A new weblog — Mind Hacks: “Neuroscience and psychology tricks to find out what’s going on inside your brain. Mind Hacks is a book by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb.“
Daily Archives: 13 Dec 04
Democrats: Get ready to offend the ignorant
“As several small nations prepare to evacuate because of rising ocean levels, and the Pentagon draws up arms-transfer scenarios after India’s fall to climate change, Americans prefer to believe that all of this is simply the product of left-wing lunacy. My “problem with authority,” is difficult to overstate, but even I have to admit that these people clearly have their reasons.
So I wonder: Exactly how much evidence does it take for Americans to be convinced that a thing is true? And how much evidence to the contrary does it take for Americans to abandon an established belief? When I look at America’s widely held beliefs on subjects like global warming, drug safety, or even evolution, the only answer I can come up with is, “An arkload.”
I hate to break this to whoever the much-needed new leadership at the DNC, but it might take more than four years of deprogramming to make any rational view acceptable in American political discourse. The good news, I suppose, is that there isn’t even going to be an opportunity to re-take the Senate for at least ten years. So, feel free to spread the truth, and piss some people off, starting now.” — Avery Walker (Raw Story via wood s lot)
Richard Dawkins on George Bush
From the Sunday Times of London:
“I’m not particularly proud of being visceral, but I am admitting it. My attacks on George Bush have nothing to do with science or the scientific method. I just can’t stand the man’s style, the way he swaggers and struts and smirks and the way he looks sly and deceitful and the way Americans can’t see it. I’m irritated by the way they think he’s just a regular guy you can have a drink with.” [thanks, abby]
Whacked! Another HBO Main Player Meets His End
Spoiler alert: If you are a fan of The Wire and have last night’s episode on TiVo and haven’t watched it yet, don’t read any further, and certainly don’t read the New York Times story to which the blink points. Not only does HBO seem to have no compunctions about killing off major characters in many of its dramatic series, but the actors seem to find out only when they get the scripts for the episode in which they meet their end. [As to the details, I actually thought Stringer Bell wwas going to get whacked by crony Avon Barksdale, not Omar.]
Friends say Sherlock Holmes fan based own death on fictional case
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“The mysterious death of Britain’s leading Sherlock Holmes expert appears to have been a bizarre suicide plot deliberately based on one of the cases tackled by the fictional detective himself, a report said.
According to friends of Richard Lancelyn Green, he appears to have dressed up his suicide as murder in an attempt to get at an enemy from beyond the grave, a notion lifted from one of Holmes’s adventures, the Sunday Times said.” (AFP via Yahoo!)
`Scrounging’ for Iraq war puts GIs in jail
“Six reservists, including two veteran officers who had received Bronze Stars, were court-martialed for what soldiers have been doing as long as there have been wars — scrounging to get what their outfit needed to do its job in Iraq.” (Chicago Tribune )
Have a Blue Christmas
Buy Blue: “You may have voted blue, but were you aware that every day, you unknowingly help dump millions of dollars into the conservative warchest? Simply by buying products and services from companies which heavily donate to conservatives, we have been defeating our own interests as liberals and progressives on a daily basis.
Buy Blue is a concerted effort to educate the public on making informed buying decisions as a consumer. We identify businesses which support our ideals and spotlight their dedication to progressive politics. In turn, we shine that spotlight on unsupportive businesses in the form of massive boycotts and action alerts.
Currently, we are developing an extensive and interactive website which will soon allow you to find out exactly where your money goes when you make purchases, and participate in a dynamic community which constantly monitors corporate activity. There will be Blue alternatives to offending companies, and by making a decision to buy from these businesses, you are helping stimulate the growth of Blue-friendly economics. We are aiming for complete corporate responsibility.”
The Feminization of AIDS
New York Times Editorial : “AIDS is fast becoming a disease that strikes younger women disproportionately. Ignorance is part of the problem, but the laws and social customs that keep women powerless and poor – and subject to sexual exploitation – are far more insidious.”
Mad or Bad? Puppets or Free Agents?
“In 1995, the Supreme Court of Georgia heard a lawyer make a novel argument. He had read a study describing violent behavior shared by several generations of men in a Dutch family. Scientists had identified a mutated gene shared by all the violent men, and that’s what got the lawyer’s brain ticking.
The accused, argued the lawyer, might carry a gene — like the men in the Dutch family — that predisposed him to violence. (The lawyer’s client was on trial for murder.) Therefore, went the argument, the accused did not have free will, was innocent of the murder and should be acquitted.
The defense, an attempt at legal trickery remarkable even for a lawyer, failed. However, scientific discoveries, particularly advances in neuroscience, are nevertheless having profound consequences for legal procedure.” (Wired News)
The article discusses the ‘insanity defense’, which has been based on 19th century science bearing on individual responsibility for one’s actions.
“The problem with the reliance on M’Naghten is that modern findings by neuroscientists suggest that damage to the prefrontal cortex of the brain can produce individuals who are able to tell right from wrong but are organically incapable of regulating their behavior.”
