“An obsession with the devil, born out of personal experience, explains why so many fundamentalist Christians believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were working together.” —Salon

“‘It’s like a game of Russian roulette,’ said one of my friends whose son is serving in Iraq. ‘Every day we wonder if our luck will hold out, or if today is the day we take the hit.’ ” —AlterNet

One thing I have recently noticed is that US news sources reporting on the death often say that a vehicle ‘ran into a roadside bomb’ or something similar. To me, this suggests accidentally hitting a buried hazard along the lines of a landmine left over from hostilities, while in reality we are talking about a deliberate attack by resistance fighters who have placed the device and I presume are waiting in the vicinity to detonate it as a US convoy passes. Similarly, when a helicopter or aircraft goes down, one has to get into the heart of the story for confirmation that it had been fired upon. Is this an unconscious softpedaling of the daily enmity the US faces? Reading European coverage of the same incidents, words are far less minced.

Related: US Soldiers’ Suicide Rate is Up in Iraq:

“Suicide has become such a pressing issue that the Army sent an assessment team to Iraq late last year to see if anything more could be done to prevent troops from killing themselves. The Army also began offering more counseling to returning troops after several soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., killed their wives and themselves after returning home from the war.

Winkenwerder said the military has documented 21 suicides during 2003 among troops involved in the Iraq war. Eighteen of those were Army soldiers, he said.

That’s a suicide rate for soldiers in Iraq of about 13.5 per 100,000, Winkenwerder said. In 2002, the Army reported an overall suicide rate of 10.9 per 100,000.

The overall suicide rate nationwide during 2001 was 10.7 per 100,000, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” —Yahoo!

“It’s been a rocky year for Poetry magazine after the magazine learned it was bequeathed $100 million. “Poetry’s first order of business was to form a foundation to satisfy IRS regulations. But later developments seemed not just to suggest growing pains but to hint at the old adage that money ruins everything.” —Christian Science Monitor

Local NPR Member Stations Still Need Help: ‘Yes, National Public Radio just got a gift of $200 million. But “the truth is that the Kroc gift will have no effect on the financial needs or the fundraising efforts of NPR’s 750 member stations. Instead of receiving financial support from NPR, these stations have to pay for NPR programming.” And the gift might even have a negative impact as donors assume public radio is now awash in cash.’ —Christian Science Monitor

“For the first time in the UK an orchestra will be performing John Cage’s silent work 4’33” on the radio. Cage’s seminal work, 4’33”, which consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, will be the highlight of a concert on Radio 3 at 7.25pm. In readiness for the performance, Radio 3 bosses will have to switch off their emergency back-up system – designed to cut in when there is an unexpected silence on air.” —The Scotsman

NASA is orphaning the Hubble space telescope by halting shuttle flights necessary for periodic maintenance even before Bush’s new space initiative phases out the shuttle vehicle six years from now. Among Hubble’s achievements, according to this BBC rundown:

• Gave us the age of the Universe
  
• Provided proof of black holes
  
• Gave first views of star birth
  
• Showed how stars die
  
• Caught spectacular views of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9’s collision with Jupiter
  
• Confirmed that quasars are galactic nuclei powered by black holes
  
• Gathered evidence that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating

Since the new Bush plan is a virtually unfunded mandate to NASA to replace valuable space science with vote-getting glitz (space activity is concentrated in two states with fat pots of electoral votes, Florida and Texas), it is unclear if the successor to the telescope, scheduled for a 2011 launch, will ever be produced.

“The Bush administration’s idea of spending $1.5 billion promoting marriage is one of those rather expensive but basically symbolic gestures that presidents like to make in election years. Mr. Bush’s advisers may also hope that it will divert social conservatives from pressing for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages. But as meaningless sops to powerful voting blocs go, this one is particularly cruel.” —New York Times editorial

Looks like a brazen giveaway to his faith-based friends to me. However, they are not completely buying it. —New York Times

Update on the ‘liberal hawks’ ‘ ‘reconsideration’ of the invasion of Iraq. Christopher Hitchens remains incredibly misguided, arguing that we have no choice but to pursue foreign policy by the ‘presumption of guilt’; excusing the flow of body bags home to the US with a brief nod to ‘utilitarianism’ (dismissing concerns about the fiscal cost of bogging down in the morass in the same breath), lulling himself with the conviction that bin Laden is already dead and arguing inanely that “you could have genuine inspections only by way of regime change”, a quote out of context by which he dishonors the persecuted whistleblower weapons expert Dr. David Kelly. He says the Kenneth Pollack’s candid reappraisal of his support for the war, the only really thoughtful reassessment in this Slate dialogue, does not ‘affect the essential case’ in the least, poor soul.

Meanwhile, Paul Berman reiterates with the fervor of the zealot how he is the only one who sees the broader and deeper picture.

I fear the worst for the famed, wry monologist who has been reported missing by his wife after failing to return from a walk in New York. The 62-year old Gray has been depressed since suffering a head injury in a 2001 auto accident and underwent psychiatric hospitalization in October 2002 after being talked down from a contemplated jump from a bridge. His mother apparently suicided when she was around his age.

(Many do not appreciate that, after a head trauma, a stroke or other brain insult, depression is not only common but recalcitrant, as it is not simply an emotional reaction to the demoralizing injury but often an ‘organic’ effect on the brain’s function. Not only the mood change but a deterioration in control over impulsive behavior, including self-destructive impulses, is often seen.)

From Garret: “Time for me to repeat my seasonal plea — have mercy on those without shelter. Extra blankets, clothes you might have. I used to purchase a “Happy Meal”? when returning from my own lunchtime in NYC [during the infamous Reagan years] and hand it to the first homeless person I would meet. Your “doggie bag” is a prime candidate for immediate donation. The homeless tend to be very appreciative of this gesture.

In this case [45-below wind chill?], there may be no other succour but to get the persons in shelter. If you see a homeless individual trying to tough it out, I would advise calling the police or other emergency service to have them take the individual to a shelter.” —dangerousmeta!

Bush makes a mockery of the memory of Dr. King on the seventy-fifth aniversary of his birth. The President’s perfunctory appearance at Dr. King’s grave allows him to get the federal government to pick up the considerable tab for the $2,000-a-plate Republican fundraiser in Atlanta. Civil rights leaders are outraged at the poor taste of pairing the two events.

Every president since Ronald Reagan has come to Atlanta, the birthplace of Dr. King, to lay a wreath at his grave. When President Clinton came in 1996, he received a standing ovation. But this presidential visit will be different. It seems to have lifted the lid on long-simmering anger many blacks feel toward Mr. Bush. Some Bush policies, including tax cuts mainly benefiting those with higher incomes and cutting back on welfare-type programs, have alienated black voters, analysts say. —New York Times

New Book Suggests Biases Are Widespread: “Men are better suited for math and science than women. Whites have more positive feelings toward other whites than blacks. The young are preferred over older people.

These are just a few of the biases discussed by social psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Thierry Devos in their article, ‘Implicit Self and Identity’, published in The Self: From Soul to Brain, Volume 1001 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Based on a recent Academy conference, the book offers the latest research from 16 experts in the areas of neuroscience, cognitive science, social and developmental psychology, anthropology, philosophy and theology. Their article is one of many that examine how the neurological aspects of our unconscious selves influence our explicit, psychological, social and spiritual selves.” —New York Academy of Sciences press release

Orang-utans ‘may die out by 2025’: “The orang-utan, Asia’s ‘wild man of the forests’, could disappear in just 20 years, a campaign group believes.

