We Love You, We Hate You — “Despite the ill will of Barney haters everywhere, the saccharine purple dinosaur’s popularity is undiminished — and that’s not a bad thing…” Dallas Observer I hasten to add that the opinion expressed is not that of the editor of FmH, who had the misfortune of raising two children of susceptible ages during the peak popularity of Barney. The article suggests that the visceral revulsion most adults feel toward Barney is attributable to our cynicism in the face of the ‘image of genuine goodness’ he presents to guileless children. Oh boy, does this miss the point! My horror at watching children’s rapt attention to the show relates to the fear they are being irrevocably indoctrinated into the superficial, plastic, stiff, forced nature of the good-timey ambiance the show thrives upon…

Impulse Gravity Generator Based on Charged YBa_2Cu_3O_{7-y} Superconductor with

Composite Crystal Structure. In other words, as Phil Agre of Red Rock Eater puts it, they think they’ve created antigravity in the lab…

Why won’t Britain jail this war criminal?” The UK has been a haven to 400 Nazi murderers. All

but one have got away with it.” Guardian UK

‘We’re going to get them’: “Israel hunts terrorists amid controversy. An inside look” at ‘targeted killing’.

Israel says it is not only in a war against terrorism, but it’s also in a war

against international opinion. It insists it has a legal and religious right to kill

its enemies. USA Today

“Is starting a weblog like declaring yourself a pundit?”

Book review: Grammars of Creation: Is the Future Just a Tense?: “It is difficult not to be impressed by

George Steiner. Part literary critic, part

existential elegist, he presents himself as

the polymath’s polymath. The erudition is

almost as extraordinary as the prose:

dense, knowing, allusive. In Steiner’s work

the suggestion of total cultural mastery,

from the pre-Socratics to the postmodern,

is inescapable.” New York Times

The monk and the fly.

Live Jail Cam — “This is a real life transmission of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Madison Street Jail. Instances of

violence or sexually inappropriate behavior by detainees during the booking process may occur. Viewer

discretion is advised. This is a jail not a simulation. The persons in this transmission are either

employees of Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, other police agencies in Maricopa County or arrestees.”

Vic Tandy, a lecturer in law and international relations at Coventry University, believes that extremely low-frequency sound — ‘infrasound’ — may explain hauntings. Twenty years ago, after he and co-workers had been experiencing an unsettling presence in their office, he identified a standing sound wave of ~18.5hz from a ventilation fan as the culprit; the lower limit of human hearing is around 20hz. The sense of presence disappeared when the fan was shut off. A ‘haunted’ 14th century pub cellar in Coventry was shown to have an 18.9hz peak when its soundscape was spectrally analyzed. Other research has shown that infrasound around this frequency can cause nausea, fear and panic. Extraordinarily, the human eyeball has a resonant frequency of 18hz, which might explain visions of ghostly presences.

Storms and waves pounding the shoreline can produce infrasound effects travelling hundreds if not thousands of miles. In a 1968 study, a U.S. town receiving infrasound from a storm over 1500 miles distant demonstrated increased traffic accidents and school absenteeism. The military has been interested in possible applications and claims powerful effects to human subjects from low-frequency and low-intensity pulses.

Recently, a team of North Carolina animal researchers has shown that, prior to attacking, tigers stun their intended prey with a roar containing frequencies around 18hz. Some dolphin clicks have long been suspected to have a role in their hunting, but a recent Hawaiian study has filmed them emitting low-frequency ‘bangs’ while chasing and catching fish; these may disorient the fish, damage their hearing, or even paralyze and kill. Researchers have observed Atlantic dolphins emit a buzz which makes buried eels jump out of the sand. Tandy speculates that human sensitivity to infrasound may be an evolutionary vestige of times when we were prey to big cats.

Regarding the best bus shelter in Britain, which has its own website. Times of London

Psychologist says adulthood dawns at 35 not 21: ‘A study claims a generation of “fledgling adults” has

developed who only start growing up at the age of 35.

A psychologist says attitudes, tastes and aspirations of

Americans and Britons change most at that age.

Stephen Richardson says until then people are typified by

the overgrown teenagers of Men Behaving Badly.’ Ananova […and what about the women??]

Stop ignoring the data — “Backed by an explosion of scientific data

underscoring the importance of behavioral and

social factors in health, an interdisciplinary group of

scientists is arguing that the sheer weight of that

evidence demands a restructuring of how social

and behavioral research and interventions are

conducted.

