Widely noted on the net already, here is a blink to The Economist editorial calling for the legalisation of drugs.

A tech-savvy Italian fashion house has shown a prototype shirt with fibers of the shape-memory alloy nitinol interspersed in its fabric. Since nitinol returns to its previous shape when heated slightly, the shirt can be pressed with a hair dryer or even the body heat of wearing it. Even more extraordinarily, the fibers in the sleeves can be programmed to shorten when the temperature crosses a certain threshold, i.e. the shirt can roll its own sleeves up! Don’t expect to buy it any time soon; ‘the prototype shirt cost around £2500 to make, and is available in any colour you like – provided you have a tendency to wear metallic grey, that is. “But it looks distinctly bronze-coloured in some lights,” says (a company spokesperson).’ New Scientist

Childhood antisocial behavior is a weighty social burden, but parenting interventions can make a difference. British Medical Journal

Don’t look now, but is that dog laughing? Science News

Mnemonic Plague: ‘You are microwaving dinner, listening to the radio, finishing a crossword; you are Web-surfing

and talking on the phone. In short, you are “multitasking,” as we so often do these days. It’s a way

of keeping the mind constantly, if fitfully, employed–and in our society, it is becoming the norm.

At the same time, many of us are afflicted with worries about memory loss, as if some mnemonic

plague, including but not limited to Alzheimer’s, were at large. In light of the vast amount of

multitasking that we do, it’s worth asking if multitasking and memory are inversely related. Does

rapid attention switching interfere with the formation of memory in some way? In other words,

does a technique that was refined in computer science play havoc with the human mind?’ The American Prospect

Weapons-grade uranium seized. As Also Not Found in Nature, an exceedingly intelligent weblog (thanks for the link), commented, this may be the first known case of a sufficient amount to make an atomic weapon found available for sale on the black market. One of the world’s waking nightmares. Guardian UK

Requiem for the classical record. In an article that starts out about how the five classical music labels that control more than 80% of world sales have “lost the will to produce”, their output down to a trickle, the last nail in the coffin may be as follows:

Tower Records, the Sacramento-based retail chain, is in

trouble. With 229 stores in 17 countries, a Tower crash would endanger

the entire classical species. Corporate record labels would survive, but

dozens of independents, especially classical and jazz, would be wiped

out.

Tower was founded in 1960 as an alternative outlet, a store that stocked

the kind of discs that were too quaint or quirky for big chains to handle –

the kind that every self-respecting music-lover would pay twice as much to

own. Over time, Tower went global and dressed up in wall-to-wall Britney

Spears. Then it overstretched.

Early this year, Tower demanded deep discounts and 360 days’ credit

from suppliers. Corporate labels agreed, but the minnows refused. Small

labels need cash flow. They cannot wait a year to be paid, any more than

Tower could let customers borrow discs for 12 months before paying up.

So Tower, whose parent group took a $34.4 million (£24.5 million) loss in

the last quarter, dropped the indies. Telegraph UK

Drug users turn to embalming fluid, says the BBC: “…even though it

is highly dangerous and can make them violent

and psychotic.

Research has found that the use of embalming

fluid is becoming increasingly popular among

young people who are searching for new drug

experiences…

‘This is a violent drug, and it will turn into a big

fire if it’s not watched very closely.’

The most common method is to dip a tobacco

or marijuana cigarette in the embalming fluid,

then dry it before smoking it. The cigarettes are sold for about $20 a piece.

They are known by a variety of names,

including ‘wet’, ‘fry’ and ‘illy’.” [Users of this are hereby nominated for the Darwin awards…]

“A South African chemical warfare expert claims the US

used hallucinogenic weapons against Iraq in the Gulf War.

Dr Wouter Basson made the allegation as he testified

about drugs bought by South African defence forces for

possible use in crowd control during the Apartheid era.” Ananova

He claimed film footage showed Iraqi elite troops affected

en masse from the weapons during the Gulf War.

Have a font you want to identify by its appearance? Linotype’s automatic font identifier uses an expert system to enable an untrained user “to identify a typeface by answering a series of simple questions about its key features.” Doesn’t work all the time, though…

Congratulations to Rebecca Blood on her marriage last week.

blog.org from David Brake, UK-based Internet journalist, consultant and virtual community builder, is back “on air” after technical glitches forced a hiatus. And (finally) lake effect is on a limited posting schedule again.