WWF, the global environment network, says in the last century the number of apes fell by 91% in Borneo and Sumatra.

Globally, it says, there were thought to be somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 orang-utans as recently as 1987.

But by 2001 that number had fallen by virtually half, to an estimated 25,000- 30,000 of the animals, more than half of them living outside protected areas.” —BBC

“Millions of harassed workers could have their worst fears confirmed about their bosses thanks to a new test to weed out the ‘corporate psycho’…

Two of the world’s leading experts on psychopathy have developed a new 107-point questionnaire to identify which desks those smooth-talking ‘snakes in suits’ might be hiding behind.” —BBC

Roger L. Simon:

“At the present moment, the Democratic Party seems to be headed over a cliff at ninety miles an hour. With Bush already sitting on extremely high poll numbers and the domestic and foreign situations breaking his way, the Democrats have two of their worst candidates in recent memory in the frontrunner positions—Howard Dean and Wesley Clark. They are particularly bad in the Internet Age.

What, you say, Howard Dean is bad on the Internet? He was and is the master of online fundraising and the first to recognize the power of blogs. Yes, indeed! But that’s only part of the story. And it’s not the more important part. The Internet is the greatest memory device we have ever had. It stores virtually everything for instant access—it’s very difficult to hide what you have said. Bloggers and others will dig it out and force the media to publicize it.

This is exceptionally dangerous for Dean who has defined himself and staked his nomination on being the Most Antiwar Candidate, when, among other things, quite a short time ago he was not. Today we see via Instapundit that Dean wrote a letter to Clinton advocating Milosevic be forcibly removed for humanitarian reasons, something he appears to have rejected for Saddam, even though the Iraqi leader was vastly more awful. Dean even advocated, in the case of Milosevic, going it alone without the United Nations.”

This is the flip side of the issue I discussed in my post below about the liberal hawks’ reconsiderations of their support for the Iraqi invasion. One and all, as the other rationales they supported evaporate, console themselves with the rote line about how we eliminated a heinous genocidal dictator without examining the moral ambiguities of that stance — which genocidal regimes are worst? where does one draw the line between those we are compelled to depose and those we tolerate? how much failure of diplomatic efforts, containment, and international cooperation is enough? how preemptive, as opposed to reactive, can an effort to remove a dictator be and be justified? how unilateral? who gets to decide? Can Dean bring coherent focus and intelligent discussion to these questions, now that he has been ‘outed’ on the issue (if you accept Reynolds’ take on it), and in so doing definitively articulate the differences between his foreign policy and the Bush regime’s?

Yes, that is billion. “The worldwide sale of ring tones, which started as a marketing gimmick for music labels and mobile phone companies, is roughly equivalent to 10 percent of the $32.2 billion global music market.” —CNN

John Brockman poses this year’s question to the luminaries of The Edge community: What’s your law?:

“There is some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you’ve noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you. Gordon Moore has one; Johannes Kepler and Michael Faraday, too. So does Murphy.

Since you are so bright, you probably have at least two you can articulate. Send me two laws based on your empirical work and observations you would not mind having tagged with your name. Stick to science and to those scientific areas where you have expertise. Avoid flippancy. Remember, your name will be attached to your law.”

164 respondents to date. Unfortunately, Brockman exhorted his contributors not to be flippant in formulating their laws. This largely excluded the ironic and cynical and with that, IMHO, an important segment of observations about how the universe works.

Nicholas Humphrey

Humphrey’s Law of the Efficacy of Prayer:

In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.

[Think about it.]

… or else. —BBC

First fullscreen high resolution Quicktime VR from Mars. Needs to be seen!

Salon excerpts the December 2003

Strategic Studies Institute report, Bounding the Global War on Terrorism by Jeffrey Record, a Vietnam veteran, author and professor in the Department of Strategy and International Security at the U.S. Air Force’s Air War College in Montgomery, Ala. Record says that conflating al-Qaida and Iraq, and setting the impossible goal of ending terrorism, ‘violates fundamental strategic principles’ — and could strain the U.S. military to the breaking point.

The author examines three features of the war on terrorism as currently defined and conducted: (1) the administration’s postulation of the terrorist threat, (2) the scope and feasibility of U.S. war aims, and (3) the war’s political, fiscal, and military sustainability. He believes that the war on terrorism–as opposed to the campaign against al-Qaeda–lacks strategic clarity, embraces unrealistic objectives, and may not be sustainable over the long haul. He calls for downsizing the scope of the war on terrorism to reflect concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American military power.

The full text (PDF) can be downloaded here.

“Now, you might expect a poetic epiphany out of me at this point. Or failing that, to get drunk and/or make a fool of myself with an absurdly young woman. Isn’t that what poets do? Not at all, at least not these days. Poets teach and drive Corollas with 150,000 miles on them and take their children to Suzuki violin lessons. If one of them succeeds in cornering you at a party, God forbid, he will probably tell you about his health plan and 401k. Even your accountant is more interesting, and presumably less neurotic and self-involved. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. Years and years ago the brilliant and iconoclastic old Bay Area poet and reprobate Kenneth Rexroth noted that ‘most poets are so square they have to walk around the block to turn over in bed.'” —August Kleinzahler, Slate

In a potentially important conversation, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg brings together Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria, proposing they reappraise their support for the invasion of Iraq in light of the bankruptcy of the WMD argument and the morass of the occupation. The conversation promises to continue, but here are some tidbits from the first installment.

Weisberg:

“This was elective surgery, and we had a pretty good idea what the surgeon’s limitations were. The choice wasn’t between an invasion led by George W. Bush and an invasion led by a president who would make an eloquent case to the world and build a credible global coalition. The alternatives were Bush’s flawed war or no war. So, the question I’m asking myself now is whether the marvelous accomplishment of deposing and capturing Saddam justifies costs that I really ought to have expected.”

Pollack:

“I think the events of the last 12 months have also indicated that containment was doing both better than we believed, and worse. On the one hand, the combination of inspections and the pain inflicted by the sanctions had forced Saddam to effectively shelve his WMD ambitions, probably since around 1995-96. On the other hand, the behavior of the French, Russians, Germans, and many other members of the United Nations Security Council in the run-up to the war was final proof that they were never going to do what would have been necessary to revise and support containment so that it might have lasted for more than another year or two.”

[I think Pollack is right here that containment was working better than we believed, but his argument about the intransigence of the rest of the world “to do what would have been necessary” founders on the fact that their noncooperation was largely in response to Bush’s arrogant disdain for them.]

Pollack continues:

“If I had to write The Threatening Storm over again I certainly would not have been so unequivocal that war was going to be a necessity. However, I still would have pointed out that there was a strong case for removing Saddam’s regime…”

[The strong case is of course based on the humanitarian rationale, and the pat assertion that the Iraqis are ‘better off now’ is the fallback position of every hawk and erstwhile hawk. There are two problems with this. First, it leaves unexamined the legitimate question of whether the Iraqis are really going to be better off with the American oppressors who lack the political will, the moral committment or the financial resources to embark on the necessary nation-building efforts. Secondly, there is the hypocrisy of the continuing policeman-and-liberator-of-the-world noblesse oblige stance being imposed on the rest of the world unwillingly and selectively, only when it jibes with US strategic interests and empire-building aspirations. You cannot argue for the moral necessity of removing Saddam to respond to the suffering of the Iraqi people without a cogent explanation of why you feel no similar obligation to remove every other despicable despot, especially when you did not start making that argument until the Bush regime mobilized for the invasion.]

