For Hindus and Vegetarians, Surprise in McDonald’s Fries. A lawsuit claims MacDonald’s deliberately misled consumers in boldly proclaiming a switch to cooking its fries in “100% vegetable oil”. It’s true, but the fries are apparently seasoned with beef fat before leaving the factory. New York Times IMHO, it serves anyone right for believing anything MacDonald’s tells them. By the way, if you haven’t read the book, Robot Wisdom points to this reasonable summary of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (from the London Review of Books via the Guardian).
Monthly Archives: May 2001
Reno’s Hint at Florida Race Catches Some by Surprise: “Florida and
national Democratic Party officials
today were polite but skeptical that former
Attorney General Janet Reno could raise
their chances of unseating Gov. Jeb Bush,
the president’s brother, in next year’s election.” New York Times You have to believe that the Democrats are targeting this race with all the heavy artillery they can muster. Reno’s liabilities are considerable — think about how the South Florida Cuban exile community must think of her after the Elian Gonzalez case, to start with — and she could end up a ‘spoiler’ in such an important race. New York Times
Dying Comet Gives Rare View of Space: “It was like watching an autopsy on a comet.
Comet Linear, falling toward the sun last summer, peeled off layer
after layer, revealing its structure and composition to astronomers
watching with some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Yahoo!
Lean & Mean — codeine abuse is coming back, reportedly. Calling it “liquid crack”, however, is a simile based on basic drug ignorance. They couldn’t be more different. Houston Press
Utah polygamist found guilty: A Mormon, not surprisingly, he has five wives and 29 children. Convicted of failure to pay child support as well. This is the first big bigamy trial on more than half a century. One of his wives was a 13 year-old in 1986 when he allegedly had sex with her. He subsequently married her, and now faces a felony rape charge as well. CNN
Student minces no words with new sign language — “A college student’s thesis
examining sign languages from around the
world could provide autistic children or
stroke-impaired adults with a new method
to communicate.
The gestures are simple, mime-like and
require a minimal number of separate
movements. Those components, the thesis
adviser said, make signing easier for people
who might have finite motor skills or limited
memory.” CNN
A comprehensive listing of US secession movements — “Discover the fault-lines where political self-determination and the increasingly Corporate nation-state clash.” disinformation
Radical Ideology Points the Bushites Toward Avoidable Trouble —
“What is worrying is the combination of three factors that could
produce a perfect political storm.First, the Bushies came into office with the attitude that
everything Bill Clinton did was wrong and needs to be
reversed.Second, they bore Republican theological positions on tax cuts,
the environment and missile defense, positions that were
hatched in conservative think tanks and chanted with religious
devotion but were never tempered by the real world as it has
evolved in the last eight years. Yet early signs are that the
Bushies will say or do anything to get their radical tax cuts
made, their oil wells drilled and their missile shield built – no
matter what is going on in the world.Finally, they control the Senate, the House, the White House and
the Supreme Court, so there are no brakes.” International Herald Tribune
Lego: No Tech Meets New Tech: “Although its trademark plastic building blocks are decidedly old school, Lego is
repositioning itself as a player in today’s technology toy market.
Founded in Denmark before World War II, Lego is emphasizing key product lines based on interactive
software, robotics and even Harry Potter, at this week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo.” Wired And: LUGNET™: ‘home to thousands of LEGO® fans of all
ages. We are a community which never sleeps — and has been called “the friendliest place on
the Internet.” ‘ A Webbies finalist.
Cytokine-Associated Emotional and Cognitive Disturbances in Humans. One element of the immune response is the secretion of infection-fighting circulating substances by lymphocytes (a class of white blood cells) activated by the presence of the infection. Many of us who look at the interface between behavioral disturbances and bodily physiology have suspected that these cytokines have direct — and deleterious — CNS effects and may account for some of the behavioral disturbance accompanying various physical illnesses. Here’s empirical evidence. Archives of General Psychiatry
“The drive by HMOs to “medicalize” psychotherapy – insisting that practitioners look for a
medical disorder such as clinical depression and then dispense a prescribed treatment – will ultimately suffocate psychotherapy through
ignorance of how it works.
That’s the contention of Bruce Wampold, professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a new,
controversial book, The Great Psychotherapy Debate.
Methadone increases infectivity and stimulates viral replication of HIV, according to new research. Bad news for patients who contracted HIV through IV drug abuse which they are now attempting to stabilize through methadone maintenance. BioMedNet And: Study: Heroin Moving to Suburbs, Rural Areas. ” A New
Jersey study suggests that heroin, a
longtime scourge of America’s
inner cities, is becoming a suburban
and rural problem.” CNN
The Accidental Curist — “Doctors who were trying to grow new blood vessels with gene therapy found a welcome side effect:
The therapy repaired what they thought was permanent nerve damage.” Not clear if the improvement was due to revascularization or direct nerve growth; further studies are planned. Wired
Breaking the Hickory Stick: The proposed Teacher Liability Protection Act,
supported by President Bush, will likely increase corporal punishment of schoolchildren in
states where paddling is still legal. New York Times
This Time, It’s Personal. Democrats (finally) begin opposing Bush’s judicial nominees. The American Prospect
“Suddenly some of the most unlikely people are losing sleep over what windmills might be doing to birds.” TomPaine.com
New disorder, cyberchondria, sweeps the internet, says the New Zealand Herald article. But it’s really just run-of-the-mill hypochondria (or, to be more precise, somatization) fueled by the ease of obtaining information on the ‘net.