Annals of the Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Teachers offered homicide insurance CNN

“A teenager created his own death site on the

internet – and hanged himself.

Simon Kelly, 18, first searched the web for

information on how to commit suicide, then set

up a page saying how and why he would do it.

It contained heartbreaking messages for his

parents – who came home from holiday

yesterday to be told of Simon’s death by his

older brother Nick.” Supposedly. Hard to say if this is yet another story that’s going to turn out to have been a hoax; after all, this is from The Sun. Going to www.essjaykay.com gives a page-not-found error.

Does this kind of uncertainty about whether someone is having at you speak to a moral issue in relation to the Internet? David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain

Manifesto and web-publisher of JOHO: The Journal of the

Hyperlinked Organization, writes on belief.net that “The World Wide Web reflects the best and

worst of humanity. But its structurally more

moral than any place we know.”

In fact, human interest and motivation is built right

into the architecture of the web. The web is only a

web because the pages are linked, and links are

created to anticipate the interests of readers. This

flies in the face of our real world geography,

where proximity has little to do with our beliefs

and interests and everything to do with the

accidents of location. The web’s geography is

neither alien, nor alienating. In fact, the web

consists of people, groups, and organizations that

for one reason or another would like us to see the

world through their eyes.

A post on MetaFilter with the title ‘Earth springs a leak‘ pointed me to this satellite photo No kidding. Impressive. AP

A Bicycling Mystery: Head Injuries Piling Up: “The number of head

injuries has increased 10 percent since

1991, even as bicycle helmet use has risen

sharply, according to figures compiled by

the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

But given that ridership has declined over

the same period, the rate of head injuries

per active cyclist has increased 51 percent

just as bicycle helmets have become

widespread.” Do cyclists have an inflated sense of security from wearing helmets? Are their natural predators, the motorists, becoming more aggressive or more distractible? Are more people wearing ill-fitting helmets, or wearing them wrong? Is off-road riding, inherently more dangerous, accounting for the injuries? New York Times

A Bicycling Mystery: Head Injuries Piling Up: “The number of head

injuries has increased 10 percent since

1991, even as bicycle helmet use has risen

sharply, according to figures compiled by

the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

But given that ridership has declined over

the same period, the rate of head injuries

per active cyclist has increased 51 percent

just as bicycle helmets have become

widespread.” Do cyclists have an inflated sense of security from wearing helmets? Are their natural predators, the motorists, becoming more aggressive or more distractible? Are more people wearing ill-fitting helmets, or wearing them wrong? Is off-road riding, inherently more dangerous, accounting for the injuries? New York Times

A Bicycling Mystery: Head Injuries Piling Up: “The number of head

injuries has increased 10 percent since

1991, even as bicycle helmet use has risen

sharply, according to figures compiled by

the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

But given that ridership has declined over

the same period, the rate of head injuries

per active cyclist has increased 51 percent

just as bicycle helmets have become

widespread.” Do cyclists have an inflated sense of security from wearing helmets? Are their natural predators, the motorists, becoming more aggressive or more distractible? Are more people wearing ill-fitting helmets, or wearing them wrong? Is off-road riding, inherently more dangerous, accounting for the injuries? New York Times

The Alchemy of OxyContin: From Pain Relief to Drug Addiction: “Part of what makes the spread of OxyContin abuse so difficult to track,

let alone to stop, is that the drug moves not physically but conceptually.

When crack cocaine spread from the big cities on either coast toward the

center of the country, it traveled gradually, along Interstates, city by city.

OxyContin abuse pops up suddenly, in unexpected locations.” One of the privileges of practicing psychiatry is the intimate glimpses of the lives of people more different than one would otherwise often meet. This week, a patient in my hospital with whom I have a candid relationship because I’ve treated him as more than “just an addict” (the way the profession often sees them when they come in for psychiatric admission), offered me a sociological treatise on the recent eruption of oxycontin onto the urban, Boston-area drug scene. Looks to me we are not going to stop this epidemic. A pain patient on Medicaid pays 50 cents for a month’s prescription of the drug, which may be as many as 60 or 100 80-mg tabs. S/he can immediately get $2000-3000 cash for the pills, because the man who buys them will turn around and sell them — within the day — for current street value, which is $1 per mg. That amounts to a $5000 profit on that one prescription, and the dealer is doing similar deals with dozens of recipients each month. As long as the price stays at or near current levels (which is partly driven by public hype, I realize…), the financial incentives make this trade virtually unstoppable.