Thomas Friedman:

“The real reason for this war — which was never stated — was to burst what I would call the “terrorism bubble,” which had built up during the 1990s.

This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as “martyrs,” and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something — to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it’s not very diplomatic — it’s not in the rule book — but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable.”

[Paul Berman as well, whom I will not dignify by including a tidbit, spouts his usual venom about radical Islam being the newest face of the 20th-century problem of ‘mass totalitarian movements’, which justifies the WoT® in terms little more cogent than Dubya’s own in arguing that we must fight them because they ‘hate freedom.’ Berman concedes that, in this installment of the conversation, he has not tied that argument to the necesssity of the Iraqi invasion. Let us hope his argument is less fatuous as they continue…]

George Packer:

“Before the war, no one could know what kind of political psychology we would find once the seal of Saddam’s tyranny was broken. It turns out that Iraqis are a lot less grateful, a lot more suspicious and even conspiratorial, than the advocates of liberation predicted. The moral self-congratulation we saw in this country in early 2003 went a long way toward damaging the prospects of a decent postwar. Totalitarianism didn’t make Iraqis better people or readier to govern themselves democratically — exactly the opposite. The margin for error was almost zero: The American occupation had about two weeks to get things right after the fall of Baghdad in order to set in motion a process that had any near-term chance of success, and it got everything wrong.”

“The sometimes uneasy relationship between African-Americans and the Democratic Party flashed into the open on Sunday, when Sharpton attacked front-runner Howard Dean at an Iowa debate for his failure to hire any blacks to a cabinet-level position during his 10 years as governor of Vermont. It was the campaign’s other African-American candidate, former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, who came to Dean’s defense, scolding Sharpton for instigating a ‘racial screaming match.’

In some regards, the Sharpton-Dean-Braun exchange captured the divided and unpredictable mood of African-American voters as the primary season heads toward its first votes. Thus far, little attention has been focused on African-American support, given the intense focus by the candidates and the media on the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, two states with negligible black populations.” —Salon

Sharpton’s playing the race card is business as usual for him; he has always been a petty demagogue seeking otherwise unwarranted credibility and respect on an affirmative action basis. I would venture to say that Dean’s lack of cabinet-level black appointments in Vermont reflects nothing more than the fact that the state is lily-white, without significant African Americans in politics at all. Correct me if I am wrong…

“A virus found in the common cold may be a new weapon in the fight against deadly melanomas, Australian researchers say.

The extraordinary development came after Australian scientists found skin cancer cells died when injected with coxsackie A21 – a common air-borne virus associated with the common cold.

Researchers said the discovery could be used as a stand-alone therapy or incorporated into conventional radiation and chemo-therapeutic strategies as an effective “three-pronged attack” on melanoma. ” —News.com.au

New software has `no boundaries or rules’: “A few hundred thousand lines of computer code could revolutionize the way people interact with computers, say its unlikely inventor and his backers.” Can anyone make heads or tails of this description? I can’t for the life of me envision how this would work or whether it would be the big deal this puff piece says it is:

The software, called “No Boundaries Or Rules,” or NBOR, includes an intuitive user interface for writing, drawing, compiling multimedia presentations and other PC tasks. It allows real-time collaboration and sends large files over the Internet at lightning speed.

The cornerstone of NBOR is “Blackspace,” software for word processing, desktop publishing, slideshow presentation, graphics, drawing, animations, audio, photo cropping, instant messaging and real-time conferencing.

Opening Blackspace results in a blank canvas where users arrange text or create sophisticated visual displays with only a few clicks and drags of a mouse — without ever using the pull-down menus, icons, margins, tabs and fonts of Microsoft Word and other current word processing systems.

Canvases can be saved as common document titles — such as schoolreport.doc — or as a symbol, such as a star, logo, photo or dot. Instead of sending all the data over the Internet, the creator can send the symbol alone.

If the recipient has NBOR, he need only click on the symbol and the complete file will rebuild itself in the recipient’s Blackspace, thanks to 500,000 lines of complicated code that Jaeger and eight developers abroad spent two years writing. —SF Chronicle

“Preservative chemicals found in samples of breast tumours probably came from underarm deodorants, UK scientists have claimed.

Their analysis of 20 breast tumours found high concentrations of para-hydroxybenzoic acids (parabens) in 18 samples. Parabens can mimic the hormone estrogen, which is known to play a role in the development of breast cancers. The preservatives are used in many cosmetics and some foods to increase their shelf-life.” —New Scientist

“Madonna’s love for Wes Clark prompts a short history of celeb campaign endorsements — featuring gratuitous sex and drug references and the use of ‘dialogue’ as a verb!” —Salon

Britain’s ‘Dr. Death’ Serial Killer Found Hanged. Harold Shipman, the infamous British family doctor who spent twenty years of quiet family practice coldly and systematically killing at least 215 of his patients (and was only found out because one of his victims had been so grateful for his care that she had left her wealth to him in her will, which was challenged by her daughter) was found hanged in his cell in an English prison. Shipman refused to confess to the murders or reveal his motives, and reaction from the families of some of his victims is to feel profoundly cheated that he “took the easy way out” without talking about his crimes. —New York Times

To Avoid Fuel Limits, Subaru Is Turning a Sedan Into a Truck: “Subaru’s strategy highlights what environmentalists, consumer groups and some politicians say is a loophole in the fuel economy regulations that has undermined the government’s ability to actually cut gas consumption. The average fuel economy for new vehicles is lower now than it was two decades ago, despite advances in fuel-saving technology.” —New York Times

“A new effort appears to be developing to expand the use of sleeping pills, which because of their potential for abuse have long had a reputation as being in some ways more dangerous than the insomnia they are meant to treat…

But part of the new push is driven by drug company marketing. Two new sleeping pills are expected to be available by the end of next year and their manufacturers hope to have them approved for broader and longer-term use than recommended for previous pills. And the companies are expected to advertise their products, and the problem of insomnia, heavily.” —New York Times

“For some women, especially those with a history of significant depression, the risks of abandoning antidepressants during pregnancy may be far greater to the mother and the fetus than taking the drugs themselves.

Those who abruptly stop taking their medications, often on the advice of their obstetricians, put themselves in danger of a relapse. Others who switch to lower dosages may still suffer depressive symptoms.” —New York Times

Washington’s Park Police bombed on a terrorism test on the second anniversary of 9-11 when the Office of Inspector General planted a mock dirty bomb at the Washington Monument. After it went undetected, they even moved it from the rear of the obelisk to be closer to a security checkpoint where tourists line up to enter the attraction. —Washington Post . I also heard a radio report about Immigration and Nationalization batting a perfect .000 recently in detecting a significant number of mock infiltrators from the OIG presenting at various ports of U.S. entry with clumsy home-PC forged identity documents. [Oh, but it must have been before they instituted the fantastic and much-heralded fingerprinting-and-photographing regimen!] But, predictably, reaction will lean in the direction of finger-pointing at the culprits in INS, the National Park Service, or whatever agency du jour has been embarrassed, rather than examining the essential futility of our paranoiac approach to ‘homeland security’.