Living dead. “Ants and infertile humans are not alive, but parasitic DNA is.
That’s the view of a Polish researcher who has proposed a
new, universal definition of life.
He claims it will lay to
rest arguments about
what is and isn’t
alive, and might offer
insights into when life
on Earth got started.
And if we ever find
something that looks
like life on another
planet, his definition
could help us settle
whether it’s alive or
not.” New Scientist
Study: Oscar Winners Live Longer , nearly four years longer on average than their colleagues who were never nominated or those nominated who did not win. Katherine Hepburn, four-time Academy Award winner, should live forever! I knew the Oscars were good for something… Washington Post
Find A Grave “… of thousands
of famous people from
around the world.”
Childhood’s end? Early puberty is more common in children who have immigrated from the third world, researchers suggest. Could pesticide residues be to blame? New Scientist
The Abolition of Man? ‘…(T)he reader who trudges through Kass must eventually wonder whether the
ethicist is confusing the map with the territory. Conservatives have long been known, in William F.
Buckley’s famous phrase, for standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” But when did they start insisting
that history which does not go their way isn’t actually history at all?
On closer examination, what worries these writers isn’t that human nature might change in the future. It’s
that human nature might not be what they think it is right now.’ Reason
Content Sites of the World, Unite! The Salons and Slates of the world ought to band together for their survival. “Right now there appears to be a race among Web publishers to
garner the most revenue in the short term by making the
experience of visiting its site intolerable, like the intrusive ads
spearheaded by CNET or the Slate format in which text ads
sneak into spaces readers expect to find unpaid-for material.
The ads will get so overpowering it’s no surprise that Salon
thinks it might take in some money by eliminating them for its
best customers.” The Standard
Puckered Out: People don’t whistle like they used to before the advent of mass entertainment. It’s a ‘loner art”, and loners today are highly suspicious. Washington Post
The wrd of Gd — the world’s first text-message church service. New Scientist
Monkeys Who Think… and the neuroscientist who loves them. Portrait of Marc Hauser (Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think). “To its advocates, the rise of cognitive ethology reflects a regaining of
consciousness after a dark half century of behaviorist orthodoxy, which
held that all behavior, animal or human, was the result not of mental events
but of conditioned responses to external stimuli. Cognitive ethologists trace
their assumptions back to Charles Darwin, who insisted that animals and
humans exhibit no less evolutionary continuity in their minds than in their
kidneys, hearts, and toes. The field’s critics, however, suspect that talk of
animal thinking and intention may owe less to Darwin than to the
embarrassing and dubiously anecdotal mentalism of his protégé Georges
Romanes, a popular lecturer who saw logisticating dogs and conniving
felines under every Victorian armchair.” Lingua Franca
Big Split Over Gene Theory: “If you eat a genetically modified strain of cauliflower, you won’t inherit its gene for frost resistance. That’s the position taken by researchers who are refuting an earlier claim published by the Human Genome Project international consortium that genes from other species could indeed “jump” into the human gene family tree. The dissenting view will appear in the May 25 issue of Science.” Wired
Short guide to a happy marriage: “The secret of a long and faithful marriage is to marry
a short man, according to research.
Tall men are more likely to divorce and remarry,
usually replacing their first wife with a woman who is
at least two years younger and better educated,
according to a study by American and German
scientists.” The Telegraph
The secret of life – it could be an uncrackable code
Robert Matthews laments that Claude Shannon’s passing was not noted more widely. The mathematician’s work, especially the classic 1948 paper “The Mathematical Theory of Communication”, was a foundation of information theory. What attention his death has received has generally focused on the technological implications of his work — “unsung father of the internet” kind of stuff. But Matthews suggests that
scientists involved with the Human
Genome Project would benefit from the
application of Shannon’s theorem. The argument may overreach. The Telegraph
Aboriginal rock paintings oldest depictions of mystics says researcher. But critics say that seeing shamans everywhere is a fad that will pass. The Age
“Kansas City is a very, very sad story,” said Gary Orfield, a Harvard
University sociologist who has studied the district for years. “They really
can’t show much of anything, though they spent $2 billion.”
To Orfield, the lesson from Kansas City is clear: Money can’t buy
good schools. Not, at least, in shattered urban districts where poverty
leaves many children ill-equipped to learn.
When students come to class hungry, exhausted or afraid, when they
bounce from school to school as their families face eviction, when they
have no one at home to wake them up for the bus, much less look over
their homework, not even the snazziest facilities, the strongest curricula
and the best-paid teachers can ensure success, he argues. LA Times
David Anderson, on his always stimulating Metaforage/Metaphorage: what’s a meta for? points to President Carter’s commentary on comparisons between the current energy shortage and the one Carter faced. David says, “Nice to hear from an honest man who brings an engineer’s mind to bear on a problem, rather than hearsay,
propaganda and superstition. In particular I like the fact he nails the administration on its bullshit labeling
of conservation as just ‘private virtue.’ ” I was struck by the quote he pulls out from Carter; certainly the understatement of the week: “Exaggerated claims seem designed to promote some long-frustrated ambitions of the oil industry at the expense of environmental quality.”
