A New Scientist review raises the same hue and cry I have been voicing in posts here and in my worklife:

Ed Fitzgerald, at unfutz, lays out several thinkers’ defining characteristics of fascism. Don’t point a finger at Washington as you read; the proper direction for scrutiny should be inward, at the question of our own susceptibility.

The answer appears to be yes, at least with respect to dimensions of extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness. (Science and Consciousness Review)

“…[A]bnormal prion proteins implicated in the development of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, such as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, may be markers for disease rather than the infectious agents.” (Medpage Today)

“He wrote about 650 pieces; why do we always hear the same old six?” (Seattle Weekly)

Impeaching Bush is Just the Start: “…[I]n the end there will be plenty of abstentions, and some nastiness and hurt feelings, and Brookline will congratulate itself for sticking it to Bush. That’s the easy part.” — Dennis Fox (Brookline Tab)

April 1st; no fooling! National “I’m Still Embarrassed by My President” Day. Wear a brown ribbon to protest the BS from the White House.

And thanks, Seth, for suggesting readers go to www.itmfa.com as well.

They should have conferred with novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose most extraordinary achievement, IMHO, was his portrayal of a petty gangster with Tourette’s syndrome, the main character of Motherless Brooklyn. (Lethem, as far as I know, does not himself have Tourette’s.) He nailed this issue of the dialectic between disinhibition and increased control, and what it does to one’s experience of self in relationship to the world.

Tourette’s and obsessive-compulsive disorder have some epidemiological intersection and some phenomenological similarity, nevertheless they are not exactly the same thing psychiatrically. My only quibble with Lethem’s character is that his Tourette’s has alot of OCD to it.

“The court that made Massachusetts the first state to legalize gay marriage ruled Thursday that same-sex couples from other states where gay marriage is prohibited cannot marry here.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled in a challenge to a 1913 state law that forbids nonresidents from marrying in Massachusetts if their marriage would not be recognized in their home state.” (Boston Globe) And Gov. Mitt Romney breathes a sigh of relief vis á vis his 2008 Republican Presidential aspirations…

Parity is one of the rallying cries of the battle for fair treatment and against societal stigmatization of mental health problems.

McCain Drain: “E.J. Dionne hits the nail on the head today when he says that the positions that John McCain will need to take in order to win the Republican primary may very well lose him the support of the more moderate voters who’ve hailed him as a maverick, to his perhaps permanent electoral or reputational detriment…” (Tapped)

A User Guide to Adolescence by Luke Jackson, a 13-year old with Asperger’s Syndrome. Social morés in adolescence are difficult enough, but the lack of interpersonal perceptual skills in autistic-spectrum disorders can make it an unmitigated disaster from which recovery is difficult. Some of this was gotten at in Mark Haddon’s poignant novel Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but this gets at it more explicitly.

Fenwick, doing ongoing research on deathbed phenomena, feels they are common, they are not attributable to medication effects, and they are more diverse than the stereotypical “going toward the light” phenomenon.

It is a complicated story, but the movement to close the asylums was originally supposed to have gone fist-in-glove with the community mental health movement. This supremely humane reform effort was co-opted by the budget mavens, however, who did the former without supporting the latter. Among other things, the story of homelessness in America is in large measure the story of the bereft and abandoned deinstitutionalized mentally ill turned out to the streets with no provision for fending for themselves. In fact, this current proposal for a new hospital grew out of Governor Romney’s budget-slashing effort to close one of the remaining three hospitals in further deinstitutionalization. Indeed, the new hospital will replace two crumbling existing ones and will result in an overall reduction in the number of state hospital beds in Massachusetts. Nevertheless, it is the first new expenditure for the sickest of the chronically mentally ill in a long time in this state. I am no fan of mental health bureaucrats, but the Department of Mental Health under its current commissioner Elizabeth Childs MD seems truly dedicated to its constituency. It is at the forefront of the nationwide effort to eliminate involuntary medication, seclusion, and restraints from the practice of hospital psychiatry as well.