“We get the conspiracies we deserve.” —Independent.UK

“French law enforcement authorities have made Vice President Dick Cheney the target of a criminal investigation for his role in a massive bribery scandal during his time as CEO of Halliburton. Le Figaro, one of France’s biggest (and most conservative) newspapers, reports ‘an investigative judge is looking into allegations of corruption during construction of a natural gas complex in Nigeria by Halliburton and a French oil company.'” Yet this story is virtually ignored in the American press, the author writes. —AlterNet. “The investigation is the first of its kind in France under laws introduced as part of an international convention on cross-border corruption signed in 1997 by some 35 countries, including the US.” —Guardian.UK

People are saying terrible things about George W. Bush. ”

With Paul O’Neill joining the ranks, the credentials of the Bush critics just keep getting better.”

I was one of the few commentators who didn’t celebrate Paul O’Neill’s appointment as Treasury secretary. And I couldn’t understand why, if Mr. O’Neill was the principled man his friends described, he didn’t resign early from an administration that was clearly anything but honest.

But now he’s showing the courage I missed back then, by giving us an invaluable, scathing insider’s picture of the Bush administration. —Paul Krugman, New York Times op-ed

A reader sent me this story from a Florida news outlet about a candidate for the Darwin Awards who, allegedly guided by voices, climbed into a lion’s cage in a Buenos Aires zoo and tried to ‘bullfight’ with a lion [thanks, Adam]. Mucking around at the site, I got to this slideshow format which has twenty-seven ‘news’ items. Clicking from one to the next, you cannot believe you go to ever more twisted, absurd and shameful displays of folly and perfidy. I do not know if it should be taken as more of a comment on human depravity or the sorry state of what passes for news on your average local station.

Why can’t Homeland Security tell the difference between a terrorist and Mark Frauenfelder’s six-year-old daughter? —Boing Boing

“…By the 1950’s fewer composers were writing for the string quartet, which had been overshadowed by more exotic ensembles. It began to seem as quaint as a Sunday afternoon chamber concert at the local church. It might have continued to languish but for the advocacy of two ensembles: the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet, founded in 1973 by David Harrington, its first violinist; and the London-based Arditti Quartet, founded a year later by Irvine Arditti, the violinist involved in the Boulez exchange.

Passionate, unflagging champions of new music, the two groups have, between them, commissioned nearly a thousand works; that achievement alone should earn them a lasting place in music history. They have also inspired a wave of young string quartets that specialize in contemporary music, including Ethel and the Meridian and Flux Quartets in America, and the Brodsky, Keller and Balanescu Quartets in Europe. Not to mention the salutary impact they have had on the classical music scene as a whole, which has become a little less staid and a little more open.” —New York Times

The world’s largest book: “Last month, MIT professor Michael Hawley set a new Guinness World Record for largest book with the publication of Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom, a 114-page photographic picture book recording four of his visits to the tiny country.

Opening to 1.5 by 2 metres and weighing more than 60 kilograms, the book is so big it needs its own Sherpa. The price? A cool $10,000 (U.S.), 17 times what the average Bhutanese earns in a year, although the books only cost $1,000 each to produce, with the remaining $9,000 benefiting the Bhutanese ministry of education as a charitable donation”

“Adobe Systems Inc. acknowledged yesterday it had added technology to its popular Photoshop graphics software at the request of government regulators and bankers to prevent consumers from making copies of the world’s major currencies…

Rival graphics software by Taiwan-based Ulead Systems Inc. also blocks customers from making copies of currency.

Experts said the decision by Adobe represents one of the rare occasions when the U.S. technology industry has agreed to include third-party software code into commercial products at the request of government and finance officials.” —Washington Post

Neal Stephenson: “Superficially, this site looks like a set of FAQs about a novel that I wrote entitled Quicksilver. As time goes on, we hope that it will develop into something a little more than that. We don’t know how it will come out. It’s an experiment.

Why put the information on such a complicated system, when a simple FAQ is easier? Because we are hoping that the annotations of the book on this site will seed a body of knowledge called the Metaweb, which will eventually be something more generally useful than a list of FAQs about one and only one novel. The idea of the Metaweb was originated by Danny Hillis.”

Having just finished reading Quicksilver (FmH readers will have noted my references to it during the past few months), I found myself reluctant to return* from an immersion in late 17th century European politics, science and philosophy. Because of Stephenson’s erudition (about nearly everything), the length of the book did not make it at all ponderous, despite the fact that much of the plotting is less than compelling and things are left unsatisfyingly unresolved for the main characters (of course, as it is the first volume of a projected ‘Baroque trilogy’). From a review:

The weight of Quicksilver, just less than four pounds, is a jail. Deep inside the 900 pages of Neal Stephenson’s vast new novel can be discerned, pacing the prison yard, a small slim underlit curtain-raiser of a tale whose task it is to warm us up for the real performance to come, the massive drama Stephenson is presumably planning to unfold in stages two and three of what he is calling The Baroque Cycle.

*Does anyone have any recommendations of good historical fiction set in 17th century Europe? Has anyone read Dark Matter, by the (underrated? under-performing?) novelist Philip Kerr?

Paul O’Neill is one disgruntled former employee, to be sure!

“Former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill charged in remarks released Saturday that President Bush began planning to oust Saddam Hussein within days of taking office and before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Providing firsthand testimony bolstering a longtime contention of White House critics, O’Neill told Lesley Stahl of CBS News for a segment to be broadcast on ’60 Minutes’ Sunday night that preparations to oust Hussein long predated Bush’s articulation of his preemption doctrine in June 2002, when he said the United States must strike looming enemies before the worst threats emerge.” —Washington Post

It is not his contentions that are surprising — I have long believed that the dysadministration was looking for a pretext to go into Iraq from the time they took power — but his gutsiness in spilling the beans. I will be curious to see what is unleashed upon him, in the way of character assassination or worse, in response.

No Guardian for a Fetus: “A Florida appeals court panel ruled on Friday that the state could not appoint a guardian for the fetus of a retarded rape victim, dismissing what civil-liberties groups complained was an attack by Gov. Jeb Bush against abortion rights.

The ruling does not affect the woman because she gave birth in August. But lawyers who fought the state’s effort said the decision would have a far-reaching impact, because it would keep the state from establishing legal protection for fetuses in the future.” —New York Times

Neal Stephenson: “Superficially, this site looks like a set of FAQs about a novel that I wrote entitled Quicksilver. As time goes on, we hope that it will develop into something a little more than that. We don’t know how it will come out. It’s an experiment.

Why put the information on such a complicated system, when a simple FAQ is easier? Because we are hoping that the annotations of the book on this site will seed a body of knowledge called the Metaweb, which will eventually be something more generally useful than a list of FAQs about one and only one novel. The idea of the Metaweb was originated by Danny Hillis.”