At a May 23 symposium organized by the National

Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of

Medicine (IOM), “Through a kaleidoscope: viewing

the contributions of the behavioral and social

sciences to health,” experts drew on six recent NRC

and IOM reports (viewable here). Each concludes that

the nation’s health can be significantly improved if

the scientific and medical communities–as well as

policy-makers–heed the wealth of data that show

how behavior and social environments shape

health.” American Psychological Association

M.I.T. Professor and author of How the Mind

Works Steven Pinker discusses technology with Richard Johnson.

What has been your worst experience of technology?

A Bang & Olufsen television and phone. They may be in the

Museum of Design, but they send you to the manual for the

simplest task. I am a professor at MIT, and if I cannot figure out

how to use them, then something is wrong with the human

factors. Sunday Times of London

EPIC Alert: “online newsletter of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC. The Alert is bi-weekly

and covers issues related to privacy and civil liberties in the information age.”

The Hunger Site is back up, under new ownership.

Hermenaut, ‘an irregularly published journal of philosophy and pop-culture, has been described as “a zine that gives voice to indie intellectual thought,” “a scholarly journal minus the university,” and “a sounding board for thinking folk who operate outside the ivory tower.” Founded in 1992 by a rag-tag group of outsider intellectuals, Hermenaut uses the tools of philosophy, sociology, and critical theory to explode the received notions of academia and the hipster demimonde alike.’

‘I’d like to force the world to sing…’ ‘…one of the more inventive conspiracy theories now making the rounds. The funny thing is how plausible it all seems once you start looking into it. In 1993 Kristol outlined a program for selling conservatism as rebellion in the pages of Commentary magazine, declaring absurdly that “now it is liberalism that constitutes the old order.” At the time this seemed quite mad. Today it seems prescient. We have all heard about the clear-eyed youngsters of “Generation Y,” with their faith in Wall Street and their uncanny entrepreneurial skills. Well, it’s all William Kristol’s doing. He has managed to persuade an entire generation with his weird logic. But how?

Two words, according to the theory: OK Soda.’ The Baffler [via Metascene] [Make what you will of this…]

“Star Wars” poses nuclear risk to Europe: ‘Further doubts were raised on Thursday about the viability of President George Bush’s controversial missile defense system when a researcher said intercepted “rogue” missiles could fall on Europe or America.

Ted Postol, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the system includes a plan to intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) just minutes after launch, while their rocket boosters are still burning. This should be simpler than targeting missiles in mid-flight because tracking a flaming rocket is easier than homing in on a relatively cool warhead.’ MediaJunkies

Saddam’s poison gas kills 20 of his men — “At least 20 specially-trained Iraqi soldiers are dead

and up to 200 have been admitted to hospital after

taking part in a chemical weapons exercise that

went wrong.

News of the

training accident

emerged last week

amid concerns that

Saddam Hussein

has rebuilt his

chemical weapons

arsenal.” Telegraph UK

Naughty children ‘born from anxiety’ — ‘Anxiety during the last few weeks of pregnancy can

affect an unborn baby’s developing brain, increasing

the chances of children becoming hyperactive or

badly behaved.

Researchers say the connection is almost certainly

due to exposure to chemicals in the womb and not

the result of “bad” parenting.’ Telegraph UK

Food for higher thought — ‘So, the school exam pass rate is up again, for the

19th year in a row. Who would have believed it? All

those hours spent playing Tomb Raider and Gran

Turismo 2 on the PlayStation, and it seems we are

still turning out a nation of young Einsteins. Either

someone’s massaging the maths or mothers are

putting something in their offsprings’ fish fingers.

“If only the latter were true,” says Lorraine Peretta,

an expert nutritionist, “but the latest Government

statistics on child nutrition are appalling.” Perretta,

who moved to London from her native New York in

the early 1980s, has just written a book, Brain Food.

Bright and bubbly, with the sort of clear eyes that

come with drinking no claret and plenty of cranberry

juice, Perretta believes that, by feeding our brain

the right nutrients and minerals, the old can protect

their brains from premature ageing, the young can

cope better with exam pressures, and the sad can

overcome depression.’ Telegraph UK

Takashi Mike’s Audition: seems to be a disturbing, horrifying film experience creating quite a buzz. “If you didn’t know this was a horror story, you wouldn’t see it coming.” Right up my alley? Deep Focus [via randomWalks]

From randomWalks (yes, they really capitalize it that way): “Let’s catalog how copyright owners have used the DMCA so far: to silence a magazine publisher (2600 case); to threaten computer science professors (Prof. Ed Felten); and to jail programmers (Dmitry). And as for the public’s first sale and archiving rights, copyright owners are poised to debut a host of DRM [digital rights management] technologies that will dramatically curtail these rights… The writing’s on the wall — how much worse does it have to get before the Copyright Office recognizes that the DMCA has fundamentally, and unwisely, unbalanced the Copyright Act? The U.S. Copyright Office just issued a disgraceful endorsement of the DMCA.”