After Moussaoui’s gift to the prosecution, his defense attorneys scrambled to put on testimony from high-ranking al Qaeda detainees that he was a poseur and a nuisance who did not have the role of which he boasted in the 9-11 attacks. Moussaoui now says that his previous denials that he had been involved in the 9-11 plot were lies designed to facilitate the fruition of the attack despite his arrest. It is not much of a stretch to join in speculation that, in making the prosecution’s case and undercutting his attorneys’ efforts to defend him, he may be seeking a martyr’s death.

“Only Bush would see Bolten as the kind of official in need of a promotion.” (Carpetbagger)

“At least five justices appeared ready to reject the administration’s argument that the court has no jurisdiction in a detainee case.” (New York Times )

The NCM has looked for around a decade for an appropriate plaintiff to sue for relief from the obligations of paternity after unintentionally conceiving a child. Now they have one…

As some have suggested, it seems a worthy cause to contribute to, if the Oglala people are soliciting donations. If anyone knows, please send me a link, thanks.

A rundown of rock’n’roll s*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*i*s*t*s (Guardian.UK)

A list compiled by Forbes Magazine, garnered from motor vehicle dept. records, on the 10 richest people on their 2005 list, to whet the appetites of the superrich-watchers while waiting for the 2006 list. Forbes observes,

It feels like a stretch to me. True, there are no Ferraris, Lamborghinis, or even BMWs. However, you will find a number of Porsches, some Bentleys and of course the Lincoln town cars. How about concluding that some billionaires are more ostentatious than others? Here’s an exercise for you to do. Before you check out the cars themselves, look at the list of ten illuminati and rank them based on your intuitive sense of where they fall on a continuum between ostentation and humility.

“Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.” [via dangerousmeta]

From Dave Pollard’s weblog of the same name. Ever since the demise a few years ago of the Whole Earth Review/CoEvolutionary Quarterly, to which I subscribed from its outset to its final issue, it has been more difficult to access this sort of ethic in the media. We could do worse than reading Pollard.

“In March 2004 we asked you to vote for the top 50 things everyone should try a bite of in their lifetime. This is how you voted.” (BBC [via …Clever Name]) I have seven to go.

He is pleasantly surprised with the audio quality he gets from his iPod, having been given one as a present after turning up his nose at the whole idea. He goes on to tell you how to tweak your settings for maximal listening enjoyment.

A list compiled by Forbes Magazine, garnered from motor vehicle dept. records, on the 10 richest people on their 2005 list, to whet the appetites of the superrich-watchers while waiting for the 2006 list. Forbes observes,

It feels like a stretch to me. True, there are no Ferraris, Lamborghinis, or even BMWs. However, you will find a number of Porsches, some Bentleys and of course the Lincoln town cars. How about concluding that some billionaires are more ostentatious than others? Here’s an exercise for you to do. Before you check out the cars themselves, look at the list of ten illuminati and rank them based on your intuitive sense of where they fall on a continuum between ostentation and humility.

• List of cognitive biases
• Logical fallacies
• Self-deception
• Statistical bias
• Media bias
• True-believer syndrome
• Wishful thinking
• Doublethink

Want to see things in true perspective instead? Or at least become more realistic? (wikipedia)

A New Generation of Conspiracy Theorists are at Work on the Secret History of 9/11 — Mark Jacobson (New York Magazine)

“…[A] report published in the British Medical Journal this week has thrown doubt on the health promoting properties of omega 3.” (Telegraph.UK)

Bush shuns Patriot Act requirement. In signing the renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act, Bush stipulated that he did not feel bound by the requirement in the law that he inform Congress of the FBI’s use of its expanded powers. (Boston Globe) Chilling enough, but it is part of an enraging and ominous — and seemingly unstoppable — trend, when placed in the context of other recent events. Consider his continued assertion that he can ignore the requirement that the government obtain warrants for wiretaps when he deems it necessary; and the ‘signing statement’ he included when reluctantly forced to accept the bill forbidding torture of any US detainee declaring he could bypass the law when in his judgment it was necessary for national security. We are talking about imperial power, about contempt for or ignorance of basic principles of the structure and function of the American government learned in elementary school civics classes. We are in for a new civics lesson — how easy it appears to be to bully oneself into a brazen Presidential power grab beyond the pale of what is allowed; how utterly unopposable it seems to be if someone in the Presidency is willing to be completely criminal; how the only recourse is not to elect someone so transparently an inept and unscrupulous fool, a faith-based airhead, in the first place.