Dan Hartung’s excellent lake effect is going on a reduced posting schedule for at least a couple of weeks, he says. “I’ve never wanted to make updating lake effect a crisis,” he says, but reassuringly adds, “No fear, I am coming back.” Good thing, too, or I’d be going after him…
Update on the Bremerton, Wash. keyless remote dysfunction about which I first blogged several months ago. “A federal investigation into two mass
outages of keyless remote entry
devices in the Bremerton area could
be complete in about 30 days, officials
said.
But the Federal Communications
Commission, which is conducting the
probe, is staying tight-lipped about
what it has found so far.
At the same time, other information
has come to light — some of it
contradictory — pointing to a number
of possible causes. One of those is a
section of radio frequency that the
military shares with many keyless
devices.” [via Robot Wisdom]
Douglas Adams continues to be revisited since he migrated over. Here’s a piece he wrote about the ‘net several years ago. How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet: “…We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody
and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and
disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But
that is changing.
Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our
lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.”
Theories that drive one to
abstraction: an erudite condemnation of modernism in art. Telegraph UK And a portrait of American modernism.
At Home With Andrew Solomon: Showing the Demons the Door. Child of a pharmaceutical fortune, Andrew Solomon turned his struggle with depression — he’s now on five medications daily — into what he describes as his big career break by authoring the forthcoming The Noonday Demon: an atlas of depression; the New York Times describes him as “the only serious historian of a sickness that disables more people in the United States than any other.” One FmH reader wrote me several months ago to ask if I knew how many people take Prozac and other related SSRI antidepressants; this article, in passing, provides the answer, a figure of 28 million.
A Debate Over Loved Ones in the E.R.. A pilot project allowing family presence during gruesome resuscitation efforts in the ER is uniformly positive for the families even if their loved one dies; hospital inches toward acceptance. New York Times
Positively 4th Street: the lives and times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina. “With this lovely madeleine of a book,
a hauntingly evocative blend of
biography, musicology and pop cultural
history, it is as if David Hajdu has struck a
tuning fork and summoned the spirit of the
folk-singing 1960’s all over again. It is also
as if Mr. Hajdu has discovered that within
every movement, however pure, there is a
healthy whiff of soap opera to be found.” New York Times
Let the culture battle begin. French culture minister seeks to enlist the other G7 nations to join it in battling homogenization of national cultures; proposes extension of the strict rules it has already adopted protecting film, television and publishing industries against dominance by U.S. material. The Globe and Mail By the way, France imposes a $100-per-television-set tax on all viewers to pay for public programming. Imagine such a proposal to fund PBS in the U.S.!
Fuelled by a willing media, America’s thirst for
paranoiac conjecture is reaching new heights of
lunacy. The Guardian
The rush to the death chamber: “Like Timothy McVeigh, more condemned prisoners are in a hurry to die. Does the trend undermine
justice?” Opponents say that it is the oppressive and prolonged conditions on death rows that “torture to death” many inmates convicted of capital crimes, leading them to give up their rights to appeals. Christian Science Monitor
Time twister. A Connecticut theoretical physicist with a lifelong passion for reading everything he could get his hands on about time travel thinks that “closed time-like loops” to take us back in time are achievable. A circulating beam of laser light can twist time into a loop; prohibitive amounts of energy are required unless you slow the light down, which we’ve just figured out how to do. New Scientist Time travel experimenters ought to make a pact that, when they figure out how to implement this scheme, they travel back in time to the present to tell us how to do it (grin).
One of Australia’s foremost tourist attractions to close for weeks. Uluru, formerly known
as Ayers Rock, will be closed for
a twenty-day mourning period as a show of
respect for an Aboriginal leader, unnamed for cultural reasons, who
died. Tour operators plead with the national government to overrule park managers’ decision, fearing the longterm consequences of even a brief closure to their business. Aboriginal authorities, to whom the Australian government returned the former Ayer’s Rock in 1985 and who have leased it back to the government in perpetuity for park use, consider it sacred and have always discouraged tourists from climbing Uluru. Ironically, the elder whose death is the occasion for the ban, was a leading proponent of the pragmatic value of opening the site to tourist access. CNN
“…(T)hings are messier, more beautiful and more dynamic than originally thought…” Astronomers find ‘spaghetti’ twirling around in galaxy: ‘Circulating the Milky Way is a stream of stars that has wound itself around the galaxy like a strand of spaghetti.
A consortium of researchers from three continents — called the “Spaghetti Collaboration” — found new evidence suggesting the existence of
three more star streams in the outer galaxy.’ Yes, a picture would be nice. EurekAlert!
Vatican comes out against pro-masturbation priest: “A Vatican Cardinal has advised Catholics not to
masturbate, after a lengthy study of a pro-masturbation
priest’s arguments.
