Dum & Dummer – Michael J. Sheehan: “Our parents taught us not to speak negatively of others, but what’s a person to do when ignorance, the absence of knowledge, rears its empty head? Any thesaurus will provide us with substantives such as blockheadedness, denseness, doltishness, dumbness, dullness, stupidity, shallowness, incomprehension, unintelligence, and unenlightenment, but when we need heftier words or more striking language, where do we turn?” The Vocabula Review

We saw A Beautiful Mind last night. (Warning: spoilers ahead.) Jennifer Connelly is deservedly the critics’ darling, up for a Golden Globe. Ed Harris is underrated and breathtaking to watch in his limited time onscreen. Even more breathtaking is Russell Crowe, who does a wonderful job as John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician with a lifelong struggle against paranoid schizophrenia, except for some moments when he was obviously directed to be a dorky stereotype which, in reality, has nothing to do with schizophrenia. This allows a gratuitous and incongruous scene in which some longhaired Princeton students — it’s the late ’60’s or early ’70’s at this point — make insensitive fun of him. As a psychiatrist whose primary clinical activity is treating schizophrenia, I was far more moved by the film than the non-mental-health-professionals with whom I saw it. What is most difficult to understand about schizophrenic delusions — the subjective, and ultimately terrifying, experience of being unable to differentiate internal fantasies from consensus reality — is well-portrayed here, although through a cinematographic artifice of populating his world with people who turn out to be imagined. No adult schizophrenic I have ever treated or read about has this literal version of an “imaginary playmate”; most of their hallucinatory experiences are of disembodied voices about whose identities they either speculate or remain ignorant. The film also provokes the right questions about the relationship between genius and mental instability. To be overly simplistic, does Nash create because of or in spite of his illness? And, the flip side of the coin, how germane is his intellectual strength — the answer, it seems to me, is not at all obvious — to his perseverence in the face of his illness? Worth seeing.

Information page on Nyiragongo, the volcano that just erupted in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A superb, well-organized colection of the woodblock prints of Hiroshige, which I have always found sublime. The above, “Thunderstorm at Ohashi and Atake,” from the Hundred Famous Views of Edo, has long had a special resonance with me.

[thanks to fruitlog — now plep??]

A dwelling for the gods — “The door handles took a year to design. The radiators took another. And then the ceiling had to be raised – by a few millimetres. Stuart Jeffries on what happened when Ludwig Wittgenstein applied his philosophy to architecture.” A review of “The Unknown Wittgenstein: Architect, Engineer, Photographer” at the Royal Academy of Art, London. Guardian UK [via Fimoculous]

Wallace and Gromit to return online — “The stars of animator Nick Park’s Oscar-winning The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave are to make their return on the internet, it was revealed today.

Wallace, a prolific inventor fond of red ties, green tank tops and Wensleydale cheese with creations such as the aforementioned mechanical trousers to his name, will be reunited with his plasticine dog, Gromit, in 12 one-minute movies.” Guardian UK [via Fimoculous]

“Lab specimens of anthrax spores, Ebola virus and other pathogens disappeared from the Army’s biological warfare research facility in the early 1990s, during a turbulent period of labor complaints and recriminations among rival scientists there, documents from an internal Army inquiry show.

The 1992 inquiry also found evidence that someone was secretly entering a lab late at night to conduct unauthorized research, apparently involving anthrax. A numerical counter on a piece of lab equipment had been rolled back to hide work done by the mystery researcher, who left the misspelled label “antrax” in the machine’s electronic memory, according to the documents obtained by The Courant.”

Brussels can like it or lump it on sauce: “A spectacularly obscure EU body will meet in Brussels today to decide just how many lumps a sauce can contain before it ceases to be classified as a sauce and is regarded officially as a vegetable.” The Times of London

The C.I.A.’s Domestic Reach: “The charter of the Central Intelligence Agency expressly denies the spies any domestic police powers. … So the boundaries were drawn at the dawn of the cold war. The C.I.A. would find out what was going on outside the United States — and so prevent a second Pearl Harbor. The F.B.I. would work inside the United States to catch criminals and foreign agents.

That once bright line has blurred since Sept. 11.

Congress has given the C.I.A. new legal powers to snoop on people in the United States — not limited to investigating groups like Al Qaeda. It has been granted these new powers, along with billions of dollars, without any public post-mortem into how all these guardians of national security failed to protect against the September attacks.” NY Times

$100,000 Speeding Fine?

Why We Want Their Bodies Back: “As humans have evolved, they’ve learned there are good reasons not to bury an empty coffin… The desire for tangible proof of the death of someone we know or love is a natural human impulse. But often that desire extends well beyond a purely rational need for certainty. In circumstances where there is not the remotest chance that someone is still alive, we still expend great energy and often put other lives on the line in order to retrieve the dead.” Discover

Stress Causes Lasting Brain Changes: ‘The research team… looked at what happened to mouse brain cells and to live mice following brief exposure to different types of stress. Their findings appear in the Jan. 18 issue of Science.

They found that within minutes of exposure, brain nerve cells, or neurons, became hypersensitive. And the change lasted for several weeks — long after the stress was gone. This is in keeping with victims of posttraumatic stress, who despite time and distance from the original trauma remain physically, mentally, and emotionally agitated.’ WebMD

Poll: Bush Admin. Hiding Something, say almost two thirds of respondents. But will it change the Administration’s approval ratings in the face of the effective pressure for sheeplike loyalty? yahoo!

Laughter in the Time of Conflict Times of India editorial; Indians use humor as weapon against world terror Smirking Chimp

PR Watch: “public interest reporting on the PR/Public Affairs industry. PR Watch offers investigative reporting on the public relations industry. We help the public recognize manipulative and misleading PR practices by exposing the activities of secretive, little-known propaganda-for-hire firms that work to control political debates and public opinion.” From the Center for Media and Democracy.

Book review: Debunking Japan’s Myths of Its Exceptional Self

For centuries Japanese have been encouraged to look at their land as exceptional. A “small island nation” set off from the huge Asian landmass, Japan was “home to the gods” and to a supposedly homogenous race of people whose origins, like those of their language, defied detection.

At various times this exceptional view of self has been used as a pernicious ideology, justifying slaughter and discrimination. More recently, during the boom years of the late 20th century, it was used to explain the nation’s spellbinding successes.

From the very beginning James L. McClain, in his sweeping and vigorously told new book, Japan: A Modern History, debunks these cherished myths. In short order he takes apart the notions of monoethnicity and cultural exceptionalism, neatly explaining, for example, how the divine-origin myth of the imperial family is at bottom a fable to cover the political massacre that allowed the Yamato clan to rule. NY Times

Poll: Bush Admin. Hiding Something, say almost two thirds of respondents. But will it change the Administration’s approval ratings in the face of the effective pressure for sheeplike loyalty? yahoo!