Listen to any emphatic public statement he makes to the American people. In every case, his rationale for a nomination, a policy pronouncement, a war, is nothing but an insistence we should support it because of his conviction and his conviction alone, because he knows that such and such a nominee is a good man, because he knows that such and such represents a threat to national security, because he know that such and such is the right thing to do. Such omnipotent self-referential assertions without any reasoned argument to back them up are the province of those operating on an infantile level in which there is no distinction between wish, fantasy and reality, between belief and knowledge — yes, the province of the faith-based fundamentalist. Bush is, as Sidney Blumenthal points out in echoing Kevin Phillips, the founder of the first American religious party, institutionalizing his cognitive deficits. It is both our interactions with our significant others and our education that occasion a developmental leap away from that infantile omniscience. One can only speculate on the twisted influence growing up with his parents imposed; insofar as educational influences go, it has long been clear that he slept through most of his schooling. Let us hope the American people do not sleep through this civics lesson, or that they awaken by the first Tuesday in November…

A six-year study of more than a million subjects headed by psychiatrist Daniel Kripke establishes that those who sleep an average of 6-7 hours a night function no worse and have no added health consequences than those getting the mythical 8 hours a night. Indeed, the mild sleep deprivation may extend their life, as well as making them more productive. The myth that we are a nation of zombies walking around bleary-eyed, making more mistakes, having more accidents and showing more emotional instability may be mostly a sales pitch for the lucrative pharmaceutical trade in hypnotics (sleeping pills). (Yahoo! News)

I routinely sleep more like 6 hours a night than 8 during the week, and (although you might argue that I would be the last to know) I don’t feel I suffer for it. If I get down to 4-5 hours, I do see the difference, especially in terms of irritability and especially if I do so for several nights in the same week. (There’s also no such thing as making up a cumulative sleep deficit by sleeping in on the weekend, I am convinced…)

And, in my psychiatric practice, both because of physiological addictiveness and the risk of rebound insomnia, I strictly adhere to the practice of only prescribing sleeping pills for my patients for acute use (less than about two weeks at a stretch, better if used intermittently than consistently). Because of the development of physiological tolerance, most of the medications lose their effectiveness if used for longer anyway, although patients become psychologically dependent on them and physicians often renew their prescriptions indefinitely. If the patient ever tries to go off the medication, indeed they have trouble sleeping and they never sustain their abstention for long, concluding that the drug-free trial confirmed their ongoing need for sleeping medication. However, all it really shows is the phenomenon of rebound insomnia, which would probably abate if they remained drug-free for long enough. And “a poor night’s sleep never killed anyone…”

Newer sleeping pills are marketed as less addictive and effective for lengthier use, but don’t believe it. There are few free lunches in brain chemistry. Zolpidem (Ambien®) and the others are really not very different from the benzodiazepine sleep aids (Halcion®, Dalmane® etc.) they are supplanting, in my opinion. Medications that interact with the benzodiazepine receptor — which all of these medications do — interfere with the acquisition of new learnng while under their influence and, at high doses, can cause the somnambulist activities so much in the news these days, such as “sleep driving” and “sleep eating”. There is nothing special about Ambien in this regard except that it is now so broadly prescribed. Other hypnotic medications do the same thing. At high doses, especially in combination with alcohol, they are respiratory suppressants (read: lethal in overdose), and they accumulate to high levels in the systems of those with impaired ability to metabolize them, such as the medically ill and the elderly. Not benign at all…

But, of course, we can try to compensate for all these hypnotic effects with the daytime-alertness drug that is all the rage these days, modafinil (Provigil®), right?