Spanish reformist priest Marciano Vidal has criticised the
church, saying no one has proved masturbation is immoral.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger described the act as very bad
indeed after the church conducted a three-year
investigation.” The Cardinal also got in his digs about homosexuality, concluding that only heterosexual relationships and chastity are sanctioned by the Church. Ananova
“The liberal obsession with installing hate crimes in every statute book is one of the saddest spectacles of our age.” CounterPunch
Mob phreakers rule Vegas phone network The Register
The Zero Year Curse: ‘Many Christians believe the election victory of George W. Bush was a direct answer to fervent prayer. But several
well-known prayer and intercessory groups are urging Americans not to stop praying, especially for the President and his safety.
They are citing what’s known as the “Zero Year Curse” and have issued “code red” prayer alerts. The groups are urging Christians
to pray especially for the physical safety of President Bush to combat the supposed curse, which is also known as the Tecumseh
curse,” about which I wrote during the election campaign. I had not ben aware that Reagan, the only ‘zero-year’ President since 1840 who did not die in office, is considered the “exception that proves the rule” by Christians; they attribute his survival to their prayer. Bizarrely, Christian fears in Y2K are aroused by predictions from New Age astrology groups. Superstition begets superstition, I guess… Christian Broadcasting Network While we’re at it, look here or here or here for discussion of that turn of phrase, “the exception that proves the rule.”
Review of God, Faith and Health by Jeff Levin. In bad faith: “A researcher offers evidence
that religion is good for your
health. Too bad so much of it is
bunk… Levin does a good job summarizing much of what we know
about the connection between spirituality and health.
Readers new to the field will probably find themselves
willing to believe that religious affiliation and activity are
probably a good marker for improved health, and may even
promote it. But they should be leery of those who try to take
the evidence much further than that, and be conscious of the
bad effects religion can sometimes have. Read a history of
the crusades for even more evidence on the negative effects
of religion on the public’s health.” Salon
“A sentimental view of the Marx Brothers misses the
point about them even more than it does about Chaplin.
They were nervous and resourceful fighters who rose from
the bottom and never forgot it, and they deployed the
slapstick aggressions of everyday life as a coarse stimulant
and a way of gaining private ends. ” The London Review of Books casts a serious eye on Groucho, loaded with anecdotes and quotes.
One of the earliest sketches to lodge in the memory of
lifelong fans was a skit about the Emperor Napoleon called
I’ll Say She Is! Its mode is runaway farce, a pastiche
without a prayer for logic, and any sample suggests about
as much as any other: ‘Our just is cause. We cannot lose. I
am fighting for France, Liberty, and those three snakes
hiding behind the curtain. Farewell, vis-à-vis Fifi D’Orsay.
If my laundry comes, send it general delivery, care of
Russia, and count it – I was a sock short last week.’A
memory of the three brothers all playing Napoleon in their
tricorn hats would find its way into Finnegans Wake,
according to Thornton Wilder, a formidable scholar of
Joyce. ‘This is the three lipoleum Coyne Grouching down
in the living detch.’ When told of the homage in later years,
Groucho was well pleased and only a little sceptical. ‘Did a
New York policeman, on his way back to Ireland to see his
dear old Mother Machree, encounter Joyce in some peat
bog and patiently explain to him that, at the Casino Theater
at 39th and Broadway, there were three young Jewish
fellows running around the stage shouting to an indifferent
world that they were all Napoleon?’
Woodworking can be hazardous to health; both commercial and DIY. Environmental News Network On a related topic, concerns are mounting that pressure-treated lumber used in climbing structures in children’s playgrounds may expose them to considerable arsenic levels. Wooden climbing structures are being dismantled in several states.
Clichés – avoid these like the plague. “Corrupt men with dead souls simply repeat
stale phrases. Like Senator Trent Lott, they use the word suck without bothering
to let a picture form in their minds.
Since all language is “fossil
poetry,” almost every phrase is a cliché. We cannot write every phrase entirely
new or we’ll end up as incomprehensible as Gertrude Stein. But that is no excuse
for wallowing in the worst of the cesspool. We can strain against fate and fight
against habit and, who knows? maybe even create some new phrases in the
process. To leave a new phrase or word behind is to have expanded the
collective consciousness and to have more than justified one’s existence. Good
writers are the heroes who free us from the tyrannies of clichés and open up the
future. Vocabula Review
“A new class of music writers is on the rise — call them the rock
curmudgeons. Call them dangerous.” Is Rock ‘n’ Roll Dead? Only if You Aren’t Listening The author, chairman of the English Dept. at SIU, finds rock music criticism to be part of a larger critical problem:
The decision to stop listening, for a music critic — or stop watching,
for a film critic, or stop reading, for a literary critic — is a
perfectly legitimate one; to delimit, however arbitrarily, the
boundaries of one’s expertise and interests creates a field of
manageable size within which one might hope to make a
significant contribution. But surely there’s a world of difference
between admitting “I don’t find time to read a lot of
contemporary poetry,” on the one hand, and pronouncing that
“no significant poetry has been written since Robert Lowell,” on
the other. Chronicle of Higher Education
Ted Olson’s Arkansas problem: “Despite his evasive disavowals, Salon investigations showed the right-wing consigliere was deeply involved in a sordid plot to bring down
President Clinton.” Salon
Studies Conflict on Whether Homosexuals Can Change. Robert Spitzer’s controversial study, reported last week, is widely criticized. [via Fred Lapides]
Psychiatrists analyze Harry Potter in a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in New Orleans, concluding he’s a good model of psychological health in the face of adversity. Salon And The analysts continue their discussion of The Sopranos‘ penultimate episode of the season:
‘When I was training to become an analyst, I had a supervisor with
impeccable Viennese credentials who taught me a very important
concept. And the fact that he put it in German made it that much
more authoritative. At a crucial point in a treatment, he told me, the
patient gains Krankheitseinsicht–which roughly means “insight
into one’s illness.” At that moment a person really becomes a patient,
an ally who has joined you in trying to understand the nature of that
“illness.”Until then, people often try to explain their troubles in terms of such
factors as ill luck, their stupid boss, their nagging spouse, the
capitalist system, an unjust world–in short, on some aspect of
external reality. While many of these complaints aren’t often true,
it’s only after a person has realized that there is something in their
inner world that causes them to continuously recreate unhappy
situations that therapeutic transformation can begin. The task then
for therapist and patient is to understand the psychological template
inside of the patient that he or she repeatedly imposes on external
reality.’ Slate
Indian caste shows link to Europeans. “A study has shown that people in higher ranks of the Indian
caste system are more closely related to Europeans than
Asians.