Having just finished reading Quicksilver (FmH readers will have noted my references to it during the past few months), I found myself reluctant to return* from an immersion in late 17th century European politics, science and philosophy. Because of Stephenson’s erudition (about nearly everything), the length of the book did not make it at all ponderous, despite the fact that much of the plotting is less than compelling and things are left unsatisfyingly unresolved for the main characters (of course, as it is the first volume of a projected ‘Baroque trilogy’). From a review:

The weight of Quicksilver, just less than four pounds, is a jail. Deep inside the 900 pages of Neal Stephenson’s vast new novel can be discerned, pacing the prison yard, a small slim underlit curtain-raiser of a tale whose task it is to warm us up for the real performance to come, the massive drama Stephenson is presumably planning to unfold in stages two and three of what he is calling The Baroque Cycle.

*Does anyone have any recommendations of good historical fiction set in 17th century Europe? Has anyone read Dark Matter, by the (underrated? under-performing?) novelist Philip Kerr?

Not that you would even consider doing such a thing, but “forty-five percent of the executable files downloaded through Kazaa, the most popular file-sharing program, contain malicious code like viruses and Trojan horses, according to a new study.” — Wired

Warning to UK readers: Keep tap water away from your face if you wear contact lenses. Seriously. —New Scientist

“Historical figures including Socrates, Charles Darwin, and Andy Warhol probably had a form of autism, says a leading specialist.

Professor Michael Fitzgerald, of Dublin’s Trinity College believes they showed signs of Asperger’s syndrome.” — BBC.

You owe it to yourself to read Steve Silberman’s fascinating Wired exploration of the savant phenomenon and the neurology of creativity, of related interest. I have previously linked to that piece. Silberman has also covered the so-called ‘Geek Syndrome’ observations that suggest Silicon Valley has been built on Asperger’s.

How Vermeer’s paintings translate to film: “Jan Vermeer’s works aren’t paintings – they’re frozen films, cinematic dramas in paint and canvas. Jonathan Jones looks at how his enigmatic masterpieces translate to the big screen.” — Guardian.UK I am transported by Vermeer, and look forward very much to this film, although I share puzzlement at how it will live and breathe on the big screen.

“At one time it was rare to find US citizens, in the safest and most prosperous country in the world, jumping at their own shadows. Now we only note how high.”

“A mother’s enquiry about buying Microsoft Flight Simulator for her ten-year-old son prompted a night-time visit to her home from a state trooper…So alarmed was the Staples clerk at the prospect of the ten year old learning to fly, that he informed the police, the Greenfield Recorder reports. The authorities moved into action, leaving nothing to chance. A few days later, (she) was alarmed to discover a state trooper flashing a torch into to her home through a sliding glass door at 8:30 pm on a rainy night.” — The Register (UK)

“Communitarian’ philosopher Amitai Etzioni has a weblog, I discovered by accident in someone else’s blogroll. Recently, for example, he has written a couple of posts lauding the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision denying the Bush administration the right to detain U.S. citizen Jose Padilla an “enemy combatant” without benefit of constitutional protections.

Forgetting Isn’t a Simple Process:

“Do you recall the last time you actively tried to forget something unpleasant? Maybe it was an embarrassing moment, or Britney Spears’ weekend wedding that wasn’t.

New research suggests your brain is quite busy when you take on the task of un-remembering. The process, in fact, is similar to the mental effort required to stop your arm or leg from moving.” —Yahoo! News

Related: Research reveals brain has biological mechanism to block unwanted memories:

“For the first time, researchers at Stanford University and the University of Oregon have shown that a biological mechanism exists in the human brain to block unwanted memories.

The findings, to be published Jan. 9 in the journal Science, reinforce Sigmund Freud’s controversial century-old thesis about the existence of voluntary memory suppression.

“The big news is that we’ve shown how the human brain blocks an unwanted memory, that there is such a mechanism and it has a biological basis,” said Stanford psychology Professor John Gabrieli, a co-author of the paper titled “Neural Systems Underlying the Suppression of Unwanted Memories.” “It gets you past the possibility that there’s nothing in the brain that would suppress a memory – that it was all a misunderstood fiction.”

The experiment showed that people are capable of repeatedly blocking thoughts of experiences they don’t want to remember until they can no longer retrieve the memory, even if they want to, Gabrieli explained. ” —EurekAlerts

Also: Unmaking Memories: “In the sci-fi thriller Paycheck, an engineer has his memory erased after completing a sensitive job. Scientific American.com spoke with leading neurobiologist James McGaugh to find out just how close scientists are to controlling recall.”

National Zoo Admits Mistakes in Animal Care: “The National Zoo has filed a formal response that disputes the claims of a former staff pathologist who said he uncovered a pattern of poor animal care, but the zoo acknowledges making numerous mistakes in treatment and record-keeping…

While presenting a detailed response to Nichols’s allegations of veterinary mistakes in 21 animal deaths, the zoo acknowledged a range of staff errors in caring for 15 animals that died. The mistakes included failure to keep complete and accurate veterinary records; failure to examine some animals in a timely manner; failure to perform tests that would have more accurately diagnosed some ailments; and failure to closely monitor the care of some animals.” —Washington Post

Bush to Announce Ventures to Mars and the Moon, Officials Say:

“…(An) administration official cautioned that the proposal could be broad and open-ended, more in the nature of “a mission statement” rather than a detailed road map and schedule….

(T)he announcement, combined with Mr. Bush’s call this week to revamp laws regarding immigration, would signal the second major policy initiative put forward by the White House at the beginning of an election year. Both new policy directives would allow the president to be portrayed as an inspirational leader whose vision goes beyond terrorism and tax cuts.

They also would have the added political benefit of diverting attention from the Democratic presidential candidates trudging through the retail politics of the Iowa caucuses.” —New York Times

“No two ways about it, 2003 was a demoralizing year for those of us working for peace and justice. With George Bush in the White House, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the California State House, and Paul Bremer ruling Iraq, it was a chore just to get out of bed each morning. But get out of bed we did…” —AlterNet

Adam mentioned he has run across other reports of animals mourning their dead. This Google search has more to say about animal grieving (although, because of the syntax I used, you will have to filter out a couple of entries about grieving for animals as opposed to grieving by animals). By the way, I have to react to the anthropocentric phrasing of the USA Today headline and the slant of the story. In this case, because Babs was euthanized, of course they had to make deliberate provisions to bring her body back into the gorilla enclosure for the wake, but should it really be up to their human keepers to decide whether to allow the animals the opportunitiy to grieve?

And:

In another challenge to anthropocentrism:

Fear of new things shortens life: “Animals with an innate phobia of novelty have higher levels of stress hormones after a new experience and die significantly younger than their braver kin, new research has found. The work suggests that a lifetime of fearful stress can take an accumulated toll on health.” —New Scientist Evolutionarily, though, would it not make sense that tolerating higher levels of stress better would be selected for, given the obvious survival value it confers? It is not clear that the health effects of stress on a lab animal bred specifically to be stress- or novelty-intolerant can be generalized to “a lifetime of fearful stress” in an evolutionarily equipped organism. Furthermore, might the study results be turned on their head — one might imagine that it may not be that fearful animals die younger than braver kin, but rather that animals who (for some undiscovered constitutional reason) are going to die younger are more fearful than their kin. As usual, correlation is not necessarily causation. In any case, go out there and try a new thing or two…

I thought from reading the headline that researchers were claiming that nonhuman animals might approach having a ‘theory of mind’, the implications of which would be earthshattering. But it turns out they use ‘thinking about thought’ to mean something different and far less momentous. They give nonverbal memory tasks to animals like dolphins and rhesus monkeys but the study design gives the subject the option of declining to complete a task they assess as too difficult, which the researchers take to mean that the animal knows when it doesn’t know. —Guardian.UK. I have not read the study but it strikes me that there are probably behavioral explanations for the subjects’ behavior in the test that do not require us to infer self-reflective abilities. On the other hand, why not? I don’t know. [Now where’s my fish?]