New Insight into How We Count: A recent functional MRI study gives us a new appreciation for the fact that specific brain circuitry underlies processing ‘how many’ (and that it is different from how we process ‘how much’). The intraparietal sulcus lights up with the former taks but not the latter when they are cleverly distinguished by the study design. The region may be involved with the learning disorder called dyscalculia, which affects perhaps 6% of the public and involves difficulty envisioning numerical sequences and even distinguishing which of two numbers is bigger. Dyscalculia is not the only way in which someone might have difficulty with calculation and other mathematics, but it is the most severe. (Yahoo! News)

That would be about as exciting a Democratic choice as the last two were, and probably less effective.

Why Physicians Participate in Executions. An opinion piece by Atul Gawande, one of my favorite physician-writers. Hopefully of interest to non-MDs as well.

Gawande interviews several physician-executioners, all but one cloaked by anonymity, pointedly examining the slippery slope that led each one to their induction into the role, and their ethical qualms, such as they are. Gawande himself takes pains to note that he is not an opponent of the death penalty, although one of the physicians he interviews, who has so far participated in six executions, is. Interestingly, ironically, troublingly, this MD sees his role as akin to not abandoning any other patient with a terminal illness in their final moments. Gawande isn’t buying that argument, and comes down on the side of advocating a legal ban on the participation of physicians and nurses in performing executions. (New England Journal of Medicine)

Even though the case went (IMHO) the right way, the heated disputation does not bode well for some of the other contentious issues facing the Roberts Court, especially as Alito (who was not on the Court when this arguments in this case were heard) begins to join the deliberations.

In typically melodramatic fashion, the journalist feels he has exposed “deep divisions” because he has gotten quotes on both sides of the issue. The unfortunate reality is that there is too little division over the issue of the necessity of medication in a psychiatric profession in the hip pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. The divisions tend to fall between the medical practitioners (psychiatrists) and the non-medical mental health caregivers; the author of the current study is a pforessor of social work. In making the cse for a portion of the schizophrenic population who do not need antipsychotic medication, he speculates that perhaps they have a milder form of the disease. I think it is even more likely that they do not have schizophrenia at all. Psychiatry has labored mightily to establish a credible diagnostic schema but few realize that it is a work in progress and deeply flawed.

Part of the problem is that the research edifice requires slavish adherence to the diagnostic system to conduct studies. This leads to a misplaced sense of concreteness. “If I say the patient is a schizophrenic (carries the diagnosis of schizophrenia), then they have the disease of schizophrenia…” In other words, making the diagnosis implies, and I would say falsely, that all subjects who share a diagnosis have something meaningful in common, so that research findings on that class of individuals are meaningful. But if you are really lumping together unlikes, the research findings will either be trivial, coincidental, or inconclusive. As an example, if a researcher set out to measure, say, the citric acid content in the fruits he called “oranges”, and included the oranges with the thick pockmarked orange skins as well as those with the smooth thin red skins (more commonly known as “apples”), his findings would be meaningless. If we were uncertain about the distinctions between apples and oranges, in other words, we would be comparing apples and oranges.

It may not be immediately obvious to the public, even the erudite readers of the New York Times, that diagnoses are not etched in stone. There are problems with diagnostic clarity elsewhere in medicine, of course, but none as severe as in psychiatry, where we peer into the ‘black box’ that is the workings of the brain and mind. The situation is particularly acute with schizophrenia, which I find to be a wastebasket diagnosis among the members of which class I discern patients with several distinct clinical entities varying along a number of dimensions including medication-responsiveness. In a less tortured diagnostic system, many of them should not be called schizophrenic at all. Compounding the imprecision of the diagnostic system is the fact that clinicians and researchers vary in the acumen with which they make diagnoses. While particularly egregious with the schizophrenic diagnosis, this is a problem throughout the field of psychiatric diagnosis. Patients who are not responding to treatment x are often referred to me with diagnosis y, for which treatment x would be totally appropriate, only I do not find them to have diagnosis y. There is another factor as well, which becomes most clear when one studies the history of psychiatric classification over the last century or century and a half. The world of psychopathology is parsed up into different diagnoses in an everchanging way. Styles of classification change; we are more inclusivist or exclusivist, more ‘lumpers’ or ‘splitters’ in different eras. Vastly different numbers of patients, different proportions of those with mental illness, were diagnosed with schizophrenia, for example, at some times than at others. Given diagnostic categories expand or contract over time, bumping up against both ‘normals’ and other diagnostic categories. There is a sort of Darwinian competition for niches in the mental health ecology; diagnoses are always trying to maximize their ‘fitness’.