Experts now believe Europeans moved into India about
5,000 years ago, helped put the caste system in place and
put themselves at the top.
The genetic differences between social levels are still clear
because inter-caste marriages are frowned upon in Indian
culture.” Ananova
First Cells, Then Species, Now the Web: “As the Internet continues to proliferate, it
has become natural to think of it
biologically — as a flourishing ecosystem of
computers or a sprawling brain of
Pentium-powered neurons. However you mix
and match metaphors, it is hard to escape
the eerie feeling that an alien presence has fallen to earth, confronting
scientists with something new to prod and understand.” New York Times
Have goat, will travel. “A goat seems to have been the
must-have accessory for any prehistoric
farmer with wanderlust. Patterns of
genetic variation in modern goats reveal
that, although they were domesticated in
several places, the descendents of these
pioneers have since intermingled,
interbred and spread far and wide, to a
far greater extent than other livestock
species.
Goats are the ideal travelling
companions: they laugh in the face of
harsh environments and will eat just
about anything. Plus, their small size
provides greater commercial flexibility…” Nature
They said it couldn’t happen. “Suddenly, we find that there are at least two genetically
modified babies in the world, alive and well and having their
diapers changed like other babies everywhere.
Except that while every other toddler on the planet carries the
genes from just two parents, these infants carry extra DNA
from a third parent. How alarmed should we be?” New Scientist editorial
Scientists find biological reality behind religious experience. ‘In a quiet laboratory, Andrew Newberg
takes photographs of what believers call the
presence of God.
The young neurologist invites Buddhists and
Franciscan nuns to meditate and pray in a
secluded room. Then, at the peak of their
devotions, he injects a tracer that travels to
the brain and reveals its activity at the
moment of transcendence.
A pattern has emerged from Professor Newberg’s experiments. There is a small
region near the back of the brain that constantly calculates a person’s spatial
orientation, the sense of where one’s body ends and the world begins. During
intense prayer or meditation, and for unknown reasons, this region becomes a
quiet oasis of inactivity.
“It creates a blurring of the self-other relationship,” said Professor Newberg, an
assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose work appears in
Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.’ Sydney Morning Herald
Dreams to Nightmares: “Predictions of exciting discoveries
in dream research are
over-optimistic, says Chiara
Portas, the British neurologist
whose research is being used to
back such claims. Her retort
comes in response to a
suggestion, which claims to be
based on her research, that it
should soon be possible to
correlate brain-activation patterns with the cognitive content
of dreams.” BioMedNet
A series of questions ensues:
Does ‘Empty Nose Syndrome’ Exist? “Surgery to remove nasal tissue is being blamed for a debilitating syndrome.
But specialists hotly debate whether the procedure is to blame.” LATimes
Can Science Explain Everything? Anything? by theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg. “Description” vs. “explanation.”
It might be supposed that something is explained when we find its cause, but an influential 1913
paper by Bertrand Russell had argued that “the word ’cause’ is so inextricably bound up with
misleading associations as to make its complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary
desirable.”2 This left philosophers like Wittgenstein with only one candidate for a distinction between
explanation and description, one that is teleological, defining an explanation as a statement of the
purpose of the thing explained.E.M. Forster’s novel Where Angels Fear to Tread gives a good example of teleology making the
difference between description and explanation. Philip is trying to find out why his friend Caroline
helped to bring about a marriage between Philip’s sister and a young Italian man of whom Philip’s
family disapproves. After Caroline reports all the conversations she had with Philip’s sister, Philip
says, “What you have given me is a description, not an explanation.” Everyone knows what Philip
means by this—in asking for an explanation, he wants to learn Caroline’s purposes. There is no
purpose revealed in the laws of nature, and not knowing any other way of distinguishing description
and explanation, Wittgenstein and my friend had concluded that these laws could not be
explanations. Perhaps some of those who say that science describes but does not explain mean also
to compare science unfavorably with theology, which they imagine to explain things by reference to
some sort of divine purpose, a task declined by science. New York Review of Books
Is it bad memory, or a trick your brain plays? “Worried baby boomers who can’t remember where they put the keys may
fear they’re looking at a future of dementia, or at least one of elderly
befuddlement. But Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter says it’s not
necessarily so. The blips and gaps of memory that plague people as they
age are normal, and may even be vital to a sharp mind.
