Mysterious virus sweeps B.C. care facility: The virus is similar enough to SARS that it registereed positive on the antibody tests for the latter, yet it caused symptoms no worse than the common cold. 143 at a residential care facility were affected, and there was no excess mortality from the virus. Although they won’t know until it can be cultured and its genome sequenced and compared to SARS, the speculation is that it is a mutant SARS virus without the virulence. Makes sense that it would cause cold-like symptoms, as the cold virus is relatively closely related to the SARS agent. The Globe and Mail

What is a Lost Word? “There are rare words, and there are rarer words, but only a very special word qualifies as a bona fide lost word. Of course, no word in the Compendium can be completely lost, or I could never have found it. To as great an extent as possible, I have tried to use a set of criteria by which truly rare but real English words can be classified as lost words.” [via MetaFilter]

A 24-year-old repeatedly arrested for offenses connected with the manufacture of methamphetamine makes history as he is charged under laws prohibiting the production of weapons of mass destruction in North Carolina. Mountain Times

Rebecca Blood points to this report of a new study suggesting that humiliation is more important than pure loss in promoting depression. The writer, Ellen Barry, gets one at least one thing badly wrong in her article. She says that the study “calls into question assumptions about depression that date to Sigmund Freud”, implying that Freud founded his theory of depression on loss. But his seminal 1917 essay on the subject, Mourning and Melancholia, thinks along much more sophisticated lines asking what the difference between an uncomplicated loss that leads to resolvable grief and one that leads to an involutional depression might be. Althoguh this is an oversimplification, Freud said that if the person’s attachment to the lost object was ambivalent, e.g. tinged with anger, the anger will be turned inward and mourning gives way to melancholia.

Now we have the Kendler study, making a big deal of the fact that it is humiliating losses, rather than just any ol’ losses, that predispose to depression. There’s a problem with this however. Does Kendler distinguish certain losses which are intrinsically humiliating in social status terms from those where it is the sufferer’s low self-esteem and vulnerability to depression which predispose to feeling humiliated? In other words, does being humiliated cause depression or does depression cause one to feel humiliated? Although Kendler tries to isolate the environmental from the constitutional factors by comparing identical twins with disparate experiences of depression, he may not have explained much.

One of the reasons the report interested Rebecca is Kendler’s nod to the evolutionary significance of depression. “How on earth does a tendency for acute and chronic hopelessness in any way benefit human survival?” she has long wondered. Evolutionary psychopathology is one of the intellectually stimulating venues in psychiatry today, one of the fun places to be, since it involves so much pure speculation. It has the thrill of controversy around it because it is firmly predicated on the materialist proposition, with which some are not very comfortable and about which I write about quite abit here, that complex behavioral patterns are brain-based and have biological and genetic roots. Evolutionary psychology has had to overcome the intellectual distaste that was aroused throughout academia several decades ago by the arguments of Richard Herrnstein and Arthur Jensen (among others) about the genetic roots of IQ, which were seen as being used to further a racist agenda. Perhaps because genetic studies are more sophisticated nowadays and proponents are more careful about which complex intellectual or behavioral traits they claim have genetic bases, evolutionary psychology is enjoying a resurgence. Even a socially progressive mental health professional leery of the insidious uses to which such thinking can be put can be intrigued and captivated by some of its speculations and implications.

That being said, one of the most appealing evolutionary theories of depression — only one among several — is the one consistent with Kendler’s findings and described in the article, that depression evolved in the proto-human pack economy as a way to reduce resource utilization and ambitions by one with lower social status, as one might have after a humiliating loss.

By the way, Rebecca, for a maladaptive trait to survive evolutionarily, it does not necessarily have to be beneficial to human survival, as your question suggests. Although this theory of depression does suggest that it is beneficial, all that is necessary for a trait to survive is that it not have an adverse effect on reproductive fitness. For example, a trait that expresses itself after the reproductive years will be neutral with regard to survival and not selected against. Or, a partial expression of the trait may confer an advantage, while those unlucky enough to get the full genetic load may suffer — too much of a good thing, if you will. This is discussed, for example, with respect to psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia or manic depressive (bipolar) illness. Could, for example, lesser expression of the relevant genes inspire quirky visionary originality of thought and creative energy, while the full flowering of the tendencies spins one out of control? (In modern society, it is certainly true that psychotic disorders, which have their most common onset in young adulthood, confer a reproductive disadvantage, but are artists or visionaries advantaged? There was a study I wrote abut here several weeks ago which peripherally bears on that, suggesting that marriage is the kiss of death to creative output…) Think, for example, of the difference between James Joyce’s fractured language and the fractured thought of his schizophrenic daughter Lucia (a patient of Jung’s), which one commentator likened to the difference betwen swimming in the river and drowning in it. A more prosaic example, although not from psychiatry, is sickle cell anemia. While having a double dose of the gene gives you the devastating syndrome, a single ‘hit’ (which gives you “sickle trait”) apparently confers some resistance to malaria, which is endemic in the regions where the sickle cell mutation arose.