Equally true is that there are cross-cultural differences. The rates of classification with given diagnoses vary significantly between European and American practitioners, even when they are seeing the same patients, as in one famous study where diagnosticians were brought across the Atlantic to compare their skills and styles.

One of the reasons diagnostic categories expand and contract is the development of new medications. If the only tool you have is a hammer, it pays to see everything as if it is a nail, I am fond of saying. The most dramatic example of this was the expansion in those who were seen to be bipolar (manic depressive) after the introduction of lithium, the first effective modern mood stabilizer, in the ’50’s. Most of the newly-recognized manic depressives would have been called schizophrenics previously, when in essence the distinction had not mattered as much. But one has to be wary of arguing that the new diagnostic distinction is driven entirely by newfound utility. The refinements in diagnostic classification are by no means inevitably improvements. It is equally likely, and more worrisome, that change is driven by marketing pressures to sell the new drug. We have seen something similar with depressive diagnoses since the development of the SSRI antidepressants, and their descendants, in the last two decades. No only do the antidepressants reach more depressed people, but more people are defined as having a depressive condition in order to be eligible for medications. No one is doing this consciously, but it happens inexorably nonetheless. Furthermore, as psychiatrists scramble for market share in the face of competition from competing nonmedical mental health professionals, it pays to expand the definitions of medication-responsive diagnoses so they have more people to treat.

This leads me to subscribe to a “one-third” rule, almost regardless of diagnosis. One third of patients diagnosed with a given disorder will respond to the appropriate treatment; one third will be poor responders; and one-third would get better regardless of, or without, treatment. Part, but not all, of this is based on the diagnostic issues I have discussed above (for example, do the one third who would respond anyway, as the ‘schizophrenics’ in the study under current consideration, really have the condition in question? In essence, is the treatment wrong for the diagnosis or is the diagnosis wrong for the treatment? We ignore either wing of this quandary at our peril.).

As I grow older, I become much more of a diagnostic nihilist, finding the misplaced concreteness of the system and of my colleagues increasingly painful to bear. At least as far as my professional work as a psychiatrist goes, the older I get, the less I know. The important question: does that make me of more or less help to my patients?

Intel-based Mac boots Windows XP

Via the null device, this Guardian piece about the latest rock revival genre: soft rock, believe it or not.

Okay, the joke is funny, but the more intriguing discussion in this old CNN article is about cultural differences in what is found to be funny, especially between American and European humor:

I had previously blinked to the world’s funniest joke article but revisited it after reading this recent Ask MetaFilter thread asking people to post their funniest joke that is not offensive to any class of people. Some of them are to laugh out loud over.

What is to become of NPR now that it has some resources? (New York Times )

Intel-based Mac boots Windows XP

Place a link to this page full of nonexistent email addresses somewhere on your web page and help defeat spambots.

“Lawyers for two airlines being sued by 9/11 victims prompted a federal attorney to coach witnesses in the Zacarias Moussaoui death penalty trial so the government’s case against the al-Qaida conspirator would not undercut their defense, victims’ lawyers allege.” (Free Republic)

“Watch in amazement as this GIF that Russ prepared shows Bush’s approval ratings plunge lower and lower month by month. ” (Daily Kos)

Andy Budd’s ingenious implementation of iTunes’ smart playlists:

A new CD release of Edward Elgar’s music conducted by the composer includes a 1933 overture in “accidental stereo”.