Bob Dylan: Sometimes He Talks Crazy, Crazy Like a Song. Greil Marcus’ elliptical preview of Love and Theft, Dylan’s imminent new recording, makes it seem as full of metaphorical stories as Highway 61 Revisited, a third of a century ago. New York Times

Monument to same-sex couples discovered in Cambridge chapel; from 17th century. ‘Alan Bray discovered a tomb in the chapel of Christ’s

College, Cambridge, shared by John Finch and Thomas

Baines.

It features portraits of the men linked by a knotted cloth,

thought to be a pun on the love knot.

Mr Bray, a Roman Catholic and church historian,

discovered Mr Finch described his friendship with Baines

as a “connubium” or a marriage, reports the Cambridge

Evening News.’ Ananova

Monument to same-sex couples discovered in Cambridge chapel; from 17th century. ‘Alan Bray discovered a tomb in the chapel of Christ’s

College, Cambridge, shared by John Finch and Thomas

Baines.

It features portraits of the men linked by a knotted cloth,

thought to be a pun on the love knot.

Mr Bray, a Roman Catholic and church historian,

discovered Mr Finch described his friendship with Baines

as a “connubium” or a marriage, reports the Cambridge

Evening News.’ Ananova

Monument to same-sex couples discovered in Cambridge chapel; from 17th century. ‘Alan Bray discovered a tomb in the chapel of Christ’s

College, Cambridge, shared by John Finch and Thomas

Baines.

It features portraits of the men linked by a knotted cloth,

thought to be a pun on the love knot.

Mr Bray, a Roman Catholic and church historian,

discovered Mr Finch described his friendship with Baines

as a “connubium” or a marriage, reports the Cambridge

Evening News.’ Ananova

We’ve Been Misled by the Drug Industry

I have recovered from schizophrenia. If that statement surprises you — if you think schizophrenia is a lifelong brain disease that cannot be escaped — you have been misled by a cultural misapprehension that needlessly imprisons millionsunder the label of mental illness.

In the last 20 years, the pharmaceutical industry has become the major force behind the belief that mental illness is a brain disorder and that its victims need to take medications for the rest of their lives. It’s a clever sales strategy: If people believe mental illness is purely biological, they will only treat it with a pill.

Drug companies have virtually bought the psychiatric profession. Their profits fund the research, the journals and the departments of psychiatry. Not surprisingly, many researchers have concluded that medication alone is best for the treatment for mental illness. Despite recent convincing research showing the usefulness of psychotherapy in treating schizophrenia, psychiatric trainees are still told “you can’t talk to a disease.” This is why psychiatrists today spend more time prescribing drugs than getting to know the people taking them.

Fisher is right to decry these trends — the pharmaceutical industry’s ‘ownership’ of the psychiatric profession; the woeful deemphasis on investing in talking with our patients in modern training — but he surely comes to his conclusions for the wrong reasons. He appears to be stuck in the dichotomous world of ’60’s psychiatry in which the debates raging about whether psychiatric illnesses were “either or” were the most important preoccupation of academic psychiatry and psychology. To be as polemical as he is — “schizophrenia is more often due to a loss of dreams than a loss of dopamine” — ignores the agonizing futility of the efforts of many with this disease to make anything work in the world, the daily terror of their existence, and the very real attenuation of their distress modern treatment, with antipsychotic medication, affords. While he is right in suggesting there should be more research into how people recover, the disease is often characterized by a progressive deterioration of intellect and personality and usually an inevitable downhill course, without ‘cure’. The trends of the past twenty years have arisen mostly from the vast progress in neuroscientific understanding of this — yes, I’ll say it — brain disease. Throw in for good measure a society that, continuing to stigmatize and marginalize the mentally ill, devalued the severity of their distress and became increasingly unwilling to pay for the expertise and experience generations of psychiatrists had had with the severely mentally ill, instead hiring cheaper allied health professionals to do the talking to the patients and relegating psychiatric physicians to the role of hired guns writing prescriptions and consulting instead of doing direct treatment. To dismiss the entire profession as misguided, as Fisher does instead of grasping the more complicated picture, does psychiatry — but, moreso, our patients — an enormous disservice. Washington Post