The Top Ten Theories About What Caused the East Coast Power Blackout:

10. Governor Gray Davis wanted to show that California’s mess wasn’t really his fault: see, there were blackouts on the East Coast too!

9. Overstressed computers in West Coast attempting to tabulate all the candidates for California Governor.

8. Osama bin Laden and his compatriots check into a motel in New Jersey and turn up the air conditioning *really* high.

7. All innocent persons on death row in Texas prison system electrocuted at once.

6. Justice Antonin Scalia seeks return to original conditions when Constitution was written.

5. Department of Homeland Security seeks to confuse terrorists by hiding location of New York City.

4. Liberal paranoia comes true as country is returned to Dark Ages.

3. Latest new excuse by Bill Clinton to explain to Hillary why he can’t make it home for dinner.

2. President Bush attempts to divert electricity from middle class to the wealthiest 1 percent.

1. Fox News sues Con Edison for trademark infringement for using the word ‘con.'”

Prettier now, made over with Moveable Type, and it also seems Garret is starting to comment more than just blinking.

Greg Palast: The Tale of The Brits Who Swiped 800 Jobs From New York, Carted Off $90 Million, Then Tonight, Turned Off Our Lights

Machines accurately infer user intent, remember experiences and allow users to call upon simulated experts

“The massive power failure that struck the Northeast and parts of the Midwest this week also delivered a jolt to Congress, where energy legislation has been stalled amid deep regional differences over how best to upgrade the nation’s aging electric power transmission system.” Washington Post

Competing bills differ on support for a plan that would put electricity transmission under the control of several regional authorities, a step toward a national transmission system opposed by regions like the South and the Northwest which enjoy cheaper power. Bush, as usual, voiced his usual authoritative but empty platitudes about an “antiquated transmission system” and how we’ve got to “figure out what went wrong.” Of course, his energy scheme focuses more on federal handouts to his friends on the supply side — tax incentives for oil and gas drilling (especially in wilderness areas) and nuclear power support. Although analysis of the power failure, whose precise cause remains unknown, does not suggest it was set off simply by a short-term overload in peak demand, almost no one in the national debate pays much attention to the potential value of conservation in reducing demand for power and consequent stress on the transmission system. And participants in the debate draw diametrically opposite lessons about whether it calls for centralization of control over the power grid or enhancing regional autonomy. Along with centralization, of course, comes automated control of transmission traffic, automatically reconfiguring connections across the grid to respond instantaneously to surges in demand somewhere in the system. It strikes me that this is precisely what analysts say caused the cascading series of failures on Thursday, whereas in areas that were spared it was because local power engineers flipped a switch to isolate their localities from the larger process.

While the debate should probably not be shaped by these dramatic failures which so far have happened only three times during my lifetime (1965, 1979 and now), they are probably only the tip of the iceberg in alerting us to potential unintended consequences of automation of electricity flow. The megalomaniacs (literally) who favor centralization, giveaways to the energy industry, and unquestioning responsiveness to the unchecked growth in demand are those who will control the public debate with emotional evocations of the spectre of chaos, anarchy and social breakdown with increasingly frequent massive blackouts if we do not do their bidding.

“The greatest brute an African mother ever brought to life” (according to Milton Obote, whom Amin overthrew but who returned to power in Uganda later to rule with equivalent inhumanity and repression) is dead at 80 in Saudi Arabian exile. The current Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, through a spokesman, said “Good.” Washington Post

“Iraqis who have suffered for months with little electricity gloated Friday over a blackout in the northeastern United States and southern Canada and offered some tips to help Americans beat the heat.

From frequent showers to rooftop slumber parties, Iraqis have developed advanced techniques to adapt to life without electricity.” CNN. How insensitive of them…to include Canada in their gloating.