(Some of these findings, of course, support the old assertion that ignorance is bliss. Given that the study deems around one third of the American public truly happy, what does that say about the American ignorance quotient??)

Does rodent brain study point to a candidate model for ’cause’ of Alzheimer’s disease? The derivative of amyloid-beta precursor protein (APP), which is linked to the “plaques” and “neurofibrillary tangles” that are characteristic of the Alzheimer’s brain, is well on the way to meeting Koch’s postulates, the formal requirements that allow us to say that a substance has a causal role in a disease. First, it is found regularly in the brains of animals affected with a form of memory loss that is considered an animal model of Alzheimer’s. It is not found in the brains of unaffected animals. When extracted from affected brains and given to healthy animals, they develop signs of memory loss. And the same protein appears in human brains. The mild cognitive deficits which precede the development of fullblown Alzheimer’s dementia could be caused by this protein demonstrated to cause transient memory deficits in rodents. It might be the first step in the cascade of changes to brain proteins that underlie the degenerative process in Alzheimer’s. If this finding is borne out, it holds out the promise of early detection of the Alzheimer’s disease process before dramatic cognitive deficits develop. Identification of the protein could also lead to the development of medications which block its actions or vaccines to immunize patients against the development of Alzheimer’s. (MedPage Today)

“Democratic senators, filing in for their weekly caucus lunch yesterday, looked as if they’d seen a ghost.” — Dana Millbank (Washington Post)

A controversial new theory depicts pregnancy not as a harmonious relationship between the pregnant mother and the fetus she is carryng but as a struggle over the nutrients she will provide.

Haig argues that evolutionary selection should favor fetuses the invasiveness of whose sprouting placental blood vessels is more effective in wresting nutrients from their hosts, while mothers who restrain the incursion to have several successful pregnancies to spread their genes would similarly have an advantage. This theory appealingly explains the baffling condition of late-pregnancy high blood pressure called pre-eclampsia, which affects around 6% of pregnancies, as an extreme version of this struggle in which the fetus causes maternal hypertension to pump more blood in through the relatively low-pressure placenta. But be sure to read to the end of the article for the even more intriguing discussion of how this maternal-fetal conflict, played out in the arena of control of fetal gene expression, may shape the offspring’s behavior and social functioning postnatally.

Will ’round things out’ with a moment of observance a little after 1:59 this afternoon. And it is also Einstein’s birthday.

“…[T]he theory put forth in Freakonomics examined why crime had fallen all over the country, not just in New York, and one of the many arguments against “broken windows” as a major cause was the fact that such innovative policing wasn’t being practiced elsewhere—and yet crime was falling in those places as well. A smaller point to also consider: Gladwell left out one other major reason that, according to Levitt’s research, crime did begin to fall in the 1990’s: the waning of the violent crack trade.”

“Deconstructing the most sensationalistic recent findings in Human Brain Imaging, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Psychopharmacology“. Recent discussions about the fMRI lie detection hullabaloo and the neurological correlates of empathy, among others.

According to US District Judge Leonie Brinkema, it may be “very difficult for this case to go forward” after prosecution lawyers admitted they had coached prospective witnesses in direct defiance of her order that they be shielded from any advance exposure to trial proceedings. She said she had “never seen such an egregious violation of a rule on witnesses” and considered, at the least, excluding the seven witnesses involved, who prosecutors say are “half of the government case.” She could also bar the government from seeking the death penalty, which would automatically end the trial and impose a sentence of life without parole on Moussaoui (given his guilty plea), pending a likely government appeal. The judge also indicated that she might reconsider a defense motion for a mistrial on an unrelated issue. Brinkema has been courageously independent-minded from the first in the face of US attempts to trample on his defendent rights. Brinkema also put the Church of Scientology in its place in a momentous 1996 decision.