Fisher appears to be cast somewhat in R. D. Laing’s mold. The father of British antipsychiatry, Laing provided what remains one of the most accessible and profound descriptions of the subjective and existential experience of schizophrenia in The Divided Self. He then went on, however, to romanticize sufferers as cultural heroes resisting dehumanizing and oppressive societal programming, and cast madness as a consciousness-raising experience. In attempting to counter the stigmatization of the mentally ill and its contribution to their social suffering, he rejected the notion of their patienthood. Indeed, the altered functioning in mental illness is, mostly, the source of their dehumanization. Laing was one of my inspirations, and you can hear his influence in my resonance with the existential crisis of my patients and my anti-stigmatization polemics. But — and this is a big ‘but’ — the empathic physican’s ability to use physiological as well as psychological-emotional means at her/his disposal is not a baby to be thrown out with the bathwater.

For those with further interest, Janus Head‘s Spring 2001 issue was devoted to a consideration of the legacy of Laing.

Some scientists believe that kids simply aren’t wired to care. Drastic change occurs rather late in adolescence in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs self-control and planful behavior, two neuroscientists find. This suggests ‘caring’ may develop relatively late, as the frontal lobe matures. Chicago Tribune

Geologic evidence piles

up that humans are the culprits in mass

extinctions on two continents — “For decades, scientists have debated what caused the mass

extinctions. Some saw humans as the guilty party; others blamed

climate change. Without solid evidence, the debate was a draw.

But two recent studies are tipping the balance in favor of humans as

the culprit. Though not a smoking gun, the new research places man at

the scene of the crime and casts serious doubt on his alibi.” The Dallas Morning News

Monument to same-sex couples discovered in Cambridge chapel; from 17th century. ‘Alan Bray discovered a tomb in the chapel of Christ’s

College, Cambridge, shared by John Finch and Thomas

Baines.

It features portraits of the men linked by a knotted cloth,

thought to be a pun on the love knot.

Mr Bray, a Roman Catholic and church historian,

discovered Mr Finch described his friendship with Baines

as a “connubium” or a marriage, reports the Cambridge

Evening News.’ Ananova

Web Ad Blocking Under Linux/Unix, BeOS, MacOS and Windows. This is an old page, last updated in 2/2000, so some newer spam hosts may slip through, but it works.

Anyone else unable to reach David Anderson’s Metaforage/Metaphorage, one of my favorite weblogs and daily reads up until my vacation hiatus? (“What’s a meta for?”) Both this page at The Well and this one, show nothing anymore, and a Well search reveals no such user. Has his address changed? David, you out there? Anyone? TIA…

ZIP Find – Calculate distance between two ZIP Codes. Find all ZIP Codes within a radius of a ZIP Code.

Reforming psychiatry’s DSM

Modern psychiatry has become mired in a system of disease classification that defines mental disorders by the way they look and not on biological or

psychological processes, according to Dr. Paul McHugh, chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the

Johns Hopkins University.

Notably, McHugh’s criticism and his proposed solution are featured in the current issue of Psychiatric Research Report, a publication of the American Psychiatric

Association’s Division of Research. [see article, available online here]…

The topic of contention is the fourth edition of the APA Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), an encyclopedic catalog used to

consistently diagnose psychiatric diseases based on clinical symptoms.

But the focus on symptoms, rather than psychologic or biologic foundations, has led to thousands of overlapping conditions and confusing diagnoses, and the

current system has become unwieldy and outmoded, according to McHugh. EurekAlert!

“The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural

Heritage (NINCH) is a diverse nonprofit coalition of arts,

humanities and social science organizations created to

assure leadership from the cultural community in the

evolution of the digital environment.”

My Personal Bolt of Lightning: “I never believed that I could be in

danger on a golf course — until I was struck by lightning on one

last year.” New York Times via Spike

Death by Overwork — “As pressure intensifies in our working lives, scientists are

discovering that stress not only triggers illnesses but may

be a killer in its own right.” The Times of London

Learning to forgive can benefit the forgiver: “Forgiving others is a valuable gift for yourself, and

even the most grudge-bearing people can learn how to do it, new studies

suggest.” USA Today