“At a congressional briefing in September, a panel of psychologists reviewed new psychological research with battlefield implications.

They presented research across diverse psychology subfields, but with one major commonality: all of the findings apply to improving U.S. military operations at home and abroad. Their presentations spanned human factors, training, recruitment and retention.” —APA Monitor The article does not mention one of the most insidious trends in Pentagon-commissioned psychological research, about which I have previously written here — efforts to subvert the natural human response (‘post-traumatic stress disorder’) to exposure to stress beyond the pale of the human organism’s design capabilities in order to preserve the shellshocked soldier’s efficiency as a warfighting machine on the battlefield.

Patients recovering from depression with talk therapy show a ‘distinct’ pattern of brain changes: “An imaging study by neuroscientists in Canada has found that patients who recover from depression with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) show a pattern of brain changes that is distinct from patients who recover with drug therapy.

It’s an important finding because it shows — for the first time with definitive imaging evidence — that the depressed brain responds ‘differently’ to different treatments. It may also help doctors better understand why a particular treatment might work for one patient and not another.” —EurekAlerts! I have a problem with framing the talking cure and medication treatment of depression as separate but equal treatments. I have often said to my patients that medication is like a bicycle; it will get you somewhere you need to go, but you still need to do the pedaling. It is just a very efficient way to use your energy. In contrast, therapy is like learning how to ride, how to plan where you want to go, how to navigate, obey the rules of the road and learn how to keep your injuries minimal if you ever fall… to push the metaphor. Of course, brainscan patterns of beneficiaries of the two treatments would show they affect different parts of the brain!

Book Review: Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin’s We: “Human Nature in Utopia argues a startling hypothesis about utopian systems. Building a society on a completely rational model is not just a political mistake but a scientific and philosophical one. A rational society is just not what we are evolved for, so the critique of hyperrationalist societies in Brave New World (Huxley), 1984 (Orwell), and Evgenii Zamyatin’s We can be understood anew from the viewpoint of evolutionary science.” —Human Nature Review I recall being scared out of my wits by Zamyatin’s little-known dystopian novel as a high school student with, of course, no inkling of evolutionary biology.

“Net multimedia company RealNetworks announced a sweeping overhaul of its digital audio and video software Wednesday, along with a digital song store aimed to compete with Apple Computer’s leading iTunes service.

Real is betting that the flexibility of its RealPlayer 10 music-playing software–the latest entry in an increasingly crowded digital-download market–will distinguish it from rival stores and software packages.

To this end, the company has created a jukebox that will play all the media formats used by its own and other song stores–including secure downloads from the iTunes store.” —CNET News

“Shameless self-promotion” is alleged in the lawsuit by the estate of George Harrison against a seemingly scummy New York oncologist who treated him in his final days in 2001. The suit alleges that the doctor, who has been promoting himself with national media publicity for caring for the dying Beatle and has already been sanctioned by medical authorities for professional misconduct, coerced the enfeebled Harrison into signing deathbed autographs for his children over his objections. —New York Times

An edited extract of a January, 2004 recording believed to have been made by Osama bin Laden, reacting to the US occupation of Iraq, transmitted by al-Jazeera and published in The Guardian.

A guest columnist in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is frank (and brave) enough to call an S-word an S-word.

No Mark of Distinction: “Some publishers and scholars want to purge the colon from book titles; the only thing that’s worse: semicolons.” —The Chronicle of Higher Education [via dangerousmeta]

I seriously raised at least one FmH reader’s hackles last week in passing on Rafe Coburn‘s proposal about their lack of empathic capability being one of the defining characteristics of rabid conservatives. Now, with delight, I’m reproducing another of his comments of a similar ilk, but this time he casts his lot, and thus in turn I do, with a consummate curmudgeon:

“I’m currently reading a collection of H L Mencken’s essays, The Vintage Mencken. In one essay, ‘The National Letters,’ Mencken describes George W Bush (err, the American plutocracy circa 1920), thusly:

It is badly educated, it is stupid, it is full of low-caste superstitions and indignations, it is without decent traditions or informing vision; above all it is extraordinarily lacking in the most elemental independence and courage. Out of this class comes the grotesque fashionable society of our big towns, already described. Imagine a horde of peasants incredibly enriched and with almost infinite power thrust into their hands, and you will have a fair picture of its habitual state of mind. It shows all the stigmata of inferiority–moral certainty, cruelty, suspicion of ideas, fear.

Mencken’s argument is that what’s needed is a real aristocracy. I’m not sure I buy into that necessarily, but his description of the American plutocracy then and now is dead on.” [thanks to walker]

. . . into your local supermarket: “Hippie cuisine has come of age and, ironically, has become very big business. The past 10 years have witnessed an explosion in the organic and natural foods marketplace with sales of organic food growing five times faster than food sales in general, according to the Organic Trade Association. With national standards in place, organic producers will continue to supply a hungry market that is expected to continue growing up to 25 percent a year. Most surprisingly, a recent survey conducted by Prevention magazine and the Food and Marketing Institute (FMI) found that 53 percent of all organic food is now purchased at conventional supermarkets.” —Chicago Tribune

Rules bar telling which stores, restaurants had tainted meat: 10,000 lbs. of recalled beef from the Washington slaughterhouse where the BSE-tainted cow was rendered may have been distributed to as many as nine California counties and has been tracked to the retailers who sold it to the public. The state has shared the information with county health officials but they’re not telling you if you may have been exposed to any. They will say, however, that eleven restaurants and a market ended up with the beef.

“We are prohibited from releasing information that companies would consider proprietary,” (a USDA spkoesperson) explained. “If you are concerned whether you may have purchased the product, you can call your retail store. They would know. .. . The only way to know for sure is to contact stores.”

The USDA stresses that it considers the recalled meat safe because none of it contains the brain and spinal cord tissue thought to be the locus of infection with prions, the transmissible agents that cause BSE and its human equivalent, vCJD (which, by my reading of the literature, is what the exact same disease is called when it has crossed to infect a human). Then why is it being recalled? The answer may lie in the fact that scientists dispute whether prions can be transmitted via blood as well. SF Chronicle

“For the last three years, President Bush’s policies have ransacked the environment, put our national security at risk, damaged our economy, and redistributed wealth from the middle class to the very wealthiest Americans. Yet thanks to a complacent media, the President has managed to hide behind a carefully constructed ‘compassionate’ image. As the 2004 election nears, it’s crucial that voters understand what President Bush’s policies really mean for our country. And to do that, we need creative new ads that clearly show what’s at stake.

That’s why we decided to launch Bush in 30 Seconds, an ad contest that’s intended to bring new talent and new messages into the world of mainstream political advertising. We’re looking for the ad that best explains what this President and his policies are really about — in only 30 seconds.”

I especially like “Desktop” and “What Are We Teaching Our Children?”

“Charity Navigator, America’s premiere independent charity evaluator, works to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace by evaluating the financial health of America’s largest charities.” [via rebecca blood]. I am sorry I didn’t get to post this before you did your year-end giving. It bears pointing out, though, that if you are interested in maximum philanthropic impact of your dollars you might want to go beyond the large charities to smaller niche organizations without the inevitable layers of bureaucratic overhead.