Think the web is colorblind? Think again [via Bill Hooker]

Lamentation that Milosevic cheats history (CNN ) by dying with no verdict in his $200-million, five-year war crimes trial. Nuremburg was concluded in less than a year. Critics have been frustrated that the prosecutors lumped together the atrocity charges against Milosevic from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and that he was allowed to be his own defense attorney and use the trial as his bully pulpit.

Milosevic’s was the second death in recent days of a Serbian in custody in the Hague, and questions abound about whether he suicided (Yahoo! News) and about his longstanding fears (BBC )his food was being poisoned. His post-mortem (with a Serbian pathologist in attendance) takes place today.

Not that the conclusion of the trial would have prevented this, but dying without a verdict against him facilitates his celebration as a hero by ultra-nationalist Serbian elements, even while many Serbians are relieved at his passing. Milosevic has always justified his barbarity as a defense against the victimization of Serbia; if there is widespread sympathy in Serbia for the notion that his death had something to do with maltreatment by the authorities in the Hague, it will become less likely that Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic will ever be extradited for their war crimes.

Nevertheless, most of the world will not grieve the passing of a genocidal monster who blackened the pages of 20th century European history (New York Times ).

If you knew your hereditary makeup predisposed you to increased cardiac risk from your caffeine consumption, would you cut back?

“If you don’t believe you’ll have a good memory when you get older, then you might as well forget about this article.” (Yahoo! News)

I am not sure about the relevance to evolutionary research. The family has a hereditary cerebellar ataxia which makes normal balance impossible. In effect, they represent not where humans are coming from but, with the right mutations impairing brain function, where we’are going to…

Not clear if he disappeared to an earthly destination or otherwise…

Drug companies, as opposed to healthcare agencies, are starting to offer case management to patients (New York Times ), since it is so much in their financial interests that patients continue on their medications as long as possible.

Just as it is so much the function of pharmaceutical company drug representatives to spin the advantages of their products to susceptible doctors, will these case managers begin spinning clinical updates on their patients to their attending physicians in the service of getting the patients on higher doses or longer durations of their companies’ prescriptions?

Lamentation that Milosevic cheats history (CNN ) by dying with no verdict in his $200-million, five-year war crimes trial. Nuremburg was concluded in less than a year. Critics have been frustrated that the prosecutors lumped together the atrocity charges against Milosevic from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and that he was allowed to be his own defense attorney and use the trial as his bully pulpit.

Milosevic’s was the second death in recent days of a Serbian in custody in the Hague, and questions abound about whether he suicided (Yahoo! News) and about his longstanding fears (BBC )his food was being poisoned. His post-mortem (with a Serbian pathologist in attendance) takes place today.

Not that the conclusion of the trial would have prevented this, but dying without a verdict against him facilitates his celebration as a hero by ultra-nationalist Serbian elements, even while many Serbians are relieved at his passing. Milosevic has always justified his barbarity as a defense against the victimization of Serbia; if there is widespread sympathy in Serbia for the notion that his death had something to do with maltreatment by the authorities in the Hague, it will become less likely that Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic will ever be extradited for their war crimes.

Nevertheless, most of the world will not grieve the passing of a genocidal monster who blackened the pages of 20th century European history (New York Times ).

You wear them during the nighttime only. They reshape the cornea to reduce the refractive error. Your vision is normalized during the day after you take them out.

After reading about the discovery of a previously unknown asteroid impact crater in Egypt, an Egyptian a Spanish websurfer decides to check it out in Google Earth. In short order, he finds two other previously undiscovered impact craters.

“A motorist was trapped in his car driving at almost 130mph for 60 miles after the accelerator jammed.” (Telegraph.UK) He said he could not turn off the ignition because the power steering would have been disabled.

A few points. Every month from here on out might be a “new low”, it strikes me. And what are the American people waiting for to recognize that the Iraqi civil war is already happening??

Roy Haynes: Attention Getter, on the Beat and Off. Basie was The Man… (New York Times )

According to this Washington Post piece, a majority of Americans think Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence, says a new WaPo-ABC News poll of a thousand random respondents. Racial profiling has won; media coverage and political leaders focus only on extremists and terrorists and the sheeple eat it up.

