a
couple of weeks at that. It almost never gets passed on to
humans and when it does it is a mild infection only. The meat
from animals that have had it is fit to eat. In clinical terms,
foot-and-mouth is about as serious, to animals or to people, as a
bad cold.

Why, then, the concern? And why the policy of wholesale
slaughter? The concern, of course, is economic. This is a
financial issue, not an animal welfare issue, nor a human health
one.” The Times of London

The British Medical Journal reviews Vivisection or Science? An Investigation into Testing Drugs and
Safeguarding Health. Italian scientist Pietro Croce used to do it himself, but now says animal experimentation is unethical — not because of what it does to the animals, but what it does to us. As Russ points out, however, a response by a Dr JH Botting to the favorable review of this book points out: ‘The antivivisection literature is replete with emotive propaganda and exaggerated claims of “bad
science”. However a definitive examination of the literature generally exposes criticisms as spurious.
Their perpetuation in books such as “Vivisection or science” does nothing for the ethical debate.’