In his new book, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and
Remembers, Schacter offers insight into common
malfunctions of the mind.” USAToday
Carbon clock could show the wrong time: “Carbon dating is a mainstay of geology and archaeology – but
an enormous peak discovered in the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere
between 45 thousand and 11 thousand years ago casts doubt on the
biological carbon cycle that underpins the technique.” .PhysicsWeb The implications of this are profound. It highlights the precariousness of the web of assumptions on which our scientific ‘certainties’ rely.
Radical plan to send US arms bill soaring
: “…major change in military
priorities as Washington shifts its sights from Europe to Asia
and from spending on the army to spending on the navy, the air
force and on hi-tech weaponry including missile defences.” The Guardian The broken promise: “Why is
Bush cutting the
budget for
anti-nuclear
proliferation
programs when he
said he’d increase it?” Salon National Missile Defense: An Indefensible System. “Although it is now
technically feasible to “hit a bullet with a bullet” on the test range, adversaries would be able to take
straightforward steps to defeat this system, not only preventing it from achieving the high levels of
effectiveness claimed for it, but also precluding any significant security benefits. Worse still, deploying
such a system would open a Pandora’s box of problems for the United States, unraveling decades of
efforts to reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles and to limit proliferation of nuclear weapons and
ballistic missiles worldwide.” Foreign Policy
Men More Likely to Divorce Ill Spouses: “Men are more likely than women to
divorce their spouses when the spouse suffers a
serious illness such as brain cancer, a new study
suggests.” ABC
Dr. Menlo agonizes more directly than most about the current anti-corporate struggle to keep information free on the Web. An idiosyncratic, powerful if sometimes abit obscure voice…
What progressives can do during the Bush years. Sam Smith: “Some of the following originally appeared in the Progressive Review under the same
headline exactly 12 years ago. Unfortunately, it is still applicable.” Progressive Review
High court strikes down medical use for marijuana. “The Supreme Court handed medical
marijuana users a major defeat Monday, ruling that a federal law
classifying the drug as illegal has no exception for ill patients.
The 8-0 decision was a major disappointment to many sufferers of
AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis and other illnesses. They have
said the drug helped enormously in combating the devastating
effects of their diseases. ” In essence, the Court’s opinion, written by Clarence Thomas, said that medical necessity is determined by how federal law classifies the substance regardless of medical opinion on its benefits. CNN
You can soon get a wireless Palm VII for $99! USAToday
Thanks to whoever (can no longer figure out who) pointed me to this discussion of remedies for hot pepper burning. Years ago, I too made the mistake of cleaning chili peppers barehanded; luckily it was before I wore contact lenses. I’m not saying this would work for burning hands, but Andrew Weil, in The Marriage of the Sun and Moon (1980), a collection of essays pondering altered states of consciousness, wrote about the hot pepper high that Westerners have difficulty with hot food because we try and fight and quell the burning sensations. Instead, you can get exhilarated by going with the flow, in essence surfing the crest of the wave of capsicum heat.
How to go about digging deeper on the Web: web miner’s tools. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
I thought I ought to link to the Head-Shaver’s Information and FAQ (given my masthead above). [via Random Walks] But how about shaving the inside of your skull?
Blogger was out of service for a few days there; the few posts below accumulated and waited to be published. Here’s Ev’s explanation of what was going on:
A perplexing bug
came up Thursday, and I spent literally all night trying to fix it. I was scheduled to leave town on Friday
afternoon for my grandfather’s funeral. I skipped my first flight, and finally took the last one out that would
get me there, only after thinking I’d fixed the Blogger problem.When I got to my destination, I found out that I hadn’t, so I spent as much time as I could — over very
lacking connectivity — working on it the next day or so, thinking I had alleviated it at least.The fixes where short-lived, so I got on an earlier-than-scheduled flight home yesterday, but ended up
getting stuck in stand-by hell for 12 hours, unable to get online.I finally figured out the problem when I got home late last night. It was a database driver I had installed that
had a connection limit they didn’t tell me about. So I’m waiting for the new driver from the company now
and hoping I haven’t permanently betrayed your confidence.
A number of users of blogger.com did some very spoiled complaining about the dysfunction, if you ask me. While I was inconvenienced like the rest (or more so; see last paragraph below), I am of the same mind with those who posted to Blogger’s discussion boards suggesting people quit whining, appreciate Ev for the singlehanded job he does for free to keep the service running, and examine why they’re feeling so godawful entitled. No, Ev, you haven’t betrayed my confidence; in fact, affirmed it!
Thank you to the readers who responded to my query about my surprised observation that my daily hits jumped up last week from the usual 300-400/day to around 900, clueing me into the Wired article below and the fact that FmH was a “Blog of Note” on May 7th.