Nobody inspired to comment on anything here? Take a chance; a blog can be a conversation, at least once in awhile. Click on the icon…

The New Imperative to Establish Rapport. Interesting Safire column this week, on connectedness and SMS-talk. New York Times

NASA Data Point to Mars ‘Bugs,’ Scientist Says: “Did NASA discover

evidence of life on Mars and then misplace it for almost 25 years?” Reuters

Study: W. Nile Virus Underreported:

“For every New Yorker

diagnosed with encephalitis or meningitis

from West Nile virus in the

summer of 1999, there were probably 140 milder infections that

went undetected, scientists have estimated.

The findings, which suggest that 2.6 percent of the metropolitan New

York City population was infected during that outbreak, indicate that

West Nile infections are vastly underreported.”

I actually wondered about this last summer after I came down with a mild, brief flu-like syndrome after a night that I had gotten numerous mosquito bites walking my dog in my neighborhood, which was only several blocks from the then-recent finding of several dead WNV-infected birds.

“As the mosquito season on the U.S. East Coast intensifies and the virus

threatens to spread elsewhere, health officials advised in The Lancet

medical journal that doctors should consider West Nile infection when

diagnosing unexplained summertime fever, especially if it’s

accompanied by headaches, muscle ache and joint pain.

For most people, West Nile virus causes only a flu-like sickness and

many who are exposed don’t get sick at all. It is mostly a concern for

the elderly.”

I called the public health agency monitoring for the virus and offered to have antibody titers drawn, and had a great deal of difficulty getting a return call from a knowledgable person, probably because I was seen as a crackpot (my wife scoffed at me too). But wouldn’t it be important to know, when they were continuing to state publicly that there were no known cases of human infection in the Boston area, that there in fact were? And that the nightly spraying in my neighborhood (itself not benign from a public health standpoint) was not effective? By the time a public health official returned my call, I was told it would no longer be useful to draw my blood because infection is established by comparing acute-phase and convalsecent antibody titers, and we had missed our chance to draw the former. Oh, well, chalk another one up for hypochondria…

And here’s a New York Times Magazine interview with Andrew Spielman, Harvard public health expert on mosquitoes and author of the new book Mosquito, which is somewhere on my summer reading list.

“So you have a double-edged relationship?

Yeah, absolutely. And in a philosophical sense they’re interesting. The

book has a quotation from Havelock Ellis that says something like, If you

would see all of nature gathered up at one point in all her beauty and

her deadliness and her sex, where would you find a more perfect

example than the mosquito? The mosquito is deadly; it’s dangerous. But he

also looked at them as beautiful. And I suppose there’s a sexual

connotation there — that whole thing in his eyes, apparently, translated

into an element of his science; i.e., human sexual behavior. It’s the female,

not the male, that can kill.”

Brain Reacts Differently to Faces Based on Race: “People have been found to remember faces of their own race

better than they remember faces of other races. Now researchers may have uncovered the

changes in the brain that underlie that phenomenon.

Dr. Jennifer L. Eberhardt and colleagues from Stanford University in California asked 19 men–9

black and 10 white–to look at pictures of faces of people from both races while they monitored

participants’ brain activity with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The investigators found that when the study participants looked at faces matching their own race, a

specific area of the brain ‘lit up’ on the MRI. But when they looked at pictures of faces of another

race, the brain area did not activate to the same degree, according to the report in the August

issue of Nature Neuroscience.” I’ve previously covered other evidence that this brain region, the fusiform gyrus, processes face recognition only and that this data is processed inherently differently from object recognition. For example, one of the clues to the social interaction impairment of autistic patients is that they seem to process the perception of other people as if they were objects. I think what this current study is saying is not that we are neurologically programmed to process the faces of other races differently, but that when our biases and preconceptions dictate that we approach the Other as an object, it is even reflected in basic neurological processes. It would be interesting to see whether distinctions around the degree of objectification of women by various men would also be reflected on fMRI. Reuters

Teenager Kills 48 for Rituals? “A teenage girl in Nigeria has confessed to taking part in the ritual killing of 48

people in the last seven years, media reported on Thursday.