One man’s perspective on Dean from Melbourne (the null device): “The fact that a machine-man from the lesser of two evils is seen as an almost messianic figure (an American Gough Whitlam, as it were) is testament to how loathed the Bush administration is in the more liberal, cosmopolitan parts of America. Mind you, with the US political system, Dean is as good as it gets; last election around, the best Ralph Nader could do was to bleed votes away from the Lesser Evil towards the Greater…”

Walker sent me this New Yorker Talk of the Town piece reflecting the question, which (with my affection for year-end “best” lists) I have been noticing increasingly on the critics’ lips this season, of why exactly we need the lists at all. Louis Menand’s answer, here, is that the year would “not make sense” without the lists:

You need, you realize, a list, and in exactly the same way that a drowning sailor needs a life preserver. The people who make these annual lists, the daily or weekly reviewers, have crossed the great sea of packaged amusement, pathos, and distraction for us, and they have emerged, clutching in their hands just ten plastic jewel cases. Here, they say; these are the best. We can imagine the nausea and entertainment fatigue they must have suffered during their twelve-month ordeal. We admire their grit and their pluck, and we salute them.

I thought it was just that, as I have grown up and become otherwise preoccupied, I am less au courant with new cultural developments, in pop music especially. But Menand shares my experience:

It’s not just that you don’t recognize ninety per cent of the stuff for sale. You don’t even recognize the categories. Electronica, Techno-House, Alternative Country, IDM (it stands for Intelligent Dance Music, as opposed, evidently, to the other kind). There are rows of bins containing Christian-rap CDs, and people are actually looking through them.

This being established, he goes on to explore the skill and care that must be taken in crafting these lists (in the process, condemning those who list their ten picks in alphabetical order as cheating us of needed further distinction…). Not only must the choices on the list be good; the list itself must be a work of art itself, it is as if he is saying.

If the lists function to help us indulge wisely in a world of increasingly limited leisure time and a bewildering multiplicity of choices, how alarming to find that different critics have different films, or recordings, on their lists. First, this is a reflection of the increasing fragmentation of culture into, as Menand nicely puts it, “thinner and thinner demographic slices,” so that a responsible media outlet must be pluralistic. Menand closes his essay a bit abruptly for my taste; his way of coping with his anxiety about not being given a clear dictate about what was the year’s best is merely to emphatically state his disapproval of such pluralism and democracy.

So Menand’s reflections go a long way to address the question of why we need the lists. Metaquestion, not addressed: why is it now, this year, that the question is being asked?

Walker sent me this New Yorker Talk of the Town piece reflecting the question, which (with my affection for year-end “best” lists) I have been noticing increasingly on the critics’ lips this season, of why exactly we need the lists at all. Louis Menand’s answer, here, is that the year would “not make sense” without the lists:

You need, you realize, a list, and in exactly the same way that a drowning sailor needs a life preserver. The people who make these annual lists, the daily or weekly reviewers, have crossed the great sea of packaged amusement, pathos, and distraction for us, and they have emerged, clutching in their hands just ten plastic jewel cases. Here, they say; these are the best. We can imagine the nausea and entertainment fatigue they must have suffered during their twelve-month ordeal. We admire their grit and their pluck, and we salute them.

I thought it was just that, as I have grown up and become otherwise preoccupied, I am less au courant with new cultural developments, in pop music especially. But Menand shares my experience:

It’s not just that you don’t recognize ninety per cent of the stuff for sale. You don’t even recognize the categories. Electronica, Techno-House, Alternative Country, IDM (it stands for Intelligent Dance Music, as opposed, evidently, to the other kind). There are rows of bins containing Christian-rap CDs, and people are actually looking through them.

This being established, he goes on to explore the skill and care that must be taken in crafting these lists (in the process, condemning those who list their ten picks in alphabetical order as cheating us of needed further distinction…). Not only must the choices on the list be good; the list itself must be a work of art itself, it is as if he is saying.

If the lists function to help us indulge wisely in a world of increasingly limited leisure time and a bewildering multiplicity of choices, how alarming to find that different critics have different films, or recordings, on their lists. First, this is a reflection of the increasing fragmentation of culture into, as Menand nicely puts it, “thinner and thinner demographic slices,” so that a responsible media outlet must be pluralistic. Menand closes his essay a bit abruptly for my taste; his way of coping with his anxiety about not being given a clear dictate about what was the year’s best is merely to emphatically state his disapproval of such pluralism and democracy.

So Menand’s reflections go a long way to address the question of why we need the lists. Metaquestion, not addressed: why is it now, this year, that the question is being asked?

“How you react to stress influences how easily you resist or succumb to disease, including viruses like HIV, discovered UCLA AIDS Institute scientists. Reported in the Dec.15 edition of Biological Psychiatry, the new findings identify the immune mechanism that makes shy people more susceptible to infection than outgoing people.” —EurekAlert!

More than unpleasant, chronic pain shrinks the brain —Scientific American

“We perceive space and time to be continuous, but if the amazing theory of loop quantum gravity is correct, they actually come in discrete pieces.” —Lee Smolin, Scientific American

Whatever doesn’t kill you might make you stronger: “If dioxin and ionizing radiation cause cancer, then it stands to reason that less exposure to them should improve public health. If mercury, lead and PCBs impair intellectual development, then less should be more. But a growing body of data suggests that environmental contaminants may not always be poisonous–they may actually be good for you at low levels.

Called hormesis, this phenomenon appears to be primarily an adaptive response to stress, says toxicologist Edward J. Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The stress triggers cellular repair and maintenance systems. A modest amount of overcompensation then produces the low-dose effect, which is often beneficial.” —Scientific American

A fuller understanding of signaling in the brain of people with this disorder offers new hope for improved therapy: “An inadequate arsenal of medications is only one of the obstacles to treating this tragic disorder effectively. Another is the theories guiding drug therapy. Brain cells (neurons) communicate by releasing chemicals called neurotransmitters that either excite or inhibit other neurons. For decades, theories of schizophrenia have focused on a single neurotransmitter: dopamine. In the past few years, though, it has become clear that a disturbance in dopamine levels is just a part of the story and that, for many, the main abnormalities lie elsewhere. In particular, suspicion has fallen on deficiencies in the neurotransmitter glutamate. Scientists now realize that schizophrenia affects virtually all parts of the brain and that, unlike dopamine, which plays an important role only in isolated regions, glutamate is critical virtually everywhere. As a result, investigators are searching for treatments that can reverse the underlying glutamate deficit.” —Scientific American The treatment of schizophrenia, to put it another way, has been constrained by the serendipitous discovery of dopamine blockers that ameliorate its symptoms; that is why the disease has for so long been conceptualized as a disorder of dopamine. I have written about an analogous problem, most recently, in my critique of a misguided critique of the biogenic amine theory of depression. However, I wonder if glutamate is not just the next great thing in schizophrenia theory, much as, in that essay, I discussed the last decade’s focus on serotonin in depression. Glutamate-modulating drugs may not address the ‘underlying deficit’ any more than serotonin-modulating ones addressed an ‘underlying deficit’ in depression; in fact, they are, as I assert, less robust antidepressants than those that work by other mechanisms. Over and over again in psychiatry, when you have a new improved hammer, it pays to start seeing more and more nails everywhere [if you will forgive me for how often I overuse that metaphor…]