Just when three times as many people as usual are checking out FmH, I had the kind of a week (writing a lecture to a short deadline, and then Blogger giving out for several days) that greatly attenuated the quality and quantity of the postings here and is probably leaving any new readers scratching their heads about why all the fuss over FmH. Win some and lose some, I guess…
Court Stories: A Tale of Betrayals Unfolds in a Montana Drug Trial. “Even in the biggest cities, drug investigations are often built on betrayal. But in a
small community like Columbus, the duplicity has a special power, as spouses,
friends and business acquaintances turn on one another. In a place where almost
everyone knows almost everyone else, the waves from a big case can wash over
an entire town.” New York Times
‘Apocalypse’ Then, and Now: “Restored films and directors’ cuts are too often a fraud, pretexts for commercial
rerelease. The second thoughts don’t amount to much and rather support the idea
that it is part of being an artist to make the crucial decisions at the living moment.
But what Mr. Coppola and his old friend and editor, Walter Murch, have now
done is not simply to exercise calm and reflection when 1978-79 was a scene of
dismay and uncertainty. Nor is it just that they’ve restored 53 minutes of original
footage to Apocalypse Now Redux, which Miramax will release on Aug. 15,
22 years after the original. It’s rather more that they have finally trusted and
freed the proper film. Even those who were never persuaded by the original
may now find it not just a new film but a masterpiece.” On August 16, 1979, I was in line enjoying the company of good friends much of the afternoon waiting to get in to opening night. Coming out of the theatre afterward, I didn’t need persuading, even though ‘Vincent Canby said the effect was of
“something borrowed and not yet fully understood.” ‘ Looking forward to revisiting it, in what it appears will be a more thoughtful form. New York Times
‘Apocalypse’ Then, and Now: “Restored films and directors’ cuts are too often a fraud, pretexts for commercial
rerelease. The second thoughts don’t amount to much and rather support the idea
that it is part of being an artist to make the crucial decisions at the living moment.
But what Mr. Coppola and his old friend and editor, Walter Murch, have now
done is not simply to exercise calm and reflection when 1978-79 was a scene of
dismay and uncertainty. Nor is it just that they’ve restored 53 minutes of original
footage to Apocalypse Now Redux, which Miramax will release on Aug. 15,
22 years after the original. It’s rather more that they have finally trusted and
freed the proper film. Even those who were never persuaded by the original
may now find it not just a new film but a masterpiece.” On August 16, 1979, I was in line enjoying the company of good friends much of the afternoon waiting to get in to opening night. Coming out of the theatre afterward, I didn’t need persuading, even though ‘Vincent Canby said the effect was of
“something borrowed and not yet fully understood.” ‘ Looking forward to revisiting it, in what it appears will be a more thoughtful form. New York Times
‘Apocalypse’ Then, and Now: “Restored films and directors’ cuts are too often a fraud, pretexts for commercial
rerelease. The second thoughts don’t amount to much and rather support the idea
that it is part of being an artist to make the crucial decisions at the living moment.
But what Mr. Coppola and his old friend and editor, Walter Murch, have now
done is not simply to exercise calm and reflection when 1978-79 was a scene of
dismay and uncertainty. Nor is it just that they’ve restored 53 minutes of original
footage to Apocalypse Now Redux, which Miramax will release on Aug. 15,
22 years after the original. It’s rather more that they have finally trusted and
freed the proper film. Even those who were never persuaded by the original
may now find it not just a new film but a masterpiece.” On August 16, 1979, I was in line enjoying the company of good friends much of the afternoon waiting to get in to opening night. Coming out of the theatre afterward, I didn’t need persuading, even though ‘Vincent Canby said the effect was of
“something borrowed and not yet fully understood.” ‘ Looking forward to revisiting it, in what it appears will be a more thoughtful form. New York Times
Separating News From Noise. Wired covers news-harvesting techniques and sites, prominently featuring Radio Userland and mentioning that it monitors FmH.
‘Apocalypse’ Then, and Now: “Restored films and directors’ cuts are too often a fraud, pretexts for commercial
rerelease. The second thoughts don’t amount to much and rather support the idea
that it is part of being an artist to make the crucial decisions at the living moment.
But what Mr. Coppola and his old friend and editor, Walter Murch, have now
done is not simply to exercise calm and reflection when 1978-79 was a scene of
dismay and uncertainty. Nor is it just that they’ve restored 53 minutes of original
footage to Apocalypse Now Redux, which Miramax will release on Aug. 15,
22 years after the original. It’s rather more that they have finally trusted and
freed the proper film. Even those who were never persuaded by the original
may now find it not just a new film but a masterpiece.” On August 16, 1979, I was in line enjoying the company of good friends much of the afternoon waiting to get in to opening night. Coming out of the theatre afterward, I didn’t need persuading, even though ‘Vincent Canby said the effect was of
“something borrowed and not yet fully understood.” ‘ Looking forward to revisiting it, in what it appears will be a more thoughtful form. New York Times
We’re Taking Our Ball and Going Home, not liking how the game’s being played just now. AP
Douglas Adams, Author of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Dies at 49, which is my age. “I was hitchhiking around Europe in 1971, when I was 18, with this copy of ‘A
Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe,”’ he said.