Police arrested the 13-year-old school student last week as a suspect in the killing of a

two-year-old boy in Maiduguri, northeastern Nigeria, the independent Vanguard newspaper

said.

The girl told police she was initiated into a secret cult by a civil servant seven years ago, the paper

said. The man has since been arrested.” Although it seems to have peaked and receded, I’ve been quite troubled by the last decade’s epidemic of psychiatrically distressed patients’ claiming to be victims of cultic ritual abuse here in the US. Law enforcement agencies up to and including the FBI have repeatedly found no forensic evidence of the killings these quite disturbed patients report. (The claimants have explanations for the lack of evidence too, of course. Recall that a sound hypothesis is supposed to be falsifiable as well as verifiable…) While it’s politically incorrect to disbelieve even the most outlandish abuse claims, they have usually seemed to be, at worst psychotic or at best histrionic/hysterical, fabrications or exaggerations, often subconsciously encouraged by credulous mental health professionals, by character-disordered patients, many of them indeed victims of horrible but far more prosaic abuse histories and stuck seeking pathological attention. Now, of course, the veracity of this report from Nigeria, where, Reuters notes, “ritual killing is common in some parts of Africa’s most populous country, where some people believe

witchcraft involving the use of human parts can make them rich”, is hard to assess. If true as pitched, does its plausibility depend upon the cultural belief system of the society? If so, we should look again at the U.S. situation, because there are probably plenty of depraved people out there with equally outlandish belief systems. While it would not affect my dismissal of the bulk of the claims I hear as distorted elaborations or fabrications, I would not, in the last analysis, be surprised to hear incontrovertible proof that there had been a case of multiple ritual sacrifices by a group of deluded, like-minded individuals conspiratorially working together somewhere in the darker hidden recesses of the American psyche. Addendum: Lo and behold, here’s a story of Satanic ritual murder in the Western world. Guardian UK

In Latest Hardy Boys Case, a Search for New Readers:

“The Hardy Boys turn 75 next year, still living at

home and enrolled in Bayport High. They are still

well-scrubbed Boy Scout types from the 1920’s,

with personalities that barely extend beyond the

color of their hair. And their books still sell more

than a million copies a year.

Holding on to the sunset of the Hardy Boys’ adolescence has not been simple. To keep them au courant,

their publisher, Simon & Schuster, now equips them with cell phones, computers and high- tech gadgets,

dispatching them on torn-from-the-headlines adventures involving citywide surveillance systems, corporate

whistle- blowers, extreme sports and online crime.

As with many children’s series, sales of new Hardy Boys books are flagging, publishers and booksellers

say, and some wonder how much longer the formulaic escapades can hold boys’ scarce attention. This

summer, a new team at Simon & Schuster’s children’s book division plans to re-examine its plans for the

Hardy Boys, said Anne Greenberg, executive editor in charge.” New York Times

New York Law May Fan the Fire in Divorces Like Giuliani’s: ‘Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and his wife, Donna Hanover, are enmeshed

in a system that maximizes opportunities for conflict, Professor Schepard

said, but they are also part of the problem. “They set the tone for

everybody else,” he said. “The media culture filters down. If Rudy does it

and Donna does it, then this is the way it’s done.” ‘ New York Times

A Bicycling Mystery: Head Injuries Piling Up: “The number of head

injuries has increased 10 percent since

1991, even as bicycle helmet use has risen

sharply, according to figures compiled by

the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

But given that ridership has declined over

the same period, the rate of head injuries

per active cyclist has increased 51 percent

just as bicycle helmets have become

widespread.” Do cyclists have an inflated sense of security from wearing helmets? Are their natural predators, the motorists, becoming more aggressive or more distractible? Are more people wearing ill-fitting helmets, or wearing them wrong? Is off-road riding, inherently more dangerous, accounting for the injuries? New York Times