The insanity defense has fallen into disfavor because of the public perception that it is abused, especially since the acquittal of John Hinckley in his attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan. But, as a neuroscience-grounded psychiatrist (it is forensic psychiatrists who evaluate and testify on the criminal responsibility of criminal suspects), I grapple with questions of whether my patients have the ability to conform themselves to standards of right and wrong all the time. I support a modern, scientifically-informed insanity defense as much as I decry its abuse as a slick defense tactic. Those who are legitimately not responsible for their actions are entitled to the defense and ought not to be penalized because others will misuse the insanity plea. On first blush, there is nothing special about the insanity plea in this regard. The burden of providing opportunities for justice inevitably leaves loopholes in many areas. The answer is to close the loopholes rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater. But there is something special about a plea of insanity, which is the public’s lack of understanding of the nature of mental illness (and, for that matter, of free will). In general, psychiatric disturbance is stigmatized and its bearer is seen as ‘bad rather than mad’. Much as there is a special burden on the court system not to err against suspects of color because of the historical reality of racism in our society, there ought to be a parallel burden not to err against mentally ill suspects.
Related:
How the Justice System Criminalizes Mental Illness — Brent Staples (New York Times op-ed)
And:
In a timely coincidence comes this story in which it is suggested that bizarre and dangerous behavior not otherwise easily understood (although not in this case direct violence towards others) may relate to the relapse of a disease process. (Yahoo! News)
R.I.P. Gary Webb
Steve Silberman sent me word of Webb’s death. You may recall the story; Webb authored an explosive San Jose Mercury News series in which he claimed that the crack epidemic had its origins in the CIA’s efforts to fund the anti-Sandinista Contras in Nicaragua. The story galvanized community anger. His reporting was eventually questioned, the story was repudiated by the paper and Webb’s career went into a tailspin from which he never recovered. Sad indeed.
Prize-winning investigative reporter dead at 49: “Gary Webb, a prize-winning investigative journalist whose star-crossed career was capped with a controversial newspaper series linking the CIA to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, died Friday of self-inflicted gunshot wounds, officials said.Mr. Webb, 49, was found dead in his Carmichael home Friday morning of gunshot wounds to the head, the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office said Saturday.” (Sacramento Bee )
Addendum:
A reader sent me this link to <a href=”For his brave reporting at the San Jose Mercury News, Webb paid a high price. He was attacked by journalistic colleagues at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the American Journalism Review and even the Nation magazine. Under this media pressure, his editor Jerry Ceppos sold out the story and demoted Webb, causing him to quit the Mercury News. Even Webb’s marriage broke up.
On Friday, Dec. 10, Gary Webb, 49, died of an apparent suicide, a gunshot wound to the head.
Whatever the details of Webb’s death, American history owes him a huge debt. Though denigrated by much of the national news media, Webb’s contra-cocaine series prompted internal investigations by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department, probes that confirmed that scores of contra units and contra-connected individuals were implicated in the drug trade. The probes also showed that the Reagan-Bush administration frustrated investigations into those crimes for geopolitical reasons.” title=””>Robert Parry’s thoughts on Consortium News about Webb’s death:
“For his brave reporting at the San Jose Mercury News, Webb paid a high price. He was attacked by journalistic colleagues at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the American Journalism Review and even the Nation magazine. Under this media pressure, his editor Jerry Ceppos sold out the story and demoted Webb, causing him to quit the Mercury News. Even Webb’s marriage broke up.On Friday, Dec. 10, Gary Webb, 49, died of an apparent suicide, a gunshot wound to the head.
Whatever the details of Webb’s death, American history owes him a huge debt. Though denigrated by much of the national news media, Webb’s contra-cocaine series prompted internal investigations by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department, probes that confirmed that scores of contra units and contra-connected individuals were implicated in the drug trade. The probes also showed that the Reagan-Bush administration frustrated investigations into those crimes for geopolitical reasons.” (thanks, joel)
Ha ha! You can’t insult Islam but I can
“Here’s a short Christmas quiz. Let me rephrase that. It’s a short Winterval quiz. I would not wish to frighten or alienate any Sunday Times readers by waving Jesus Christ in their faces.
Anyway, the first question is this. One of the two statements below may soon be illegal; the other will still be within the law. You have to decide which is which and explain, with the aid of a diagram, the logic behind the new provision.
a) Stoning women to death for adultery is barbaric.
b) People who believe it is right to stone women to death for adultery are barbaric.” [more] (Sunday Times of London)
Reimagined Math
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“It’s hard to imagine that these plaster forms, so starkly beautiful, were originally used to teach advanced students trigonometry. Called stereometric models, they were manufactured in turn-of-the-century Germany to help scholars grasp complex mathematical formulas. Last year, the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto shot each object, the tallest of which is less than a foot high, from below at close range so that they appear monumental. His series of photographs, ”Mathematical Forms,” reimagine these scientific models as things of wonder. They embody Sugimoto’s belief that art is possible even without artistic intention.” (New York Times Magazine slideshow)
Google Suggest Fun
You know about Google Suggest by now, right? It is a page with a Google searchbox which drops down a list of autocompletions, based on popularity, of the search term you are starting to type into the box. Here is the Suggested Google Alphabet (he means the Google Suggest Alphabet, more properly):
“After reading about the exposed Google Suggest URL over at InsideGoogle and seeing the ABCs of Google posted by Hatta on Slashdot, I decided to automate the process. Each time you load this page, it checks the most popular keyword for each letter of the alphabet given by Google Suggest, and displays them here for your viewing pleasure.”
And Jerry Kindall suggests an ego-ranking based on Google Suggest. Every term gets a score x.y in which x is the number of letters you have to type in to get your name on the drop-down list, and y is the position of your name in the list when it shows up. Gelwan is 8.4 and Follow Me Here is 11.1, for example. Keep in mind, however, that those rankings change with the relative popularity of the search.