“At one point I found myself lying in the middle of a field, a little bit drunk, when
it occurred to me that somebody should write a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
It didn’t occur to me that it might actually be me years later.” New York Times
Charles L. Black Jr., Constitutional Law Expert Who Wrote on Impeachment, Dies at 85. Even if you know, or care, nothing about legal scholarship, read about this much-beloved renaissance man. My best friend in medical school married his son and I was often privileged to be a guest in his home. At Yale, he gave an annual Louis Armstrong Night flocked to by the law students he taught, and by me. I’ll never forget the rapture and reverence with which he would spin those Armstrong discs for the assembled. He was a poet as well:
In process of letting go the breath,
Moment for relieving your eyes’ ache,
You see bark patterns, a child’s hand
Catching and throwing, next to the tree.
You have to relive all your days
To receive the gift of surprise
At words you didn’t quite hear, once riding.
Do what you can; everything will come
In memory if never in experience.
Revisit, retell. Love sounds deeper
Out of time than in time. Act love
Imperfectly; you will remember love itself.
“Letting Go”, (1985)
Rest in peace, Professor Black. Laurie and Gavin, my deepest sympathies to you and the rest of your family.
“We’ve found your personality”, said the subject line of the email a reader sent me pointing to this article. Thanks, Fred!
I Was Hungry, And Ye Gave Me Meat. “England is an abattoir, with stacks of stinking, slaughtered kine,
with greasy smoke palls rising over the countryside, with ruined
farmers, with an election postponed, with tourism slashed, with
nothing but gloom forecast for the future. And all for the want of a
lamb chop or a nice cut of prime rib. Which makes one think, it
really does!”
Study: Some Gays Can Go Straight
An explosive new study says some gay
people can turn straight if they really want to… Gay rights activists attacked the study, and an academic critic noted that many of the 200
“ex-gays” who participated were referred by religious groups that condemn homosexuality.
The interesting thing is that this research comes from the venerable Dr. Robert Spitzer, known to all psychiatrists as the godfather of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. the ‘bible’ of all official, allowable diagnoses and their diagnostic criteria. Spitzer spearheaded the removal of homosexuality from the DSM in 1973 because it did not meet the requirements for being a psychiatric disorder (well, duh!) and called for more research on how fixed people’s sexual orientation is. He ended up doing the research himself, starting out as a self-described skeptic about the prospects for changing sexual preference through psychiatric treatment. Associated Press
BBC World Service to drop shortwave broadcasts to the North America and Australia as of July. The only way to listen will be via FM rebroadcasting (on your local NPR station, right?) or over the Internet. [Scroll down past the Angola material for the text of the BBC’s statement.]
James Fallows talks with Barbara Ehrenreich about her new book Nickel and Dimed: ‘(L)et me explain that your book is the account of three
month-long episodes of attempting to live entirely on earnings from
$7- or $8-per-hour jobs. You show up in low-wage cities and try to
get on your feet, like someone “graduating” from welfare to work.
One of many intriguing aspects is the juggling of three challenges:
landing a job (not that hard, in the “tight” economy of the late
nineties); doing the job (sometimes quite hard, as you make vivid);
and finding a place to live (nearly impossible, for reasons we will
get to). The account is realistic and sobering.’ The Atlantic [via MetaFilter]
Americans high on public TV, radio — poll: “A majority of Americans believe they get some of the best bang out of
their taxpaying buck from public television and radio, a poll released Monday showed… The poll, conducted by the respected Roper Starch Worldwide report, concluded that Americans
count public TV and radio among the five best deals when it comes to taxes, right alongside
military spending, medical research, law enforcement and highways.”
A Cure for Poverty? The indigent depressed are among the most disabled population in the country. Depression is the consequence of constitutional vulnerability activated by psychosocial stress; in the most significantly traumatized population, simply put, you don’t have to have much predisposing vulnerability at all to become depressed. The author contends that depression, in a sense, “hides in plain sight” in our lower socioeconomic strata. It may be harder to recognize dysfunction; there is often no previous higher level of functioning from which to decline. Helplessness is endemic and fate passively accepted.
This has led a small movement of therapists to advocate extremely assertive treatment, “pressing insight into them, often through muscular exhortation.” The simple labelling of the affliction — “to be given the idea of depression is to master a socially powerful linguistic tool” — can be transformative. Medication might be an expeditious addition to such assertive outreach but the proper recipients are less likely to be identified, and it is less likely to be taken consistently, as it must to be effective, without immediately observable effect, or to be continued after relief is gained.
Advocates of such assertive treatment take the position that “people whose condition can be
improved through treatment should receive it whether they want to or not. It is
their view that those who resist treatment place an unconscionable and
unnecessary burden on society.” The author contends that the disorders that receive coerced treatment are the “noisy” ones, notably schizophrenia and mania, where social disruption occurs. I don’t think it’s exactly their “noisiness” that’s determinative, but rather the fact that we think the capacity for insight, including the ability to recognize that one is ill, and the judgment to seek treatment, are palpably impaired by the brain process in these illnesses. The mental health and judicial systems are generally comfortable coercing treatment when, as a result of such a process, a danger to the patient herself or others is posed.
At the other extreme are literal civil libertarians whose position is that treatment should never be coerced.With nonpsychotic illnesses such as depression, unless the person poses a threat we usually feel they have an absolute right to the freedom to choose not to be treated. But perhaps the dividing line is arbitrary. Nonpsychotic illnesses such as severe depression also impair insight into need for treatment and the wherewithal to seek it; is it cruel to leave them untreated? New York Times Magazine