Malcolm Gladwell responds to those dying to know what he really thinks of Freakonomics, a book for which he wrote a glowing cover blurb. He finds the freakonomic analysis “occasionally frustrating,” he says. His pet peeve is Levitt and Dubner’s highly-touted explanation of the surprise drop in crimes rates in major American cities in the ’90’s in terms of the legalizaiton of abortion. In his own book, Tipping Point, he had favored the so-called Broken Windows theory, in short that crime drops when there are more police on the streets.

Forget for a moment that, in this post, he waffles abit about whether Levitt and Dubner are even conceding or disputing the Broken Windows theory. In the end, he resolves the conflict by appealing to the notion that economic and psychological explanations of behavior do not contradict but complement each other.

Either this is a sophisticated argument that somehow lost me, or it is simplistic, vague and unsatisfying. I suspect the latter. Social scientists have expended endless energy trying to parse the complicated interactions of sociocultural and psychological influences on human behaviors. Gladwell’s assertion that he ‘likes’ psychological explanations better is both abit shamefaced to the extent that he concedes their reductionism, and abit uninsightful about what he himself is up to. Economic explanations inevitably have recourse to the psychological as they dissect how an incentive turns into a motivation. And certain psychological motivations, of course, relate to ‘economic’ incentives. Gladwell’s quibble over how they differ in explaining falling crime rates doesn’t really resolve anything…

And:

The cracks in ‘broken windows’

“A crime-fighting theory that says stopping major crimes begins with stopping small ones has influenced policing strategies in Boston and elsewhere since the 1980s. But scholars are starting to question whether fixing broken windows really fixes much at all.” (Boston Globe) Progressive academic critics seem particularly eager to dismantle ‘broken windows’; finding the war on quality-of-life crime a thinly veiled war on minorities. Champions of ‘broken windows’, notably the egotistical William Bratton, accuse critics of ‘broken windows’ of an anti-cop bias.

The daughter of one of my close friends just generated a scheme to take her dad on a cross-country bicycle trip. I have done a number of long-distance tours in New England and Europe over the years, and have always wanted to go transcontinental but there is no way to carve out the time and the respite from my responsibilities. Jim did it; he and Kate started out yesterday from San Diego on the ride of their lives, and my heart is with them on the road. I will be following their progress through their weblog of the journey, to which the link above points; I look forward to Jim’s articulate and reflective writing.

They are trying to raise money for the Jimmy Fund, a Boston-based cancer charity with a long relationship with cyclists-for-a-cause. If you are inspired to do so, consider sponsoring them with a pledge per mile. You will find a link at their site.

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, writing in The New York Review of Books, offer a primer on the origins and dimensions of the ‘crisis’, a suggestion (what else? a single-payor system) and an analysis of the likelihood of significant reform.

Kenneth Turan on why Brokeback was beaten out for best picture by Crash. Turan feels the answer is homophobia:

He whines about Crash ‘s being positioned to be a spoiler:

I think it is simpler than that. Brokeback Mountain was recognized for its courageousness — that is why Ang Lee got the director’s award — but Crash was, dramaturgically and cinematographically, just a better, more complicated and ultimately more interesting and more satisfying film. Does that make me a homophobe? If you’ve got a pet issue, you are always going to accuse those who don’t share your passion of (a) not getting it; (b) being prejudiced against it; and (c) being pretentious and superficial for championing a competing issue. It is just not that often that issues are pitted against one another competitively (as the Oscars are wont to do; or should I say, as pundits commenting on the Oscars are wont to do?). We don’t get anywhere debating the relative merits of striking blows against homophobia or racism, and let’s not confuse values with artistic merit (as the Oscars, or the critics, are wont to do). Furthermore, isn’t it after all reductionistic to distill either of these films down to their emblematic issue? A given film looks at human complexity, pathos and motivation more or less successfully regardless of which scenario is the occasion.

Moronic religious fundamentalist opposition to inoculating girls against the strain of human papilloma virus that causes cervical cancer. (BeliefNet thanks to walker)