There is yet another problem, which this article touches upon only in its ultimate paragraph (“…because schizophrenia’s symptoms vary so greatly, many investigators believe that multiple factors probably cause the syndrome. What physicians diagnose as schizophrenia today may prove to be a cluster of different illnesses, with similar and overlapping symptoms.”), giving the briefest of nods to what I think of as a core issue in conceptualizing schizophrenia. It may not be only that other neurotransmitters beyond dopamine are affected, to varying extents, in different patients with the disease, provoking its varied presentations. I, and a number of those who treat schizophrenia, including a number of psychiatric luminaries, are convinced that our current diagnostic concept of schizophrenia lumps together patients with diverse and heterogeneous disease processes. While controversial, a strong case may be made that in some schizophrenics, it is not necessarily a disorder of intercellular signalling (neurotransmitters) at all, but more gross “organic” disruption in the architecture of the brain as a result of perinatal insult or developmental disturbance. Schizophrenics may sort roughly into two categories, those with (a) genetic history of the disease in relatives, fair to good medication response, more normal premorbid cognitive abilities (although sometimes having shown premorbid social-interactional abnormalities), less cognitive deficiency, absence of environmental insult history, and absence of findings on brain scans or autopsy; as opposed to those with (b) no family history; poorer medication response; evidence of poorer premorbid cognitive functioning; more deficits on neurocognitive testing; evidence of environmental insults such as season-of-birth effect, antibody levels indicative of exposure to infection, or other metabolic abnormalities; and abnormal brain scans and postmortem findings. The two types of schizophrenics also have contrasting symptom patterns; the former are more paranoid and delusional (the type Javitt and Coyle are writing about) and the latter more disorganized and confused.

Goodbye sunshine: “Each year less light reaches the surface of the Earth. No one is sure what’s causing ‘global dimming’ – or what it means for the future. In fact most scientists have never heard of it.” —Guardian.UK

Related? String Theory — A weak sun may have sweetened the Stradivarius:

“Myriad proposals have surfaced in the past several centuries to explain how Antonio Stradivari imbued his now priceless wares with transcendental sound. Some have suggested that Stradivari used beams from ancient cathedrals; others argued that he gave his wood a good urine soaking. The latest theory proposes that the craftsman should thank the sun’s rays–or lack thereof.

Stradivari could not have known that his lifetime coincided almost exactly with the Maunder Minimum–the 70-year period (from 1645 to 1715) of reduced solar activity that contributed to colder temperatures throughout western Europe during what is called the Little Ice Age.” —Scientific American

This is a reprise and an amplification of a New Year’s Day post from FmH in years past:

Years ago, the Boston Globe ran a January 1st article compiling folkloric beliefs about what to do, what to eat, etc. on New Year’s Day to bring good fortune for the year to come. I’ve regretted since — I usually think of it around once a year (grin) — not clipping out and saving the article; especially since we’ve had children, I’m interested in enduring traditions that go beyond getting drunk [although some comment that this is a profound enactment of the interdigitation of chaos and order appropriate to the New Year’s celebration — FmH], watching the bowl games and making resolutions. A web search brought me this, less elaborate than what I recall from the Globe but to the same point:

“Traditionally, it was thought that one could affect the luck they would have throughout the coming year by what they did or ate on the first day of the year. For that reason, it has become common for folks to celebrate the first few minutes of a brand new year in the company of family and friends. Parties often last into the middle of the night after the ringing in of a new year. It was once believed that the first visitor on New Year’s Day would bring either good luck or bad luck the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor happened to be a tall dark-haired man.

“Traditional New Year foods are also thought to bring luck. Many cultures believe that anything in the shape of a ring is good luck, because it symbolizes “coming full circle,” completing a year’s cycle. For that reason, the Dutch believe that eating donuts on New Year’s Day will bring good fortune.

“Many parts of the U.S. celebrate the new year by consuming black-eyed peas. These legumes are typically accompanied by either hog jowls or ham. Black-eyed peas and other legumes have been considered good luck in many cultures. The hog, and thus its meat, is considered lucky because it symbolizes prosperity. Cabbage is another ‘good luck’ vegetable that is consumed on New Year’s Day by many. Cabbage leaves are also considered a sign of prosperity, being representative of paper currency. In some regions, rice is a lucky food that is eaten on New Year’s Day.”

The further north one travels in the British Isles, the more the year-end festivities focus on New Year’s. The Scottish observance of Hogmanay has many elements of warming heart and hearth, welcoming strangers and making a good beginning:

“Three cornered biscuits called hogmanays are eaten. Other special foods are: wine, ginger cordial, cheese, bread, shortbread, oatcake, carol or carl cake, currant loaf, and a pastry called scones. After sunset people collect juniper and water to purify the home. Divining rituals are done according to the directions of the winds, which are assigned their own colors. First Footing:The first person who comes to the door on midnight New Year’s Eve should be a dark-haired or dark-complected man with gifts for luck. Seeing a cat, dog, woman, red-head or beggar is unlucky. The person brings a gift (handsel) of coal or whiskey to ensure prosperity in the New Year. Mummer’s Plays are also performed. The actors called the White Boys of Yule are all dressed in white, except for one dressed as the devil in black. It is bad luck to engage in marriage proposals, break glass, spin flax, sweep or carry out rubbish on New Year’s Eve.”

Here’s why we clink our glasses when we drink our New Year’s toasts, no matter where we are. Of course, sometimes the midnight cacophony is louder than just clinking glassware, to create a ‘devil-chasing din’.

In Georgia, eat black eyed peas and turnip greens on New Year’s Day for luck and prosperity in the year to come, supposedly because they symbolize coppers and currency. Hoppin’ John, a concoction of peas, onion, bacon and rice, is also a southern New Year’s tradition, as is wearing yellow to find true love (in Peru, yellow underwear, apparently!) or carrying silver for prosperity. In some instances, a dollar bill is thrown in with the other ingredients of the New Year’s meal to bring prosperity. A similar New Year’s meal in Norway also includes dried cod, “lutefisk.” The Pennsylvania Dutch make sure to include sauerkraut in their holiday meal, also for prosperity.

In Spain, you would cram twelve grapes in your mouth at midnight, one each time the clock chimed, for good luck for the twelve months to come. The U. S. version of this custom, for some reason, involves standing on a chair as you pop the grapes. In Denmark, jumping off a chair at the stroke of midnight signifies leaping into the New Year. In Rio, you would be plunging into the sea en masse at midnight, wearing white and bearing offerings.

In China, papercuttings of red paper are hung in the windows to scare away evil spirits who might enter the house and bring misfortune.

Elsewhere: pancakes for the New Year’s breakfast in France; banging on friends’ doors in Denmark to “smash in” the New Year; going in the front door and out the back door at midnight in Ireland; making sure the first person through your door in the New Year in Scotland is a tall dark haired visitor. Water out the window at midnight in Puerto Rico rids the home of evil spirits. Cleanse your soul in Japan at the New Year by listening to a gong tolling 108 times, one for every sin. It is Swiss good luck to let a drop of cream fall on the floor on New Year’s Day.

However you’re going to celebrate, my warmest wishes for the year to come!